Multitasking — some business owners swear by it, others call it “the art of messing up several things at once”. Whichever side you’re on, if you’re a multipreneur (i.e. an entrepreneur owning or managing more than one business), you probably wish you had more Zen in your life and less chaos.
To qualify for this evasive business Zen, multipreneurs will benefit from digital tools that demand minimal investment but are wholly invested in all of their businesses. And to unravel these (and approach the matter from the tried and tested side), we asked multipreneurs who’re very good at balancing several businesses to recommend their favorite digital guides to multipreneur nirvana.
1. ClickUp
ClickUp is a cloud-based project management platform for communication, collaboration, task management, and real-time reporting. It includes features like Gantt charts, Kanban boards, sprint management, resource management, agile reporting, advanced time tracking and workload management. Plans range from free to enterprise, and the multipreneur’s optimal Business plan is priced at $9/user per month.
“ClickUp has allowed me and my team to eliminate all the other tools and truly integrate everything into one place. Helping us streamline tasks, projects, and hit all company deadlines.” — Whitney Kay
Usability rating: Medium
Recommended by: Whitney Kay, founder/CEO of Social Savvy Influencer — a brand and social media agency, leader of a 6-figure organization in the direct selling space. Whitney is also founder/CEO of Moss Management, LLC (a company founded by Whitney and her husband) and host of the UNOMOSS Podcast.
2. Superhuman Email
All the rage in Silicon Valley, Superhuman Email is the equivalent of a luxury email experience. Incredibly fast, with a gorgeous minimalist user interface, AI-powered inbox sorting, email tracking, Undo-send, and even unexpected bonuses like automatically generated social profiles of email contacts, it may just be love at first sight. The only downside is the $30/month cost of this chic app.
“I find it most useful to manage my inbox as between both businesses I get a lot of emails. Superhuman allows me to rapidly get through my inbox each day, schedule follow-ups, meetings, reminders so I can focus on the tasks at hand and organize what I need to get to for later.” — Nathan Engel
Usability Rating: Effortless.
Recommended by: Nathan Engel, Founder/CEO of The Rebbe’s Choice, a manufacturer of gourmet appetizing food products, and of consulting company NHE Consulting Co.
3. MightyCall
MightyCall is a virtual phone system for business that prioritizes mobility and personalizes the calling experience. Features include: multiple business numbers (toll-free, local, and vanity), compatibility with all internet-powered devices, business SMS, customizable voice menus, voicemail to text transcriptions, automatic call recording, built-in CRM, Zapier integrations, and team management. The $20/user per month business plan is perfect for multipreneurs who need to connect from 3–10 team members to their business phone system from any place in the world.
“Finding a single technology that could handle both [my] businesses in different states was a priority for us. For my web development business, I took an 800 number and a local number and for Windy City Parrot we have an 800 number that we ported over. [We kept the] local number for Chicago and also created a third number for Indiana so we could have a presence there. MightyCall has given us total freedom.” — Mitch Rezman
Usability level: Simple
Recommended by: Mitch Rezman is a multipreneur operating two businesses: an online web development business and national e-commerce store Windy City Parrot. Read Mitch’s story on building his national e-commerce business step by step: Windy City Parrot: Be Prepared to Pivot
4. Lucky Orange
Lucky Orange is a traffic tool for measuring how visitors engage with business websites. The app includes session recordings, dynamic heat maps to observe how visitors interact with your website’s dynamic elements, live chat, conversion funnels, surveys and analytics. Multipreneurs in the SMB sector will find its $20/month plan for managing 3 websites the optimal option.
“Every morning, the program gives me an email with a daily or weekly traffic report, as well as a source report highlighting places where traffic has grown. The dynamic heat maps and recordings are my favorite features of the tool. You may also watch recordings of people who clicked things on the page to get even more specific. When I’m looking at user engagement with forms or navigation, I’ve found these to be very time-saving and I can’t imagine
running websites for my multiple businesses without it.” — Lattice Hudson
Usability rating: Simple
Recommended by: Lattice Hudson. Lattice is the founder of Lattice & Co and a Business Coach, leadership mentor, and social sales expert.
