Note investing requires a number of different software tools—from email apps and CRM to marketing apps and much more. In this podcast, host Dan Deppen talks about the main programs he relies on for his notes business. He then shares some of the changes he is making, as well as the tools he is switching out. Finally, Dan goes over some new things he is testing that you may not have heard of yet. Tune into this great episode!
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Software Tools For Note Investing
I’m going to be talking about the software tools that I use for note investing. The main purpose of sharing this stuff is to help other note investors. There may be some tools in here that you haven’t heard of or you’re not familiar with. Maybe there are ways to use them that you haven’t used them before. The other thing is I’m interested in hearing what tools you recommend. If there is something that you like to use for your business that I didn’t mention, please drop me an email at Dan@FusionNotes.com. I’m always looking for new tools to try out. I spent a lot of time looking at my entire business from top to bottom and figuring out what I can improve to save myself time to make things more accurate.
I’ve done this whole deep dive on software tools and there are some things in here that I’m in the process of transitioning to. There are some other tools that I’m going to be checking out and looking at a little closer. What’s interesting with software is I used to work for Oracle. There were a lot of people or Oracle customers I talked to that when it came to software, it was like religion or politics to them oftentimes. They’re like, “I like this software and I hate that one. I don’t care what changes over time. This is how I roll.” I’ve known other people who are like that with cars. They like a certain brand of car and they never change even if they bought three lemons in a row.
Whereas I’m always like, “Whatever it is, software or golf clubs, I’m always willing to change if I think something works better.” For those who know me, I’m a big golfer. I’ve got TaylorMade irons, Callaway Woods, PING putter and Tireless balls. I use whatever I think is going to work the best for me at the time and I do the same thing with software. Some of these tools I’ll talk about, I’m in the process of switching. If something comes along and it works better, I’m always willing to switch. If you people have feedback on stuff, I’m always interested in hearing it. I wanted to share some of the stuff I’m using now and then some of the other stuff I’m looking at. There are some things in here you’ll be familiar with. There are some other things in here you probably haven’t heard of yet. This will be a good topic to go over.
Note Investing Software Essentials
I’ll start with the essential tools that I use. These are the core ones that I’m using all the time. The first one is Pipedrive. That’s my CRM. For any notes business, there are two things you need. One is CRM, which is a customer relationship manager. It is a piece of software that contains all of your contacts and lets you get ahold of them. The other thing I use Pipedrive for in addition is project management. It’s not what Pipedrive is intended for but I bastardize it to make it work. That’s tracking deals, setting reminders and follow-ups to do different things, keeping notes on deals, scheduling tasks and other things. This gets tricky in Pipedrive because it is built as a CRM but what’s cool about it is it’s customizable. I’ve been able to customize it to do some of these project management types of tasks.
A few years ago, Adam Adams had put out some good videos on setting up Pipedrive for notes business. I started with his videos originally, but then over time, I changed things a lot once I figured out how I wanted to run my note business. I’ve stuck with Pipedrive for a few years. One of the things I like about it is the way that it integrates with email. I use G Suite and one of the things that’s pretty cool within Pipedrive is when you pull up a contact, it will integrate with your email. You can see all the emails you’ve exchanged with that contact all from within Pipedrive. You can also send emails directly from Pipedrive, which is nice. Maybe I’ll do another episode where I’ll deep dive on how I use Pipedrive because I don’t have time in this episode to go through it all.
It has a Gmail extension that you can download and what’s cool about it is let’s say I get an email from somebody new and it’s a contact that I want to save in my CRM, there’s a little side panel you can get for Pipedrive. You can say create it as a contact and then right from that panel you can add in some of their information. You can set an activity like let’s say it’s a new asset manager and they email me back. Within Gmail, I can add them to my CRM. I can set what Pipedrive calls an activity, which is a task. I can set an activity in Pipedrive to follow up with them a week or two weeks later or whatever if it makes sense. I can also add notes from talking to them on the phone. I can throw notes in there and do that all from email. It’s pretty seamless back and forth between the CRM and email but the project management part is where it’s a challenge and I’ve made it work. I’d be willing to share how I do that as far as from my deal. I’m looking at some additional tools to help with that.
