Use the Free Version of Software and Apps When Bootstrapping Your Business (with Elise Enriquez)

Welcome to the Frugalpreneur podcast. I am your host, Sarah St. John.

This episode is what I refer to as a showcase episode where I feature a bootstrapped entrepreneur and they briefly share their tips, tricks, tactics, techniques and tools that help them bootstrap their business and the successes and failures along the way.

My hope is that each of these showcase episodes will provide at least one valuable takeaway that you can implement right away in your own bootstrap business journey. Now onto the episode I was definitely.

One of those people who did not know what she wanted to be when she grew up. It took me a while to find my place in the coaching world.

I started out, I was a communications major at the University of Washington simply because I didn't know what else to do. I then got out of college. I tried to work at a restaurant just to have some fun for a while and it didn't last. I went and got a real job.

I'm not the restaurant work isn't a real job.

I went and got a job, but was more in line with my major and went into a place where it was advertising and a small firm in Seattle and then moved on to Microsoft where I became an operations manager. So I did a lot of process and policy work in the online ad field, where it was actually very entrepreneurial in that space at the time.

So I was getting to kind of help build the plane as we flew it, which was really, really fun for me. But as we became more successful as a division at Microsoft, it became more corporate and I realized I wanted to be more entrepreneurial.

I made the shift to residential real estate for a while because my husband at the time was a mortgage broker and we were quite the little power team. But I realized real estate still wasn't the thing. But real estate didn't introduce me to the concept of coaching.

And a lot of coaching in the real estate industry is more about sales coaching. And I realized there was more that I wanted to help people with than that.

So I got certified as a life coach, went on to get certified as a Myers Briggs practitioner, and just kept going from there.

And so I've been a coach for 15 years now and in the past eight years really shifted to focusing on productivity and supporting entrepreneurs to be able to really get out of that busy hamster wheel mode and shift into productivity that allows them to make progress on what matters most to them while still remaining present to the people, experiences and opportunities that are all around them. Bootstrapping in our businesses I think is really important, especially in the Businesses where you can actually have some low overhead.

So the coaching business, you don't really have overhead. Not too much overhead. You have some, obviously, but not a ton.

So a lot of the bootstrapping I did at the time, at the beginning, with kind of a lot of the DIY stuff, building my own website, figuring out my own marketing, I did outsource logo design because I wasn't really great at that. But I do a lot of the stuff myself, which I enjoy. A lot of the work that I do to support my business, I really enjoy.

And one of the biggest ways that I bootstrap my business is with technology. I'm one of those people that I've watched a lot of people think that technology is going to save them if they just invest in the right app.

If they just pay for the big thing with all the bells and whistles, that that's going to save their business somehow, or it's going to make them more efficient.

And I am a really big fan of starting with what you have or starting really cheap with whatever is going to help you solve your problem or at least make progress on your problem.

So, for example, one of the tools I use, the main tool I use to run my life and business, is a to do list app that cost me $30 a year, and that's it, 30 bucks a year. And this thing helps me run everything in my life, in my business, in terms of staying on top of things.

And I will continue to use that until either my business grows so large that I need, you know, that it's breaking this, right? That it can't.

It can't handle the volume of it, which is highly unlikely, or that there is something in my business or life that requires some sort of functionality that this tool doesn't provide. But at least then when I'm going to invest in whatever the next technology is, I know exactly what I'm looking for.

I think a lot of people don't know what they're looking for when they're investing in technology. So they end up spending a lot of money on stuff that they don't actually need.

My biggest success really has been in having this bonus brain that I've created with the cheapest tools possible to keep me on top of things. It's helped me in not just the good times, but in the hard times.

I think as entrepreneurs, we sometimes forget that we are human beings that are coming and doing the work that we're doing. You know, we have all of this flexibility that can really get in our way sometimes. And hard stuff can happen in our lives.

And that's what I'm most grateful for.

The way I've put together some really inexpensive apps to support me is when the hard times come in my personal life and I need to be able to know exactly, really, truly what my priorities are in those moments, what really has to get done and doesn't need to get done in my business each day when the hard times hit, like illness or death in the family or things like that.

I think the, the biggest failure in bootstrapping in my business is not when I have held onto something too long, when I haven't been willing to invest in getting support or expertise from somebody. I think that as a DIYer that I am, I'm very willing to poke around and figure things out.

There is a point at which you can really benefit from investing in the expertise and knowledge of other people, whether that's to have them take over something in your business permanently or whether it's they take over for a while and you can learn and pay them for what they're teaching you, and then you take it back on more efficiently than you could have had you not got their support. There's just a lot that you can do with the free version of things.

There's a lot you can do with whatever the free version is of whatever apps and tools are out there. There's a lot that you can do with the baseline level of a tool out there.

It can be so easy to get romanced by, seduced by all the things that an app is capable of that you aren't really going to use.

So I would say really making sure you get the most out of the free version of things before you invest in the next level so that you can make sure you're actually going to use it. Because it's, it's highly unlikely that whatever the next level is, is going to be the thing that's going to fix everything.

It's more likely that, that it's worth investing in the next levels of an app or tool. If you are already using that app or tool faithfully, you're already using it consistently, you are already getting great wins out of it.

And now you've discovered that there's a, you're ready for the next level of efficiency or support that that app or tool can provide.

When it gets down to it, regardless of what is what, you know, whether we get an afterlife or whether we're going to be reincarnated, how many lives we get, we know this one experience of life is, is this current one that we're having is our actual life. Each day that you're living is your actual life. And so I just really want to urge you to make the most out of the time that you have here.

Make sure that you're making the impact that you want to have. And that means being able to prioritize how you spend your time. And you can't prioritize what's not known.

You can't prioritize a list of things that are actually scattered across multiple tools and apps and notepads and post its and whatnot.

And so my thought for you is to figure out how to get everything in one place as efficiently as possible, as cheaply as possible, and expensively as possible. And so that way you can have a sense of everything that's on your plate.

So you can make choices about what stays on your plate and choices about what you're going to take action on. Because I want you to feel just as good about what you're not getting done as you are about what is getting done.

And everybody's going to approach how they do productivity in different ways. And I actually developed a productivity assessment, a quiz if you will, to help you uncover your productivity personality.

It's called what's your productivity personality? And you can find it at elisenriques.com forward/quiz.

And what it does is it helps you understand which of these different four personality types you are, what that means for what's great about that type and how that benefits your productivity, as well as the roadblocks that you sometimes they're going to get in your way sometimes, and how to overcome them.

I'm a big fan of helping you understand and accept who you are and then working to give yourself what you need to create the kind of success that you want.

I hope you enjoyed that episode and were able to take away a valuable nugget of information that you can implement right away in your own business. If you feel your story would be valuable for the listeners of this show, please visit Frugal Show Guest.