We love systems and tools (surprise, surprise). We’re always upgrading a process, trying out new tools that we think will benefit our team, and generally seeing what’s helpful and ends up sticking long-term. In doing so, we’ve accumulated a small staple collection of tools that massively benefit our team productivity and communication, which are two of the most important aspects of managing a team.

Stepping into our roles as not only managers but leaders, learning how members of our team work best, how they prefer to communicate, and ensuring that we have the necessary tools to aid in that has served us and our team members so well.

There are 10 tools that are our absolute couldn’t-live-without-them favorites, and we’re so excited to share them with you today! If you don’t adopt some of these exact tools for your team, hopefully the goal behind them inspires you to create something similar.

We’ve talked before on our podcast about what it means to be the type of person who immediately takes action versus someone who tends to overthink before doing something, if they even do it. In the past, we’ve used the terms “be-er” and “do-er” to describe these two types, and then we learned there’s actually a more scientific Scholarly-level phrase– having a cognitive bias towards action or thinking.

If you have a cognitive bias towards thinking (a be-er), you’re someone who needs to, well, think. A ton. We believe that be-ers need to believe something specific about themselves first before they take action. (Like that you’re actually a productive or organized person before purchasing a planner. Or that you are the type of person who goes to the gym before you actually go to the gym.)

Is it possible to change your cognitive bias and become an action-taker when you’ve historically been an overthinker? Keep reading as we dive into the how-to!

Not many people would say systems get them excited but at Boss Project we feel passionately that systems are THE THING that gets us excited. (yeah, you heard us right!) Systems are what give you more time and freedom, they give you the opportunity to step away, they run your business smoothly, and they provide your clients with an excellent experience.

We’ve heard many business owners say that systems and automations are overwhelming to tackle because it’s one more thing to think about. If that’s the case for you then you really NEED systems. With some up front work, you’ll actually have less things to think about and more time to do other things.

CRMs and service-based businesses go together like peanut butter and jelly. Having a CRM software means that you have a digital database for all things pertaining to your leads and clients.

While we know service providers who are getting by tracking their leads and clients using spreadsheets or other methods, CRMs allow you to boost your overall client experience. You’re able to streamline the way you send contracts, proposals, forms, invoices, schedulers, and other documents, all the while maintaining a consistently branded and professional image.

Unfortunately, we often see service providers massively underutilizing their CRM, so in this post, we want to share 5 ways to maximize your CRM and boost your productivity!

We’ve tried many project management systems throughout the different stages of our business, and the one that’s allowed us to completely revolutionize how we complete projects and daily tasks is Asana. It’s the perfect fit for our team and, honestly, Boss Project has never been more organized and streamlined!

We’re learning new things and ways to refine our systems in Asana every single day. Even though our project management is ever-developing, we’ve still picked up on 3 strategies that have really amped our overall experience with the platform. Keep reading to find out what they are!

It probably wouldn’t be too far-fetched to say that a common dream amongst business owners is to be able to work less but make more money. It sounds like a contradiction, but it’s actually entirely possible to achieve. By streamlining your work week and increasing your client capacity, you’re able to get back more time in your business and make more money.

There are really only two levers to pull in order to do this: 1. Increase the price of your package, and 2. Decrease the amount of time it takes to complete a client project. In this blog post, we’ll break down what it means to accomplish each of these, so you can finally reach your “work less, make more” goal.

We wouldn’t call ourselves the queens of automation, but, boy, are we pretty darn good at it. Over the years, we’ve automated more things in our business than we can count, and it’s saved us hours of valuable time that we can focus elsewhere.

We believe automation is a huge piece of the puzzle in allowing small business owners to either avoid or break free of overwhelm. When you have to manage the administrative, financial, marketing, support, and countless other duties in your business, the stress can quickly build up.

That’s why in this blog post, we want to share 10 things we think every small business should automate to avoid overwhelm!

We see you, frazzled service provider. We see you bustling and overwhelmed, reinventing the wheel every time you perform any admin task in your business. You’re building your proposals and forms from scratch, manually emailing clients repetitive emails in your process, chasing down payments, etc.

The overwhelming majority of service providers are, well, overwhelmed (and quite frankly, underpaid). We understand because we originated as a service-based business. There are 7 tips that massively helped us streamline our services and made a huge difference in our overall productivity, which is what we’ll be sharing in this blog post!

If you want to take this a step further with us to help you create a High-Touch Signature Service on Autopilot™ so you can work less and make more, we invite you to apply for The Incubator.

This year has been a wild year of content for us! We’ve cranked out almost 200 total blog posts and podcast episodes, dropped almost 50 new collections of templates, updated some of our programs and added a new one, and overall have really been dedicated to helping creative business owners.

We thought the perfect post for the end of 2021 would be to gather all of the best resources for creatives and wrap them all up with a pretty bow. (Late Christmas gift, maybe?) We have a lot to dive into, so let’s get started!