Tweet to use in the blog post: I'm always looking for better tools to help my business, and am willing to change something if it makes sense. Click To Tweet
The other one that’s most popular for note investors is the software called Podio. I have not used Podio before so I’m not an expert on that. From what I understand about Podio is it’s designed as a project management software. That does the project management piece well. I don’t know if the people that use Podio can also use that as a CRM if they have to use something else. That’s a piece of software I haven’t used myself, but I mentioned it because I know a lot of new investors use it. There’s even another software product out there that’s called NPL Manager, which from what was explained to me is a skin for Podio. My understanding of an NPL Manager is it’s basically Podio with all the customization set up for a note business. I have not used the NPL Manager either.
The other one that some people use is Infusionsoft. From what I understand, Infusionsoft is extremely powerful and expensive. I think it’s hundreds of dollars a month if I’m not mistaken. Another one that I’m considering that I’m going to talk about is called Claritysoft that I’ve had some people recommend. These weren’t note investors that recommended it but Claritysoft looks interesting because it has different modules. It looks like it might handle more of these hybrid tasks. If you look at the world of CRMs, there are at least 300-plus CRMs out there. Zoho, HubSpot, Zendesk are some of the big ones. Salesforce.com is like the Ferrari of CRMs. When I worked for a larger startup company, that’s what we used. That’s very expensive and probably an overkill for a notes business.
That’s the CRM part that’s maybe the most vital piece of software that I use because it contains so much critical data. The next one I’m moving on into is cloud storage. I use Dropbox for cloud storage. I’ve got a business account. I’ve got an assistant that works for me and some other things. With the business account, they require you to have three seats and it ends up costing me $45 a month, which is very expensive. That’s something I’m looking to change because that’s too much to spend on cloud storage. That $45 a month does get me five terabytes of data, which is a phenomenal amount of data. Unless you’re making boatloads of video and saving them at high resolution, that is a lot of data. For an individual particularly with a notes business, you’re never going to come near that.
I’m in the process of shifting some of my things over to Google Drive. From an email, I have a G Suite Basic account and that comes with 30 gigabytes of storage per user and that’s a lot of storage. I’ll outstrip that at some point. I may have more than that and I’m not sure what I have in Dropbox. I’m in the middle of moving some things over to Google Drive. Coming this early part of 2020, I may move everything over to Google Drive at some point. It is cheaper for one and the main thing is it makes it easier to share files. You don’t get into this whole business of a Windows type environment where if you’re creating links to files and documents and then you move the file or you change the folder structure, all of a sudden all the pointers get broken.
Part of the reason I use Dropbox is I’ve had a lot of experience with it and I’m comfortable with it. That’s a lot of the reason why I use some of my software tools and other people do that as well. It’s not a bad reason but as Google Drive has come along, it might be time to look to something that’s a little easier to use, a little more robust and a little less expensive. There are tons of cloud storage options out there. There’s Microsoft OneDrive. There’s the Box that I used at a company I worked at once but I don’t recommend it. It’s a clunkier version of Dropbox in my opinion, but there’s a bunch of them out there.
The one thing I will say is whatever you do, don’t just put all your stuff on your local hard drive on your laptop or computer. People do this all the time, but it’s dumb to do that. I apologize for the people that do this, but I strongly urge you to get at least a copy of your data on some cloud storage system. It’s so easy to drop and break a laptop or have it get stolen or have your hard drive die. Your data, especially your business data is so valuable. You can’t afford to lose it. There’s no excuse in this day and age for not having it in some cloud-based solution. That way, you’re also protected if you accidentally delete data or something happens.
These companies all have ways to recover data and pull things back. Whereas if you just have it on your hard drive, you’re on your own. I’m sure we’ve all heard horror stories of people who’ve had hard drives die or laptops get stolen and lose lots of data, but your data is too valuable to do that. Whatever you do, don’t store it locally. You can have a copy locally as a backup. That’s not a bad idea but don’t make that your only copy. You want to get it off somewhere else. It’s amazing how many people don’t do that. Even when I worked for Oracle talking to IT professionals, there are ones that did horrifically stupid things. There’s no way to candy coat it. Make sure you protect your data.
