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In today’s digital age, businesses often fall into the trap of accumulating an overwhelming number of tools to manage their operations. What starts as an attempt to increase efficiency can quickly turn into a tangled web of software, requiring constant maintenance, updates, and integrations. The result? A Frankenstein-like tech stack that drains both time and resources, leaving teams frustrated and overwhelmed. Instead of boosting productivity, an excess of tools can create confusion, slow down workflows, and lead to costly inefficiencies.
Finding the right balance is key—leveraging powerful yet streamlined solutions that eliminate clutter while enhancing efficiency. Yvonne Heimann, a leading expert in business automation and digital workflows, has mastered this approach. Through careful selection and strategic implementation, she has identified five game-changing productivity tools that have not only simplified her business operations but also significantly improved overall performance.
These tools provide the functionality needed without the unnecessary complexity, allowing business owners to focus on growth rather than tech-related headaches.
The Journey to Simplification: Why Less is More
Yvonne Heimann introduces us to the concept of minimizing our tech stack by focusing on essential productivity tools. The key question she asks is simple: why juggle multiple platforms when a handful of well-chosen tools can do the job effectively? By adopting a streamlined system, businesses not only cut down costs but also increase efficiency, allowing for more time to focus on strategic growth rather than mundane tasks.
High Level: The All-in-One Productivity Tool
For businesses aiming to consolidate their tech stack, High Level is a game-changer. As Yvonne Heimann discusses, High Level replaces various conventional productivity tools such as Active Campaign, Mailchimp, and Nimbus. It serves as a robust platform that integrates CRM, lead generation, and automation. By centralizing these functions, High Level reduces both human error and inefficiencies, making business processes more seamless and effective.
ClickUp: The Ultimate Productivity Tool for Task Management
Yvonne describes ClickUp as “if Asana and Trello had a baby on steroids”—a powerhouse among productivity tools. ClickUp combines task and data management, allowing businesses to organize, prioritize, and execute tasks effectively. With its automation capabilities and the ability to consolidate tasks, calendars, and projects, ClickUp plays a vital role in reducing the complexity of business operations and increasing overall productivity.
Fathom: AI-Powered Productivity Tool for Note-Taking
Fathom is a pivotal addition to any productivity tools suite. This AI-powered note-taking tool integrates with Google Calendar Hangouts and Zoom, offering automatic transcriptions, key takeaways, and topic summaries. By eliminating the need for manual meeting notes, Fathom significantly cuts down time spent on post-meeting reviews, making it an indispensable tool for efficiency-driven professionals.
Metricool: A Social Media Productivity Tool
Managing social media effectively requires the right productivity tools, and Metricool stands out with its visually intuitive interface and powerful analytics. This tool simplifies social media scheduling and provides valuable insights through its data-driven approach. Despite platform-specific API challenges, Metricool remains a versatile and budget-friendly solution for businesses looking to enhance their social media presence without excessive costs.
Riverside: The Must-Have Productivity Tool for Content Creators
For content creators and business owners who need a reliable recording tool, Riverside is an essential part of the productivity tools arsenal. Designed for high-quality podcasting and video recording, Riverside ensures that content remains crisp and professional. It also includes AI-powered automation for short-form content creation, reducing the time and effort required to generate promotional material.
Conclusion: Leveraging the Right Productivity Tools for Business Growth
By focusing on these five carefully selected productivity tools, Yvonne Heimann demonstrates that the key to running a successful business lies in simplification. The right tools should empower you to focus on growth, rather than getting bogged down with overly complex systems. Every business has unique needs, so it’s important to choose the productivity tools that align with your goals, streamline your workflow, and enhance efficiency.
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Video Transcription:
Yvonne Heimann [00:00:00]:
When it comes to technology and the tech stack we are running in our business. Oh my God. This can feel like an endless collection of tasks and tools. You need all the things and do all the stuff. What if I tell you there is a way to simplify, automate and free yourself from this day to day having to deal with 10,000 different tools just to make your business work and running. I’m about to share my top five productivity and running your business tools with you so you can really simplify your system in 2025 and stop building this Franken stack of technology in your business and really focus on working on your business than constantly working in your business. How does that sound? Now, if you haven’t met yet, I’m Yvonne Heimann, aka Yvi of askyvi.com and my goal is to show you how simple systems and easy tech stack can help you scale your business without the overwhelm, without the burnout and without you. Because that’s the goal, right? We don’t want to work in our business 24/7
Yvonne Heimann [00:01:14]:
We want to be able to travel like I just did, taking the digital nomad route and packing up my life and going. Or maybe you want to spend time with your family. I don’t think you started a business to be able to just work 24. 7 in your business. You could have stayed in a job if you wanted to do this. So that’s exactly what this video is about today. 2024 for us in my own business has been a journey of really simplifying.
