The Two Decisions That Drove Growth for My Business

My bookkeeper can generate a profit and loss statement and balance sheet every month, or more frequently if required. She can answer any question about payables and receivables.

We integrated our business credit cards and checking accounts with Quickbooks.

Getting information to my C.P.A. has evolved from “stressful” to “click of a button.” All my tax information is sent digitally in a highly organized way.

I put this system in place before our spurt in growth. I couldn’t have managed without it.

Oh Dubsado!

At some point in the growth of a business, the founder can’t keep everything in her head. Tracking leads, managing projects, hiring teams, and the list goes on. It’s overwhelming.

My primal fear was missing something that would cause harm to my clients or our business.

Enter Dubsado.

We did not do an exhaustive analysis of CRM software before deciding on Dubsado. There are many options. Some of them are geared towards financial advisors.

When I looked at my choices, I found it overwhelming. All of them had more than enough firepower to deal with our needs.

I ended up going with Dubsado for these reasons:

1. My virtual assistant had worked with it and found its interface user friendly.

2. It had a reputation for good customer support.

3. I felt like, with support from my assistant and another team member (both of whom took the video courses offered by Dubsado), I could get to a point where I could use it to run our businesses. With their help, I viewed only selected video courses.

Before you decide on Dubsado or any other CRM, know that the learning process is steep. You have to be prepared to set aside an hour or so a day for a month or two before you will feel comfortable.

You will need guidance from your team members or an outside vendor who knows your business and has the patience to tutor you, with a focus on using the features of the CRM most critical to your business and ignoring those that aren’t.

You will need to create status buttons, tags, templates, forms, canned e-mails and packages that cover every aspect of your business. This is time consuming but enlightening. I never realized how what we did could be broken down and organized in this way.

The payoff has exceeded my expectations.

We created workflows that automate almost every aspect of our business.

Many of our e-mail communications are repetitive. We now have canned e-mails for just about every inquiry. We can quickly customize them, rather than creating them from scratch each time.

We created templates and forms we can easily edit, depending on the services chosen by our clients.

Proposals, contracts and invoices are mostly automated, while still giving us the ability to customize them, quickly and efficiently.

On our dashboard, we can see every new lead and every project. We can tell at a glance where each lead and project is in our workflow. We can see how many new leads are in the pipeline, what we should do next to move them along, how many projects we are working on and determine the status of each one.

We provide our clients with a portal where their important documents are stored, including their agreements and e-mails.

We integrated Dubsado with Quickbooks, my calendar and my e-mail accounts, so everything is in one place. We now send all business e-mails through Dubsado.

We use the digital signature feature of Dubsado, which facilitates signing proposals and agreements.

One tip I found helpful: We had everything in Dubsado that is client-facing (our e-mail signatures, contracts, proposals etc.) designed by our graphic design team. We then sent these documents to Dubsado. They will put 10 forms into their system without charge. The combination of professional design and using Dubsado in this way has given us a professional look missing in our prior communications.

Our ability to scale, without adding administrative staff, has increased exponentially.

We’ve done other things that have contributed to our growth, but these two changes were the foundation upon which our other initiatives were built.

Dan trains executives and employees in the lessons based on the research on his latest book, Ask: How to Relate to Anyone. His online course, Ask: Increase Your Sales. Deepen Your Relationships, will be available October 1, 2021.

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