The next one is my web hosting for my Fusion Notes website. I use Bluehost for my hosting. I started using Bluehost in 2009 for another website that’s actually still up and I still use it for. I use Bluehost originally because a friend recommended it. It’s cheap and reliable. It’s proven to be that way throughout. I use WordPress for my website. If you have a Bluehost account or a GoDaddy account or whatever, there are a million different web hosting companies out there. Bluehost is the one that I happen to use but there are a bunch of others. If you want to run your website on WordPress, you can run WordPress for free. You can download various themes and then set up your website.
Before I originally set up Fusion Notes a few years ago, I had created some other websites several years before that and so I had a little bit of experience with WordPress. It’s easy to use but I had done it before and maybe a little handier with some of that stuff than some people. If you’re like, “I don’t like computers and this isn’t easy for me,” then there are some other what I call simple website builders you can use like Squarespace. It is a big one. There are some others. There’s one called Wix. They’re going to cost you a little more to host but they’ve got some simplified setups and templates where it can be easy to put your website together.
The way I recommend doing is what I did. Use WordPress and set it up yourself if you’re willing to wrestle with that. It’s not too bad all in all. What I like about having built mine myself is when I need to update it or add a page, I know how everything works. It’s really easy. The other option you have is to hire someone to build it for you. One thing you could do is have a host like Bluehost and then hire someone to set up WordPress for you. That’s not a bad idea especially if you don’t want to spend hours figuring it out yourself. If you do that, I would urge you to make sure that you have them teach you how to update it. You don’t want to get stuck where you’re dependent on some developer to make basic updates to your website.
I’m always making changes to mine. I’m uploading case studies. I did an overhaul of the Fusion Notes website where I installed the new theme and I added a new page for the Fusion Income Fund and edit a page for the Systematic Due Diligence course and added some case studies and changed around some other things. It’s nice to be able to go in there and do all that stuff myself. If I find an error later on, I can go in and tweak it. It makes your life easier if you can go in and make some simple adjustments when you need to without having to get ahold of somebody to do it or pay somebody to do it every time. That’s my website.
Email is obviously a big one and there are a lot of free options for that. I use Google G Suite and for G Suite basic account, it’s $6 per user per month. I’ve got two users because I’ve got an assistant who works for me that I want to have a FusionNotes.com email address. Even if you are using Google G Suite, you can connect it to your other domain. Even though my email is run through G Suite, it is connected to Bluehost which has the Fusion Notes domain. All my emails come back and forth from Dan@FusionNotes.com even though it’s actually Google under the covers that are running it.
Google makes it easy to share. Google is smart about keeping everything straight. Click To Tweet
You can have the hosting companies run your Gmail directly. Originally, I did have Bluehost running my email. I switched that when I ran into some big problems with my email that almost drove me insane and I don’t know what was going on. I’m not even sure if it was a Bluehost issue or not. It was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. Some but not all of my emails were not getting sent. They would show up in my sent email folder but not actually go. It was intermittent and it took me three weeks to even figure out that I had a problem. I had all these people who wouldn’t respond and I was getting mad at different people wondering why they wouldn’t respond.
What made it insidious was it wasn’t tied to the person. If I traded five emails with a person over the course of a week, some of them would go through and some of them would not. We get emails back from people and I’d be like, “I already told them that in the other email,” but I didn’t know that they didn’t get the other email. I’m thinking like, “What’s wrong with these people?” I thought I was taking crazy pills for a while. I ended up switching everything over to G Suite. The problem finally went away. That was a dark time in my business because that almost made me crazy.
G Suite is one option. You can make a free Gmail account. I don’t recommend that though. I think it’s best if your email comes from a business domain. Mine is @FusionNotes.com or whatever domain you’re using for the website of your notes business. It looks a lot more professional especially when you’re emailing with asset managers to have it come from your web address. When I see Gmail addresses, it means one or two things. It could mean that it’s just an individual who’s buying stuff for their self-directed IRA. That’s totally cool and that makes sense. If you’re just buying a couple of notes for your self-directed IRA, you don’t need to set up a whole notes business and worry about this stuff.