Yvonne Heimann [00:01:45]:
Today I really wanted to show you how we have downsized my own business to five simple tools and they can do everything you need in your business, some of which if you are not a content creator, you might not even need. And you can downsize to even less tools than this. And the nice thing is you are not just downsizing tools, you’re also downsizing your budget. You’re getting more productive because you are not all over the place. You have more money left over because you are not paying for all kinds of tools and life is just suddenly easier. You might have heard about High Level before. A lot of agencies actually white label this tool and give you their framework on top of High level out there. Like Funnel Gorgeous is one of those where they have white labeled high level to make the use for you even easier.
Yvonne Heimann [00:02:38]:
Now full on note here, let’s be honest, I dove deep into this to look at it also from the perspective of building my own agency and building out snapshots on High Level specifically for you who is following my teachings and my systems and processes. Why we decided to go the high level route is because it replaced tools like Active Campaign or mailchimp. It replaced tools like Nimble or Sales Salesforce, any kind of CRM. It replaced the need for any kind of lead page tool and it replaced the need to automate in between those tools. So let me show you what that means. Our academy. If you have seen and checked out our bossyourbusiness.academy, that’s where my ClickUp templates are. That’s where newsletter, that’s where freebies behind the scenes, that is actually all of the technology that is running.
Yvonne Heimann [00:03:38]:
So we have the whole academy. All of the learning portal is right here. This is go high level. This is high level. Not only that, that’s the website that houses the academy. We also have specific landing pages where you can sign up and you can pay and you have the whole shopping cart experience. If you’ve seen right here we also have the shop right here with the ClickUp templates that are mentioned. All the delivery, all of the sales process of this, all of the follow up emails, everything is right in here.
Yvonne Heimann [00:04:15]:
Same with the bonuses for my book. You probably, if you’ve been around, have seen all of these. Now what happens behind the scenes is you submit, you pay. Now I can run my email automations and not just only email automations, but actually adding you to the community where you get template supports. I know that’s a lot all at once. So let me put this all together in one single explanation why taking the deep dive with a tool like High level is worth it. The possibility of human and technology error is huge. When you have teaching platform, a course platform and then you have an email newsletter and automation platform and then you have a lead funnel platform.
Yvonne Heimann [00:05:05]:
Now you have to connect all of these high level combines these all nicely in one tool and all of these bits and pieces that you are running and the processes and systems in your business now suddenly are all nicely packaged in one tool that talks nicely with each other between all of these features and eliminates the need for up to five different tools plus make or zapier automations in between those tools. Tool number two that we have implemented for quite a while and it’s not going to be a surprise is ClickUp. Why ClickUp it ClickUp to me is like a as if Asana and Trello had a baby on steroids. I’ve been using that phrase pretty much since 2018. ClickUp allows you to do the same thing where it is data management, task management, and all nicely concise. Together with automations I can run my content creation through here. I can go into easily see my week on what I need to get done. I can take the same information and sort it in a way that tells me this is important right now.
Yvonne Heimann [00:06:16]:
This needs to happen right now. There’s not many tools that can do that. Asana is working in way too many silos. You have to decide what you’re working on. There is no combining and changing a lot of things. Trello has literally a ceiling on how far you can scale it. And I’m sorry, Notion is a data management tool, not a task management tool. Now that I got off of my horse and preached again why ClickUp is better than others, let’s go into tool number three and I actually love this tool so much I invested in it when they did their funding round.
Yvonne Heimann [00:06:51]:
Fathom Fathom is an AI note taker and why I love them is first of all you have a free version. Now if you’re going into the pro version you can literally tell it what you want and how you want it. In the free version you are getting the full on transcript. You can take this and roll with it, do whatever you want to do with it. In the paid version you also can build out your key takeaways and your topics and work with the AI to give you more information based on the transcript that is there. It integrates with Google Calendar Hangouts as well as Zoom. Now why I said Google Calendar Hangouts? Because if you didn’t miss it, we were just talking about how ClickUp rolled out. Google Calendar Automations integrated and has an AI note taker and also can schedule things and Hangouts.
