THE FIVE TOOLS WE CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT
While your planning process involves so much more than software and project management tools, these resources can help with efficiency, organization, team management, brand consistency and more. When shared appropriately, they can even help your potential and current clients understand your approach and philosophy, which is beyond helpful when it comes to sales and building trust. If you haven’t found the perfect tools to support your process, here are the top five we use at BHE for design, project management and more:
MONDAY
Monday is my go to tool for managing my full time team and our step by step process internally. It’s a simple software that allows you to build out each project and every related task, no matter how small. From there, you can assign tasks to associates and external team to ensure nothing falls through the cracks so you always know who’s working on what. It also has a feature that allows your team to update their status on every element to things like “waiting on client”, “waiting on vendor” or even “waiting on boss (Ours says “Waiting on Beth” in in this instance)” or whatever custom status makes sense for you. This allows you to understand where each task is in the funnel. The interface is intuitive, customizable and relatively aesthetically pleasing which is important if you have a creative mind like mine. We use it to track every step from the bigger tasks such as “book the caterer” to the smaller details like “double check calligraphy on invitations” or “order tissue paper for the welcome bags”. It’s a Godsend for anyone managing multiple employees or vendors.
AISLE PLANNER
I’m sure most of you at least know of Aisle Planner and those who do, likely love it as much as we do. We don’t use all of the features in Aisle Planner because while it does allow you to upload your logo, we have a lot of other design elements involved in communicating our brand. Especially when it comes to proposals, design tools and more. With that in mind, I can’t speak to the tool in all it’s glory but we do love Aisle Planner for creating and storing our four different timelines, our at-a-glance budget (but NOT our other three budgets), our wedding profiles, our master planning calendar, guest lists, seating assignments and storing vendor contracts. We like this tool because it’s easy to use and our couples have access should they ever need to review their budget, guest list or photography contract at three o’clock in the morning. While not every couple uses it, we still find it incredibly useful internally as it allows us to store 70% of our client’s information in one intuitive platform.
ALL SEATED
All Seated is our go to software for creating to scale floor plans for all of our events. We love it because it not only has most popular venue layouts readily available but we’re also able to simply send an address and allow the All Seated team to create a floor plan from Google Earth. This is specifically helpful when we’re working in a client’s home or other private venue. While a custom CAD is slightly more accurate, we still love All Seated because we have 24 hour access to our floor plans and can make our changes on demand rather than waiting for our CAD designer to make adjustments.
EXCEL // GOOGLE SHEETS
I mean, what planner doesn’t use Excel or Google Sheets?! We specifically use this tool to create the more detailed budgets we create throughout our process and also use it to share side by side comparisons when quoting multiple details or vendors on our client’s behalf. Ultimately it simply allows us to be more thorough than the at-a-glance budget we create in All Seated.
POWERPOINT
I basically spend 80% of my day working in Powerpoint. This is where we create our proposals, our supporting sales documents, our contracts, all of our designs and more. Powerpoint allows me to create templates that are fully aligned with our image using our preferred fonts, colors and layouts, ultimately allowing our brand to be consistent and beautiful. I know there are other tools out there that offer efficient and beautiful templates, but we love Powerpoint because the template created is ours and ours alone.
What tools do you use, love and why? I’d love to hear about them! And if you want to dig deeper into building your process, budgeting for your clients or anything else, check out our content page for more information. And, as always, if you want to be kept up to date on the release of new content, special promotions and more, subscribe here and receive instant, complimentary access to my session on “Getting Treated Like an Expert Instead of an Assistant”. In this session I talk more about the steps you can implement immediately that allow couples to understand your role and value from your very first conversation. Until next time…