7 Essential Tools Every Business Should Use Blog

After five years of trial, error, and costly mistakes, I’ve finally built a tool stack that keeps our team productive, accountable, and sane.

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Are you looking for the perfect set of tools to add to your ecosystem to ensure your team and clients are taken care of? Many start-ups or even medium-sized organisations find it really difficult to finalise tools to use which can help them in improving productivity, transparency & quality of their offerings.

You make constantly be wondering:

• Where should I store all of my data and how can I give secure access to my team to collaborate?
• How can I track my teams’ tasks and get updates?
• How do I ensure I can track and manage things from inception to its delivery?

After 5 years of setting this up for adlance, I have decided to share what I have done with you today as a means of benefit. So, let’s get started.

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1. WhatsApp

For real-time communication and announcements, WhatsApp is still the go-to app. Especially with the Communities feature! As the world is prominently using WhatsApp, there’s no onboarding required. Just a simple ‘create a group’ and add all relevant people into that group.

Internally, adlance has its own community and all departments have their own WhatsApp group chat with all relevant people in those groups. I create separate groups outside of that community for my clients and have ‘adlance’ in the title of those groups i.e. ‘Emaan Relief x adlance’ to distinguish between my personal chats and work chats.

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2. Dropbox

There are quite a few data storage tools such as Google Drive, OneDrive and then Dropbox. I prefer Dropbox specifically for the following reasons:

• Send contracts off for signatures using drag-and-drop input fields (add full name, add title, etc.) so there’s no need to have a separate ‘send for signature’ tool.
• Highlight areas of images and PDFs and add comments. This is extremely useful when reviewing work and sending feedback to your team.
• Leave comments with timestamps for videos. Instead of having a separate subscription for Frame.io, Dropbox does it for you.
• Send large folders as downloadable links. No need for WeTransfer.
• After checking the pricing, it’s far more economical than other data storage providers. I’ll explain how below.
• You can rewind your data if it ever gets ‘accidentally’ deleted.

I haven’t created a user account for every single employee. Rather, whenever I need an extra 5TBs, I purchase a user account as it comes with 5TBs in the Professional package. That’s how I keep it economical by only paying for storage.

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3. Synology

You might be wondering, how do my employees interact with the company’s data and use it? No, we don’t all sign into the same Dropbox account. Trust me, it doesn’t work. If you have every employee download Dropbox for Desktop, it will only mess with the sync and can even result in files being deleted. Yes, I have tried it in the past and suffered because of it.

We use Synology as our internal server. It allows us to create as many user accounts as we want and store data internally which is accessible to our team with security permissions applied however we want. All of my team members are now able to store and use files directly from the Synology NAS without needing large storage space on their own computers, as all storage is managed by the hard drives installed into the NAS.

What you need to consider when getting Synology:

• Constant supply of electricity – if anything happens to the electricity, your server will turn off and your team won’t be able to access files.
• Safe & ventilated placement – we recently had an internal component fry due to overheating, so ventilation is critical.
• Security – the NAS and its terabytes (TBs) of hard drives are worth thousands of £, so theft prevention is essential.

To conclude this section, we use Dropbox as our cloud storage which we scale up, and Synology as the main internal server synced with Dropbox. Synology provides daily operational access, while older files are kept on Dropbox.

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4. Notion

I could write a lot about Notion, but this article will focus on explaining how we use Notion briefly. Notion is not just a task management system but rather an ‘everything’ system. Its core strength is allowing you to create databases and define custom properties. Here’s how we use it:

• Department Spaces – onboarding, department-specific guides, job descriptions (JDs), quick links (IT complaints, HR policies, announcements), meeting minutes, and internal documentation.
• Client Workspace – task dashboards showing only items requiring client review, plus meeting minutes and client-specific documents.
• HR Database – candidates fill in a Notion form connected to Notion Calendar, allowing organised interview scheduling.
• Team Evaluations – senior members submit evaluation forms scored out of 10, leading to rankings, bonuses, and salary increment requests.
• Team Points – team-based points tracked via bar graphs, with the winning team receiving a large cash prize at year-end.
• Finance Invoice Requests – internal requests for invoices.
• IT Systems Record – manual entries for each PC, assigned to who it has been assigned to.
• Task Request Form – public Notion form allowing clients and prospects to submit tasks, kickstarting contact, invoicing, and execution.

Everything above took around 10 months to build and implement alongside running the business. As you can see, Notion handles a lot.

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5. Google Workspace

This was essential for us as it unlocks Google Meet and provides Google-secured email addresses used for accessing clients’ YouTube channels, Google Analytics, Google Ads, etc. We previously used free Gmail accounts which got hacked. With Google Workspace, we now have 24/7 support, allowing us to recover quickly if anything happens again.

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6. Zoho Mail

I really liked Zoho’s security features. I can create aliases and forwarders, and it clearly showed me why using free email addresses was a huge security risk as well as a waste of time.

Without it, I received far too many spam and fake emails. With it, I only see emails that actually concern me.

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7. ChatGPT

Here’s the really cool thing about ChatGPT now. I can connect Notion with ChatGPT and it can converse with me without me having to give it the complete context regarding any task on Notion which I want to discuss! I am currently exploring more features such as the new transcribing meetings which I currently use Google Meet to do for me. However, my ChatGPT is completely set up to providing me key details about anything regarding my business make it the perfect Personal Assistant (PA).

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Conclusion

The tools mentioned above took a lot of effort to enforce, but without them we’d honestly be lost. We’re still looking at simplifying things and possibly adding more tools, but these are our core systems which help us keep everything tracked and running smoothly.

I hope this list benefits you in taking your business to the next level without the long hours of research I went through when comparing and setting up each tool. If you’re interested in getting adlance to set all of this up for you, feel free to contact us. And if you just want a bit of advice, I will be more than happy to give it for free — just mention you want to speak with Jawaad.