How to Use Trello to Grow Your Small Business
How to use Trello to grow your small business
When I first tried Trello, I couldn’t stand it.
It wasn’t for me, I had no desire to be on it, and I gave up on it.
Fast forward a few years and here I am writing an article on it. Actually, this isn’t the first article I’ve written about how Trello helps me improve the way I work.
If you’ve met me (if not, hi! 👋) and we’ve talked about your freelance work or small business, then you most likely have heard me ask you, “are you familiar with Trello?”
I kid you not. This one little and extremely affordable tool has helped me streamline, plan ahead, and feel really good about the work that I do here.
Mariellen, our designer, and I use it daily. We track everything in Trello to ensure that nothing is missed. We highlight our monthly priorities, we project manage, and we chat about the upcoming work
5 ways to use Trello to grow your business
Project management tools really work, huh?
1. Cut down on emails
If anything, this alone does it for me. Trello helps me cut down on emails - long gone are the days of searching for attachments and small snippets about projects. Instead, I just hop right on back to my Trello board. We use this for tracking project progress, communicating about strategy work for clients, and mapping out our monthly planning.
Give it a go: Do you work with a VA or a partner who supports your vision? Try using Trello to communicate and track what needs to be done. You may find yourselves quite a bit of time.
2. Put processes in place
I love using Trello to establish a process for our projects and client work. We’re able to better serve our clients because we have solid processes in place that work for us, which allows us to focus more on supporting the amazing people we work with.
Try it for yourself: Establish a process for your next project, product launch, or whatever it may be that you’re currently working on. Create a board that reflects that process so you can easily track it.
3. Collaborate with your team & partners
Mariellen and I love using Trello to collaborate. We’re able to see real-time updates to the cards (aka where we’re tracking each project, piece of client work, and loads of other fun things that we’re launching soon) instead of sending emails back and forth. We can quickly edit each other’s work, incorporate checklists and due dates, and even assign tasks to each other.
Test it out: Invite your VA, team member, or partner to a board. Identify how you’ll be using Trello to streamline your business. Create a clear plan for assessing its benefits - will you be huddling up in 2 weeks, or perhaps one month? What defines success in the test? Write those answers down so you know what you’re looking for once you sit down to reflect.
4. Identify patterns and pain points
Using Trello has helped us figure out pain points in our process. Do we often find that we’re stuck waiting on something? Or that a card is sitting dormant because one piece of the puzzle may not be fitting just quite right? I love looking back at the work we’ve done and marked complete in Trello to see where we experienced slow-downs (pro tip: Add a 🎉 to the name of your “completed” or “published” list for a little surprise - thanks for the tip, Janet!) so that we can continue to improve our own processes.
How to find those your business: As you’re trying out Trello, take a look at your due dates - are those constantly passing without the task being completed? Where’s the slow down for you? Identifying those because you’re able to actually, visually see them on the card vs. floating around in your head is one of the many important ways that you can use Trello to grow your small business.
5. Set, achieve, and surpass goals
When we first launched Well Kept, we were writing monthly goals down in a card and totally ignoring them. Yet, we continued to achieve those goals without thinking about them. The act of writing them down kept them suspended in our subconscious. We were achieving goals without really thinking about them.
And, when we realized this it was a major aha! moment for us. Now, we’re more intentional with our goal setting. We huddle up at the start of each month and walk through our:
Goals
Priorities
Deliverables
Client work/projects/roster
Content
New offerings
And anything else that we're anticipating or working on for that month. It helps us be more intentional with our time and also more present in our work. It keeps us on track.
Surpass your own goals: Goal setting is easy to put off. It’s easy to say, yeah I’ll do that next month! Then, next month comes, and no goals are set. I’ve learned the importance of setting intentions for the days, weeks, and months ahead. And, I encourage you to try to do the same. Create a monthly goals card in Trello and keep it at the top of your board! Then, envision yourself ticking those off at the end of the month. Feels good, doesn’t it?
The bottom line here is that streamlining your business = more time for you to build your business. Trello helps me grow my own business because it helps me speed up the work that I’m doing, meaning less time on email and more time on supporting my clients and the growth for their own businesses.
How do you put processes and tools in place to better your own business?
- Gabriella
