📱 How to Build The Right Tech Stack to Be More Profitable + Efficient

Oh hey! 👋 I’m glad you’re here.

In this issue, we will walk through how to ensure you have, and are using, the best tech stack for your business.

Each of us already has a tech stack, personally and professionally. You may just not realize it or call it that. A tech stack is a collection of tools, platforms, and applications that a business uses daily to operate. My iPhone, Apple Watch, Gmail, Google Calendar, and Noom are a few pieces of my personal tech stack.

Technology can be overwhelming for a lot of people. At the same time, having the right technology in your business can create massive unlocks in your productivity and profit.

Unfortunately, many businesses limit their own growth and oftentimes diminish their customers’ experience by not investing time to research and implement technology that best fits their unique business needs.

The right tech stack allows you to spend less time using technology and invest more time doing your most important work.

Together, let’s walk through a simple strategy to identify how your business currently operates, determine what tools can create efficiencies and increase profitability, and how to hold your technology accountable moving forward.

HERE’S HOW IN 8 MINUTES:

1. Ask The Right Questions 🙋

2. Choose Your Weapons 🏹

3. Set Standards 📜

Step 1: Ask The Right Questions 🙋

In order to determine what tools will form the best tech stack for your business, you need to ask some clarifying questions.

Briefly review how your business operates and use the following questions as a guide.

1. What’s the elevator pitch for your business?

2. Who is on your team and what are their roles?

3. What was your Revenue, Profit %, and Units Sold last year?

4. Of the Units Sold last year, what were your Top 2-3 lead sources?

5. What technology (tools) does your business have currently?

   • What business challenges are those tools intended to solve?

   • What does each tool cost monthly or annually?

   • What is your current return on investment (ROI) for each tool?

   • Who on your team uses each tool?

   • How frequently is each tool used (e.g. daily, weekly, etc.)?

6. Do you have a contact database?

   • How many contacts (you know them and they know you) are in your database?

   • How many leads (you have their information and no relationship yet) are in your database?

   • How many of your contacts are in your sphere of influence?

   • How are you currently marketing to your database?

7. What is your follow-up process (after a new lead is generated)?

8. What systems and tools are you using from client acquisition to closed transactions (if applicable)?

Once you’ve answered these questions, you should have a clear picture of your business today, as well as a better understanding of where potential gaps are or how your expenses can be managed differently and capital redeployed in areas that will make a more meaningful impact on your growth and profitability.

Next, you’ll choose what technology could fill those gaps to fuel growth by allowing you to focus more on revenue-generating activities, and/or create efficiencies so you can focus on cultivating deeper relationships with your customers.

Step 2: Choose Your Weapons 🏹

Far too many business owners skip Step 1 and start swiping their credit cards, buying one shiny new piece of software after another, expecting the dizzying number of features to be their magic bullet to success.

What Not to Do 🙅‍♂️

Owners/Operators often base these purchase decisions on what’s popular in their industry or what colleagues are using, without investing a relatively small amount of time in understanding what their business needs and finding a product they’ll actually use on a daily basis to solve that challenge.

For Example…

One of the biggest examples of where operators make this mistake is with their website.

While many platforms like Squarespace, Wix, and Webflow allow businesses to create beautiful websites without knowing how to code or spending thousands of dollars to build them from scratch, websites are still complicated for one main reason: the versatility of their purpose.

The most successful businesses invest time to think through what their website should solve, how they want their customers and visitors to use their website, how it should make them feel, what value it will provide them, and how the business will know when their website is successful at all of the above.

Do This Instead 👌

Much like each dollar should have a job, each piece of technology or tool should have a job as well as a way to measure its results.

Your business’s tech stack may be complex or simple; either way, it should simplify your life and how your business operates.

If your technology constantly frustrates you and drains your energy, it’s not the right fit. Change it. Just know that each change requires an investment of time to learn and understand how to use the tool and optimize it for your business. If you haven’t done that with your current tools, that may be the cause of your frustration and the best place to start.

Applications should be as interconnected as possible to reduce the amount of time spent jumping from one application to another and limit performing the same tasks multiple times (e.g. double-data entry).

Platforms like HubSpot provide an all-in-one experience that creates these efficiencies. Platforms are a suite of tools that are connected on the backend to streamline your workflow.

Consider all the areas of your business where your tech stack could automate tasks or streamline workflows.

1. Contact Management/Database

2. Lead Generation

3. Sales Pipeline

4. Transaction Management

5. Marketing

   • Asset Creation

   • Email Marketing

   • Video Marketing

   • Content Management

   • Automation

   • Reporting/Analytics

6. Website

   • Domain Registrar

   • Website Hosting

   • Analytics

7. Communication/Collaboration

8. Data Storage/File Management

   • Password Management

9. Financials

   • Reporting/Forecasting

   • Mileage Tracking

   • Payment Processing

10. Customer Service/Support

Which of these areas are you already leveraging technology?

How can systems be simplified and consolidated or eliminated, and are you holding each piece of your tech stack accountable for providing a return on your investment?

Once you’ve determined what tools may be the right fit for your business, start small by beginning with a free trial, then go month-to-month for 3-6 months to confirm the tool is the best fit and that you’ll use it consistently before committing to an annual plan to save some money.

Even after you’ve built a great tech stack that fits your business’s needs, know that as your business grows and evolves, your systems and technology will likely need to scale to continue meeting those needs. You may need to change to a plan that offers what your business needs or switch to another system altogether. Be nimble. Be water, my friend. 🐉

Step 3: Set Standards 📜

Now that you’ve asked the right questions and used those insights to build the right tech stack for your business, the last critical step is to set and communicate standards for how each tool will be used within your business, who will do what, and begin creating habits around using your tech stack.

And that, my friends, maybe the real secret right there.

Choosing and learning new technology isn’t that hard. It’s creating a daily habit of using the technology that causes most operators to not receive the intended benefit.

Define + Communicate

When implementing new technology, it doesn’t have to be a top-down rollout. It can be a collaborative process with your team.

Ensure that any terms or workflows that need to be defined and set as standards are done in a collaborative nature and then communicated across your organization.

A great example of this is when organizing contacts in your database. Most CRMs (Customer Relationship Management systems) utilize tags to organize contacts into segments. A term like “Sphere of Influence (SOI)” might be defined differently by each member of your team. Everyone should be on the same page and define SOI the same way, for example.

Standards + Accountability

Once your terms and workflows are defined and communicated, the standards must be set by leadership and each team member should be held accountable to those standards.

Each member of your team should be using the tools you implemented on a consistent basis (i.e. daily or in real-time) to ensure everyone in your organization knows what is happening with your customers, what needs to be done, who is doing each task, and where the business is year-to-date to their stated goals.

If your sales team isn’t logging their contact notes into your CRM so the rest of your organization can receive the massive efficiencies that come with it, it may be time to rebuild your sales team. 😤

Have a productive and fulfilling week, my friends!

ONWARD TOGETHER.

In The Weeds 🌾

Additional resources for you to dive deeper.

• Tech Stack: Definition + 9 Examples from the World's Top Brands

• How to build a roadmap toward lower costs for your small business

• Revenue Tech Stack 101

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