Yvonne Heimann [00:07:47]:
So here is now where you can look into simplifying things if you’re deciding to use Fathom that works with Google Hangouts. Now you don’t need to pay for Zoom because ClickUp also integrates with Google Hangouts. If you haven’t watched the video, go watch the video on what ClickUp has done and the upgrades they have done to their Google Calendar integration. Metricool. I love Metricool as a social media scheduler. Number one, it has a great visual analytics section. I am a visual person, give me some great charts and as long as the charts are nicely built and not on a pie charts I can read that information faster and make informed decision based on it. So much faster.
Yvonne Heimann [00:08:34]:
Not only that, again Metricool has a free account that you can get started with so you don’t have to chunk out a ton of money right away just to get started with the social media scheduler. It has all of the nerdy feature somebody like me wants with a collaboration with tagging people and all the things to be able to make the most out of the platform you are scheduling with while being able to grow into it. I know I’m. I’m a freaking tool nerd. I test all the things out, how it’s possible, what is possible. You might not be there yet and it allows you to really grow into this with a great customer support and a simplicity that other tools have lost while they were scaling. Now you are limited on the free account and some platforms might not be available again. Twitter has been a pain in our booty with what they allow to happen with API.
Yvonne Heimann [00:09:36]:
Not something that Metrical can go about and I think Blue sky is on the page paid one. So based on what they can do and what the API allows them and what they have to pay, it might be a paid feature in here. However basics we are literally running on the free account. Let’s be honest, if you’re running multiple accounts, you’re going to need the paid account or set up two accounts. We are talking about content creation and social media. You might have seen some of my older videos where I talked a lot about Streamyard and Streamyard was amazing. I was close friends with a lot of employees there and I loved what they had built. Unfortunately they got bought out by a company that I do not align with and me on a Mac.
Yvonne Heimann [00:10:23]:
Love me some ecamm but I heard you, you are a Windows user, you need something else or something that’s cross platform available. And I was lucky enough. Riverside actually reached out to me and was like here, go test us. I had used Riverside in the past and did like their approach and they upgraded. Oh my God, have they upgraded. They have put some serious work into. As you can see, we have been using Riverside to record the podcast. She is a leader is my podcast where I am bringing in female leaders to talk about how we can make a bigger impact on how they are making an impact.
Yvonne Heimann [00:11:04]:
All of this has been recorded in Riverside because we are able to actually locally record on my guest’s laptop. So if something happens and we have a little bit of wonky Internet connection, it is buffered in their browser and then gets sent to me. Such a lifesaver. We had a couple of podcasts happening where we thankfully had that in place. But not only that, Riverside now also has added AI features. They have added automatic short form creation to this. So they really have listened to their content creators, to their podcasters to their business owners that don’t want to be a content creator, that just want to be on camera talking about it and make this process simple. What did they do? We actually now have magic clips right in here that you can automatically generate and say hey, I want under 30 seconds.
Yvonne Heimann [00:12:05]:
I want 30 to 60 seconds. Which speaker do you want to focus on? And you can let Riverside do the work. Not only that, you also can now run webinars and live stream live classes through Riverside. They have really done an amazing job to listen to their audience and be able to work around business owners that don’t want to be a full time content creator and giving us the features and possibilities and opportunities in a tool that we need as a business owner that just doesn’t want to be a content creator. And with that, I know I threw a whole bunch of tools at you. You got any questions? Pop them in the comments below. What are you trying to make happen? What is your pain point with your tools right now? and I’ll pop in and I’ll help you figure it out. Because systems are so personal to us, everybody can tell you this is the way to do it and this is the only way to do it.
Yvonne Heimann [00:13:08]:
I call bs, grab information, see what other people are doing, what do they love using and then ask the questions based on how you work and what you are trying to accomplish. And if you don’t know which questions to ask, pop them in the comments. I’ll help you figure it out. That’s exactly what I do in my community and with my clients. And with that it really comes down to these how do we make this ours? And I want to I want to send you over to another video where I talked about how you shouldn’t be setting goals for 2025. It’s not how this system works. Even if everybody tells you you need to set goals, I’m going to see you over in that video and in the comment section. Hop on in and tell me what’s your biggest struggle with your tool stack right now?