5. Bonjoro
Bonjoro is a customer engagement tool that helps cultivate customer relationships through interactive videos at each stage of the customer journey. Includes a great mobile app for recording and sending videos on the go. If you don’t plan on recording over 50 videos per month, the $19/month plan may just be perfect for your businesses.
“I’ve used Bonjoro to personally reach out and develop relationships with software customers from the road and it has by far been the most potent with regards to impact. You’re pinged when a new customer comes through, and you just pick up your phone, record a short video, and hit send. Done!” — Josh Koerpel
Usability rating: Simple
Recommended by: Josh Koerpel, co-founder of Firebuilders.io and the founder of Funnelmappy.com.
6. Notion
Notion is productivity software combined to project and task management software. It’s a powerful cross-collaboration platform that encompasses Kanban boards, tasks, wikis, and databases, and can easily substitute a handful of project management apps. Check out the $8/user per month plan if you plan on collaborating with a team.
“The one tool that is the backbone of all my businesses. It allows me to keep track of all of my businesses including projects, playbooks, accounts, and processes. It makes it very easy to document details of my business that allow me to hire and outsource business processes and help me scale. Usability.. is mostly effortless. There are some very advanced capabilities that it can do for power users that are more of medium usability. But those functions are not required to get value out of the tool. — Chris Redrich
Usability Rating: simple, with advanced capabilities
Recommended by: Chris Redrich. In 2021, Chris left full-time employment to pursue scaling his side projects into businesses. He now runs three businesses: a web development agency, online business ‘Product Manager Jobs’, and freelance product management.
7. AHREFS
61% of B2B marketers agree that SEO and organic traffic generate more leads than any other marketing initiative. AHREFS may not be an “out of the box” tool but it’s one you grow into as you go. If you’re a multipreneur worried about generating organic traffic, taking over a niche industry, or keeping up with the competition, it will be your desktop tool. One of the priciest apps on this list, the ROI is indispensable if one or both of your businesses are online/digital. Plans start a $99/month for just 1 user + $30 per additional seat.
“I am constantly looking at the latest marketing trends specifically in the search results. AHREFS helps me quickly see where we are at with our SEO marketing efforts & plan out future growth opportunities for my businesses. Within 2 minutes I can see exactly where we rank on a keyword by keyword basis and determine what to focus on for the next month. It’s pretty easy to get started but does require some more in-depth SEO knowledge to take advantage of the advanced features.” — Josh Eberly
Usability rating: Medium, with advanced capabilities
Recommended by: Josh Eberly. Josh is the owner of a real estate investment company 717HomeBuyers and a digital marketing consultancy. Running an agency for years has lead Josh to co-launch a real estate investment firm in Lancaster, PA that specializes in generating motivated seller leads.
8. Timely
Timely (not to be confused with its pricy business management software alter-ego, Timely) from AI-powered developer of SaaS apps Memory.ai, is the tool that allows to track time, projects, teams, helping monitor time spent on a project, plan and control business budgets, and form a complete picture of your team’s performance and time. The starter team works for up to 3 teams and 50 projects and starts at just $8/user per month while the $14/user per month Premium plan is for unlimited teams monitoring and projects.
“Whether you bill for it or not, knowing how your company spends time is essential. Timely automates the time tracking process by automatically documenting everything your staff does. It drastically decreases time management overheads while also enhancing the accuracy of reporting and billing. Essentially no staff training is required to learn how to utilize it fully. It includes an easy-to-read calendar and can be accessed from any computer, mobile device, or phone.” — Abe Breuer
Usability rating: Simple
Recommended by: Abe Breuer — multipreneur, CEO and owner of VIP To Go and John To Go.
