Welcome to episode number 93 of The Growth Booth. Thanks for tuning in today. Today, I'm going to be talking about seven online tools and apps that have massively simplified and improved my life. Now, I'm not talking about gadgets and gizmos that you can use online to do different things related to online marketing. Instead, I'm talking about tools that replace what you would have had to otherwise have done offline. It'll become apparent what I'm talking about here in just a few moments. I don't actually have seven tools – I've got seven categories with a bonus one thrown in for you at the end. And like I say, as you're about to find out, these tools have enabled me to do things that otherwise I would have had to do offline, and quite frankly, they would have been a pain in the butt.

So the first one that I've got is a tool called Signeasy. This is something that I can use to sign documents. Any document at all that I need to sign, I just use Signeasy, and there's lots of these out there these days. Signeasy is the one that I use, but there's DocuSign and many, many more. These allow me to add my signature to documents, or not just my signature, but to add and fill out documents online. I can bypass printing; I can bypass scanning. If we think about how we would have had to complete a document previously, it would have been printed out, maybe handwrite, to fill it in, and then sign it at the end, whereas now, of course, we can do all of that online. Signeasy is the tool that I've been using for a long time to do this. I find it incredibly flexible but also very intuitive and just simple to use. So document signing is the first one.

The second one I've got for you is document scanning. Now, if you've got a document offline that you need to turn into a PDF as an example, then the way that we have historically traditionally done this as we've taken it to a scanner, and we scanned it. Nowadays, however, it's very, very easy to do. All you need is a smartphone, and you can do it with an app. The app that I use is called Tiny Scanner. There are a bunch of different document scanning apps, but what the Tiny Scanner app does, which I use on my smartphone here, is allow me to take a photo of whatever document that is or photo it is, whatever it needs to be that I need to turn into a PDF. Essentially, take a photo of it, I can add multiple pages to it, and then it will save it for me as a PDF, send it to any email that I want. It just makes it easy for me to get things done while I'm on the move.

Now, in addition to document signing, there are tools out there that actually allow you to edit PDF documents as well. One is called pdfFiller.com, I think it is. You can open up any PDF document, and you can start editing it. Another one is Adobe Scan. This is probably a bit more of a pro solution to scanning. But the Tiny Scanner app, which is probably I think even free on the iPhone anyway, is incredibly useful for scanning documents.

Now, the third tool that I've got for you here today is about a virtual mailbox, and the one that I use, it's called Traveling Mailbox. I'll include links to all of these things over at thegrowthbooth.com, head over to thegrowthbooth.com, find episode number 93, and we'll make sure that we've got links to all of these things. Traveling Mailbox is one that I started using quite recently, actually. What I've been able to do is consolidate all of my addresses for different companies that I have for personal mail that I have, for all the banks that I use, any kind of service that requires me to put in an address, I've got Traveling Mailbox that I can use, and I can put my US address now. One thing I found about virtual mailboxes in some places haven't allowed you to use them because they say "We won't send documents to a PO Box." Now with virtual mailbox, it doesn't work. I'd like that you've still got your special number, but it's more like a street address, so it seems to work fine in my experience with banks and different places that have traditionally been a little bit more strict about where they will and won't send a mail.

Traveling Mailbox, what they can do, they can receive your mail, they can scan your mail, they can send you an email, to let you know that you've got the mail, and you can see it in the scanned version. It can also receive physical goods. So if you need to send yourself a physical package of some kind, it could receive that forwarded on. If you need to receive a check, and then cash that check or deposit that check or something, it can do that, as well as many other things as well. I found this one to be really the best bang for your buck, I think, with virtual mailboxes that I've explored.

Now, just like a virtual mailbox, another, and this is my fourth tip or tool here, is a virtual phone number. This is useful for all kinds of different things, but if you're not in the United States and you are working with different things like banks in the United States, for example, then oftentimes you'll need to have two-factor authentication. This is where a bank will send you an SMS message or text message with a special code to be able to log into different things. This is where virtual phone numbers can come in handy because they oftentimes won't send to my international phone number, but they will send to USA phone numbers.

Grasshopper is one service that I've used for virtual phone numbers in the past. Skype have actually got one, and that allows you to have a USA phone number. RingCentral is another one. OpenPhone is another one. There are lots of virtual phone numbers out there these days. The ones that I've got most experience with though are Grasshopper, RingCentral, and Skype. All three of these are fairly cost-effective depending on what you need to do. I've used these on e-commerce services, e-commerce stores, I should say, stores where I sell physical products online. I've been able to put a phone number on the store and either have phone calls directed to me, to one of my team, or directly to an answer phone and then forwarded on to me as an audio message in an email. So there's lots of ways you can configure this. It can just make your life a lot easier.

The fifth tip that I've got, the fifth tool or app that I think can really help streamline operations, save you a lot of time and replace what has traditionally been an offline service is related to notary services. This is when you need to get a signature notarized, witnessed by a notary public. I use a service called notary cam for this NotaryCam.com, and it's been a great service. I've used it many, many times for now, already, I should say, and it's never let me down. It's simple to use, it's easy to set up an appointment, I think it's quite cost-effective. Most of all, it just saves me a huge amount of time. Anytime I need to get a document notarized for whatever reason at all, NotaryCam is a good go-to solution.