The other thing that it signals a lot of times is joker brokers. Whenever somebody comes out of the woodwork that I’ve never heard of before, they say they have a bunch of notes for sale and they often have an @Gmail.com email, they are often a joker broker. Especially if you’re emailing asset managers, it’s best to have your own domain. There are also a lot of Hotmail and AOL email accounts and those work just fine. The problem with those is it sends a signal to people that you set up your account in the ‘90s and it makes you look like a dinosaur. If you have to use a free email service, I would recommend Gmail or something like that. If you’re running more of a serious notes business, I would highly recommend having some custom domain to go with it.
For email marketing, I use Mailchimp. There are a bazillion email marketing software tools that you can use. There’s no particular magic to Mailchimp. I liked it originally because the free plan that I was on when I started was a good deal. I don’t recall what the limits are on their free plan now but they’re pretty generous overall, assuming they haven’t changed it too radically. They have spiffed up the interface over the years. It’s very easy to use. If you’ve never done email marketing or it’s something that is new to you, you’ll be amazed at some of the cool things you can do with it. A lot of these features nowadays pretty much all the modern email marketing tools have. One of the big ones is being able to schedule emails in advance. When I send out emails to my newsletter, I typically do it on Sunday nights. Sometimes I end up writing the emails right before I send them. If it’s a week where I’m a little more on the ball, I usually get that teed up several days in advance, then within Mailchimp, I can schedule that to go out when I want. You can also do some automation and you can send additional emails based on what the recipients do or don’t do and all email tools do this.
As you’re receiving emails from different vendors and different things, you may not even realize this is going on. They usually come with these tracking pixels and email marketers can usually detect whether you opened an email or not. If you did open an email, whether you click on anything or not. You can do things like say, “Send an email to my list.” All the people who click the link sometime later send them this other email or all the people who didn’t click send them this other email or all the people who didn’t open it, send it to them again. You can get crazy with a lot of information. You can tee all this up in advance so you don’t have to do this manually. It can save you a lot of time.
The other thing I like about Mailchimp is it can automatically post to social media. I have a Twitter account and Facebook account for Fusion Notes. When I send out my newsletter, Mailchimp will automatically post my newsletter or link to it on Twitter and then a link to it on Facebook. It makes my life a lot easier. You can do a lot of things with segmenting lists. I have different lists, there’s one for my regular newsletter, one for asset managers and then I’ve got another one that I call my preferred investor email lists. People who have contacted me that are interested in learning more about deals and things like that. I have a shorter list that I’ll send to you when I have deals that are available. That’s email marketing. There are lots of different tools available. I don’t even know how much it matters which one you use but I find Mailchimp pretty intuitive and simple.
The big one has always been Microsoft Office. Word, PowerPoint and Excel have been my mainstays for a long time, although I’m increasingly gravitating towards Google Docs versus Microsoft Docs. When Google came out with many years ago, I was doing my MBA at the time. I remember looking at it and not thinking too much of Google at the time. When this stuff first came out, it was fairly rudimentary. Google has come a long way over many years. The big thing is Google makes it easy to share. You don’t run into this whole problem in the Microsoft Word of if I try to link to a document and then that document moves or the folder structure changes, all of a sudden everything’s broken. Google is smart about keeping everything straight.
At the end of the day, as big an Excel guy as I continue to be, there are certain things I need Excel for. I have some spreadsheets with certain macros that won’t run on Google. They could be rebuilt to work on Google, but that would be a lot of work and I would have to figure that out. I don’t want to bother with doing that. For example, I’ve got a spreadsheet that I use and ties into the Zillow API. I can put in a list of property addresses and my API key from Zillow is in the spreadsheet. It will run some macros and it will go out to the Zillow website and pull data on those addresses. I can pull Zillow values and other sorts of information on the property like the number of bedrooms and things like that. These days, I believe you can also do that within Google Sheets but at this point, there’s no point in recreating all of that stuff.