9. Tawk.to
Tawk.to Live Chat is WordPress-friendly live chat software. Multipreneurs love it because it can connect several business websites in a single dashboard, which makes for an incredible time-saver. This free app is especially key to the productive work of small teams and solopreneurs who manage several businesses.
“Being able to offer live customer service is really important for online stores. Customers often don’t have time to wait for email responses or to call a customer service phone line. Having a platform that allows instant, live Q&A across multiple stores is incredibly helpful for our customers and our team. As you can add multiple stores and live chat agents, you can control all of your live conversations in the one app. This streamlines the way you can instantly connect with your customers no matter what website they are visiting you from.” — Bol Varga
Usability rating: Simple
Recommended by: Bol Varga owns and operates three e-commerce stores ranging from Health and Wellbeing, Hobby and Leisure and Sustainable Fashion.
10. Slack
By 2022, only the lazy team hasn’t used Slack at least once in their lifetime. What you may not have heard about though, is cutting back on the apps you use by smartly integrating Slack with other channels. For example, multipreneurs and their teams can use Slack to dispose of several collaboration apps. Pricing on the Business plan suitable for multipreneurs is $12.50/user per month.
“We use Slack beyond the standard communication method. We use it as a centralized monitoring system. A special channel is connected to other apps like Zapier or Google drive, where a notification pops up if something important has changed. We have another channel that tracks website downtime and uptime. On the HR side, there is a dedicated channel for automatically showing who is on holiday.” — Jae Jun
Usability Rating: Simple, with advanced functionality
Recommended by: Jae Jun. Jae is a multipreneur who “lives and breathes the e-commerce ecosystem” and runs three businesses: SaaS business GorillaRoi, a content business, and an e-commerce store. Even managing three remote teams, Jae likes to keep his software tools essential to operate efficiently and cut out ‘excess fat’.
11. Basecamp
Basecamp is an online project management tool most often used for managing remote and distributed teams. It comes with message boards, to-do lists, document sharing, scheduling, and automatic check-in questions for remote team admins. Basecamp Business is a $99/month flat fee for unlimited projects and users.
“Basecamp serves as the central hub through which all branches of each [of my] businesses communicate, allowing me to communicate to each team through their own project page and schedule tasks accordingly. This tool is extremely beneficial for businesses that operate with employees and freelancers split up across the globe.” — Teresha Aird
Usability rating: Simple
Recommended by: Teresha Aird, SEO and e-commerce veteran currently splitting time between Offices.net, an online brokerage that connects businesses with flexible workspace, and Custom Neon, a globally dispersed retailer and manufacturer of custom-designed LED neon signs.
12. StudioCloud
StudioCloud is business management software for service-oriented businesses. Features include bookkeeping, client management, scheduling, invoicing, project management, marketing automation, online booking, and more. There’s a free version if you’re ready to handle the service by yourself or just want to get a hang of its basic features, but the most suitable plan with all add-ons is the $30/month Partner Boost.
“To manage both [my] businesses, I use StudioCloud. It .. helped me connect with the dealers, vendors, customers, partners, and clients in one place. It even had this opportunity for them to review our designs and send in their approvals. In addition, it helped me track my work, focus on several of my business projects and send in immediate invoices to keep the businesses running smoothly.” — Dan Barret
Usability rating: Simple
Recommended by: Dan Barret, CEO of Plutus Software Inc. a corporate grouping for legal, finance, and accounting purposes, and the co-owner of Pacific Precious Metals.
Final word
As wisdom has it, “Harmony makes small things grow. Lack of it makes big things decay.” In business, we can be bold enough to paraphrase: “A harmonious entrepreneurship experience is what makes small businesses grow. Lack of it makes big businesses decay”. And while harmony is a delicate work-life balancing act, with these helpful digital platforms, you can be confident about harmonizing all your businesses and growing a step closer towards your business Zen every day.
Want to go a step further towards multipreneur savings? Here’s how our very own business phone system helps connect remote workers into a single team and effortlessly communicate with clients from any spot in the world.