The sixth tool or software or app that I've got for you here today is related to accounting. There are lots of these as well. So you've got things like QuickBooks, you've got like Zoom, you've got Mint as another one. There are many, many different tools out there that will allow you or help you with your accounting. These can be for personal use, where it's the second or the expenditure that you have from different bank accounts, and so on and so forth and automatically categorize it, or it could be for business use as well. So lots of flexibility there. They make doing tax returns a real breeze now.

I went one step further, probably about eight years ago, I would say at this point, and hired a CFO, Chief Financial Officer. She's a Chartered Professional Accountant as well, so she can now handle all of this for me, but prior to that, I used to use a lot of these types of apps and services. They've come a long way even in the last few years just with the way that they can suck in information from different places, spit out reports, allow you to have all the information you need at your fingertips essentially, and just save a huge amount of time.

The seventh tip that I've got here for you today is relating to legal services. LegalZoom has become a very popular web site for getting legal documents and so forth, prepared or any legal-related work, really. Rocket Lawyer is another one where you can go in there and hire people or buy boilerplate templates for different bits and pieces. And then more recently, I've been using Chat GPT. In fact, just recently, I needed to make a company resolution for one of my companies, and this would have previously cost me probably a few hundred bucks to have a lawyer draft up for me, but I was able to do it using Chat GPT just by explaining what I needed, what I needed the resolution to be about and to say, and it was able to craft a really good resolution for me. Now, obviously, you can't lean too heavily on something like Chat GPT if you don't know what the desired outcome is, but if you've got a little bit of experience, a little bit of background in what you're looking for, then Chat GPT is a great way to replace some other types of solutions that you've got here, otherwise, like, say LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer, a really good one as well.

So that's the seventh category, if you like, of different tools and apps that can streamline your daily operations and your life. I've got a bonus one for you, and this is related to general admin tasks. There are a few that sort of fall into these, and I've deliberately tried to stay away from general purpose online marketing tools in this episode here, but there are a few that I'm going to throw in here. Now probably my favorite general admin tool is 1Password. 1Password has allowed me to completely transform the security of how I keep my passwords and just make it so much faster for me to log into different places, instead of having a spreadsheet full of passwords, which is what I used to have. I've now got them all stored securely in the cloud and allows me to log into different places on any device that I've got. I just remember one password, that's the master password for 1Password, and the rest is simple. So that's a really good solution.

A couple of other tools that I use on a daily basis, which are not going to be a surprise to anyone here, Dropbox. In fact, just a couple of days ago, we lost a pretty important document, or we updated a document and something got deleted out of it. For a moment there, I was sort of thinking, "How are we going to recover this? How am I going to find it?" and then it occurred to me that Dropbox actually keeps a version history of your different files. I was able to go back a couple of months and download the file that used to exist. And sure enough, the information that I was looking for was actually in it, so that can be a huge stress saver. I will say, in fact, I started using Dropbox I want to say about 14 years ago, maybe 13 years ago. I was living in London at the time, and my computer just crashed and wouldn't open anymore. I lost quite a lot of different documents. Back then, I was doing my backups on a portable hard disk, so I had some backups, but they weren't up to date or anything. I ended up losing a lot of information. From that moment forward, I said, "Look, I need to have a cloud solution for this," and obviously Dropbox is a pretty well-known and a robust solution these days and also very cost-effective.

The other one that I use for a general admin every single day is Google Docs. I use it for spreadsheets, I use it for presentations, slide decks, I use it for Word documents, and everything in between. It's a really good all-around tool for creating, publishing any kind of content that I need to publish and for organizing and storing it as well.

That rounds up my seven tips, seven categories, plus the bonus category of general admin, and you've probably got a dozen different tools to consider there. These have been tools, apps, solutions that have massively simplified my life. So again, just to sum up, we spoke about document signing, that's a big one, document scanning, and we've got tools like Signeasy and Tiny Scanner there. My preferences here, a virtual mailbox like Traveling Mailbox, virtual phone numbers, the likes of Grasshopper as an example, notary services, such as NotaryCam.com, accounting using the likes of QuickBooks, legal services, general admin as well with the likes of 1Password and more.

So, look, I hope you found this useful here today. I would love to hear about any tools that you think I should add into the mix anything I've missed here. I would love to find out about those because as you know, when I find one of these tools can genuinely go a long way to simplifying and improving my life and I'd love to hear about it, and then be able to share that with the other listeners of The Growth Booth. As always, head over to thegrowthbooth.com, navigate to episode number 93. You'll see the way that you can download a full transcript of this show, and you'll also see links to all of the different tools that I've mentioned on this show. Okay, so head over, check it out, and let me know if you end up using any of the recommendations here. Thanks for listening. I'll see you in the next episode of The Growth Booth. Bye for now.