A megathread of all of the services I'm using to grow my companies today. Bookmark this. All the tools, services and strategies (free and paid) I utilize across my 11 companies from launch to growth phases. Lets go: A web domain and website. Customers find you on the internet. This is the most critical part of your business. Don't skimp here. You need a clear, concise website designed to convert online shoppers to paying customers. The scrappy way: Go on SquareSpace (used to be Google Domains) and buy a domain and watch youtube videos to learn how to build the website on Wordpress or Webflow. The ideal way: Buy a premium domain on dan.com and buy a two word domain that is easy to remember with less than 12 characters. Hire WebRun.com to build your website (they've built 10+ of mine). They focus on simplicity, conversions and SEO and they add design elements to make it look professional. Make sure you have landing pages for each individual service you offer and each town you offer it in. Get a good form on your site to collect customer info and use calendly to allow the customers to book sales calls with your team. Organize customer data in a CRM like Airtable or Hubspot. WebRun folks can help you with this. Logo: I use 99 designs for all of my logos. Not always perfect and you need to check for other trademarks using image search tool. Google Business Profile: Set up a google account and build your profile so local customers can search it. Get citations done (Bold SEO can help here). Get reviews from real customers ASAP. Use a service like NiceJob if necessary to collect reviews. Phone number: Get a company phone number. The scrappy way is Google Voice. Ring Central or other services are better for multiple employees, etc. Email: Set up a G Suite account and get an email address, calendar, Drive, etc with your company domain as the tag. Search engine optimization: Great landing pages and site structure is important. WebRun can help you with that. Google reviews and an optimized Google Business Profile is critical as well. But you need a few backlinks to your website to increase your domain authority and get found online. Links to your site are votes of confidence in the eyes of Google. The scrappy way here is to sponsor sports teams, donate to charities, ask your friends for links, go on podcasts, do guest posts, etc. The easier way is to hire a link building service to do this work for you. I use BoldSeo.com to source 50+ links a month across my portfolio to grow my domain authority. Go to this site to check your domain authority vs your competitors. If you are lower than your competitors, get more links: ahrefs.com/backlink-checker Paid Ads: You can watch youtube videos and learn to run your own paid ads on Google. If you do less than $1k per month of ad spend I recommend this or getting a friend to help you. If you spend more than that I recommend hiring an agency to help you run the paid ads. I use AdRhino.com to run $100k + of monthly adspend across my portfolio of companies. They set up Google Analytics 4 and help you get real data on cost per lead and cost per conversion so you can figure out your Return on Ad Spend. Communication: Get Slack so your company can communicate in an organized fashion. Bookkeeping / Tax Returns: Get an LLC created so you can open up a company bank account. I use betterbookkeeping.com to do my monthly bookkeeping and also create my K1s and tax returns for a monthly fee. My friend Mitchell Baldridge runs this company and he's a great guy. Company insurance: A general liability insurance policy is a necessity. TitanRisk.com does my GL and property and casualty insurance across my real estate company and others. They specialize in real estate heavy businesses so you may need to contact a local broker on your own. Hiring: I think overseas employees are an excellent way to grow your business without increasing overhead. I use a recruiting company called supportshepherd.com to hire them. 80% of my employees across my businesses are located in Latin America and the Philippines. What they do for me: - Customer service - Collections - Financial analysis / Underwriting - Project management - Web development - Engineering - Sales - Admin assistant - Management And much more. One of the employees I hired last year will definitely end up running one of my companies someday - an extremely talented individual. A few more reasons: 80% less cost than US employees. Not entitled. Don't ask for a raise every 6 months. Team players. Positive attitude. Grateful to be a part of my company. How did I find them? I used a recruiting company called supportshepherd.com to help me make the hires. Recruiting US based employees: The scrappy way: Walk in every retail biz in town and hand cards to anyone who looks physically able. Esp Starbucks, Walmart (watch the folks going out for carts and approach the ones who hustle). “Know anyone looking for work? We pay $20 an hour.” The applications will come. The easy way: I've used a recruiting company called recruitjet.com to find and recruit US talent for my companies. Sales reps, engineers, managers, etc. Hiring and delegation strategy: Hiring and managing is hard. Here is a breakdown of how I do it: youtube.com/watch?v=lQ3-QlAm… Payroll: I use Gusto.com to manage my company payroll, sick days, vacations, bonuses and more. It is a great service. Payment processing: I use stripe.com to collect payments at most of my companies. I encourage most $1k + ticket items to be paid with ACH or I add an extra fee for the buyer, which you can do on stripe. Sales and executive coaching: I hire executive coaches for all of my upper level management. I also hire sales coaches for all of my sales reps to increase their closing percentages and fine tune their strategies. I use a company called hubermethod.com (which I founded) to organize all of this. It pays for itself quickly because the closing percentages increase drastically and my sales reps become serious assets. Online banking: I use relayfi.com to run my online banking for almost all of my companies. Many folks prefer Mercury and if you do local business you might want to just use a local bank. I can move money easily, make payments, create credit cards for my employees, etc. AI notetaker: I use Avoma in all of my zoom meetings so I can get transcripts and keep notes of all the meetings that happen in my companies. All of my teams are remote with no offices. This is critical. A second monitor for everyone: Sounds silly but no employees at your company should work for even a minute without a second monitor. If they don't have one, get them one. What am I missing? What are you using to help your company be more efficient or drive sales? Disclaimer (I am an investor or partner in several of the companies mentioned in this post).