My Favorite Organization Tools For Beauty Business

If you didn’t already know this, my sunless entrepreneurial journey started about seven years ago! Which means I have put a ton of time into finding the best ways to stay organized AF! As someone who has ADHD, my mind can go into a bunch of different directions in the matter of literal seconds. My life can be a bit chaotic and crazy as it is, so that means I need to thrive in the organization of my life or I may just lose my marbles all together. Kidding!.. Kind of. However, I wasn’t always as organized as I am now and sometimes I still struggle to this day with keeping my life in order. Sometimes things just become a mess, if you know, you know, right? With that being said, if you’re in a space right now where your lack of organization is just slowly killing your motivation, you get frustrated with the fact that the desktop on your computer is always a mess or you can never find those super important emails, I am going to help you reign in all of that clutter and disorganization with the use of some of my favorite tools. Below, let’s dive into some of the tools that have been extremely helpful to keeping the back end of my business organized!

Trello

This tool helps with the overall organization of my business and our team. This software allows me and my team members to access a portal that covers different categories of the business, how to do things and other standard of operations type of information in an organized, easy to use manner. Some information that is super important and needs to be shared amongst the team, such as passwords and logins, can be easily searched, organized and accessed through this one platform. Basically, the way this works for us is through creating different boards that you can separate based on which team member will be accessing that information. For example, I’ll have a separate board dedicated toward information that I need to share with my salon manager and inside that board there’s variations of information related to operations or methods that are used within the day-to-day workings of the business. One of the reasons I love this so much is because it’s allowed us to filter different standards of operation through easy to use columns, which makes it that much more useful from an organizational standpoint. Through this platform we are also able to dedicate certain pieces of content to the separate boards that are created. This means that you can create documents or add photos and videos that can be accessed from anywhere around the world, which is perfect for teams with remote employees. 

Loom

This tool has been such an incredible game changer for me in terms of staying organized and just managing my time and resources more efficiently. Oftentimes I will use Loom in conjunction with Trello to share information with my team members in a way that is easily accessible. For example, if I segment a category in Trello under,  “How to process shipping labels,” I can create a video in Loom explaining everything someone would need to know about processing shipping labels so that they can get the information and also go back and re-access it at any time. This is extremely helpful for growing teams because when you’re hiring new employees, having to explain the same task over and over can get repetitive in comparison to having a video available and always accessible in the future. 

Google Drive

This is a favorite organization tool for me because it’s a lot more cost effective than similar systems, especially since I use a ton of storage on this one platform. With this tool, I have created separate folders for each business and then also have different documents located within those folders. I use this platform to organize folders based off of X-Tan, Spray Tan Class and Slay The Spray information. What's super helpful for me when using Google Drive is that you can have all of these separate folders for different businesses or different segments of your business and then inside those folders you can drop whatever type of materials that you may need to access at a later date, such as photos or documents. This is also an extremely helpful tool when it comes to staying organized within your team and allowing your team members to access documents as well because the folders you create or the separate pieces of materials that are dropped inside the folders can be shared to be used by other people. 

Email

I am going to go out on a limb and assume that you have and use an email. I don’t think I’ve ever met an entrepreneur that doesn’t use email for their business! But, what I really want to touch on today in terms of using email as a tool, is the organizational aspect of your email. For a long time, this was something that was just a hot-mess-express in my business. All I will say is, thank goodness for the search bar because without that tool, my email would have just been a mass of lost information. Not to mention, I’m sure many of you have experienced an overload of emails that take over and clutter your inbox, which can really disrupt your organization in general. One of the first things you can do to help declutter and organize your email is to unsubscribe from anything that is no longer serving you. The email blasts of companies you don’t interact with anymore or that you find it’s not a necessity to be on their email list should be unsubscribed from in order to clear out your daily influx of emails. My second tip with email organization is similar to how I organize using the Google Drive tool. Essentially, I will create folders within my email that I can sort my emails into based on the context of that email. For example, I keep a folder just for complaints. Therefore, all of the emails that deal with complaints, will be dropped into that particular folder in case I ever need to access them again. I do keep all of my important emails just to protect myself and the business and I keep those important emails organized into the appropriate categories and folders within my email so I know where to find them if there’s ever an issue. 

There you have it beauty biz babe! I hope these tools help you get organized so that your work life can be filled with less stress and more efficiency. I know, for me personally, before these tools were implemented into the back end of my business, the disorganization would cause me to be less motivated toward getting stuff done in my business. Now that I have proper systems set up for my organization, it’s like a sigh of relief every time I need to share information to a team member or locate a piece of information from several months ago without scrambling to find where I put it. If you want more of the inside scoop on how I run my business and create a stress free, organized environment for myself and my team, make sure to subscribe to the Beauty Business Babes Podcast on iTunes or Spotify. 

Xoxo,

Kelly