Secondary Tools You May Consider
Microsoft Office is still a big one for me but it will be used less and less probably as time goes on. Those are the essential tools that I use. I’m going to talk about some of the secondary tools. A bigger one is Zoom that I use for meetings. I use this for one-on-one meetings with people and for webinars. I use it for recording podcasts. If I’m interviewing someone, I use another piece of software called Movavi for recording videos if it’s me on my laptop. I find that a little bit easier to use for some things. Zoom is cool. It’s a free plan and pretty generous. It has unlimited one-on-one meetings. It does have some time limits on group meetings. If you do have to upgrade, it’s $15 a month. What I’d do is if I have something going on where I need to upgrade temporarily and then downgrade it to the free plan. It also got an add-on for webinars, which is slick. It’s $40 a month. If I’m going to do a webinar, I’ll turn it on for that month and then turn it off when I’m done. There are a lot of other free options as well for meeting software. Google Hangouts is one people use a lot. GoToMeeting is one I used to see a lot, especially in the corporate world. I don’t know how big that is nowadays.
GoToMeeting is not a free tool, but a lot of the free meeting software tools out there are known for being pretty flaky. I don’t know how much that’s changed, but Zoom is stable and reliable. I like it. The other one I use a lot is called Calendly and that’s used for scheduling. What Calendly does is it solves the problem of if you want to have a call with someone or someone has to have a call with me, then there’s this inevitable email back and forth where somebody says, “Are you free next week?” and it’s like, “Yes, how about Thursday?” They’re like, “What time?” “11:00” “I can’t do it at 11:00. I can do it at 1:30.” “I can’t do it at 1:30. I can do it at 12:00.” What Calendly does is it cuts all of that stuff out.
I can give someone a link. If I send them a link that says www.Calendly.com/fusionnotes, it goes to my scheduling page and within my Calendly account, I can set up the times that I’m available for meetings. What’s great is it syncs with my Google Calendar. When someone clicks my Calendly link and they go in and set a meeting, it will look at the times that I’ve said we’re available but then it’s integrated with my Google Calendar. If I already have a meeting scheduled at some time, it doesn’t make it available to them. This is nice. If someone wants to have a call, I can send them that link and say pick out a time that works well for you. They pick out the time and then we go from there. The other cool thing about it is it will integrate with Zoom.
Using a VPN is a pretty good idea to protect yourself. Click To Tweet
I also have it set up where if I’m recording with a podcast guest, I can send them that link. They can click the button to record a time for a podcast recording. When they pick out their time and that meeting gets created, it not only sends it to the calendar, but it creates a meeting within Zoom. It schedules that and then adds the Zoom link to the meeting invite. It’s easy because you’re not getting into the separate business of, “We’re going to record this on Zoom.” I get to create the meeting within Zoom and then send you the link. It’s all very simple and streamlined. It saves a lot of time. It’s pretty cool.
The one that I use off and on is a VPN software or a virtual private network and I’ve used IPVanish for this. A VPN is used to protect your privacy and protect your data mainly when you’re on public Wi-Fi. It also does it from home as well. I do a lot of working at coffee shops and I don’t travel as much as I used to but it’s also good in airports and other places. If somebody who knows what you’re doing, let’s say you’re logging into your bank or you’re logging into something else, there are ways to sniff that data. Using a VPN is a good idea to protect yourself.
It gets a little tricky sometimes because I’ve tried a few different VPNs. All of them are a little bit janky to some degree or another. Sometimes they can slow your performance down. Some websites don’t like VPNs and they won’t let you go there if you’re on a VPN. BiggerPockets is like that. It’s always annoying. I spent a lot of time on BiggerPockets. If I’m in a coffee shop connected to IPVanish, then I tried to go to BiggerPockets, it will say, “We’re not letting you in unless you turn off the VPN.” They’re not perfect but they’re not a bad idea. They’re relatively cheap. IPVanish, if you sign up for a year, it’s $6.49 a month. It’s not too bad.
Some of these other ones are ones that I use that you may not, depending on what you’re doing. There’s one called Libsyn and that’s for podcast hosting. That’s where my podcasts get uploaded. From there, it gets distributed to iTunes and other platforms. It’s $15 a month. It’s pretty cheap. I switched up my podcast production. What I had been doing was I had a guy in the Philippines where I would do a recording. I could upload it to Dropbox and then he would do some editing. He uploads it to iTunes, Libsyn and gets it distributed.
I’ve switched it over to a service called Podetize. Podetize does the same thing except it’s more polished. They do it better. It’s a little more expensive than what my guy in the Philippines ultimately cost but much higher quality. I flipped over to Podetize. I think it was episode 17 with David Putz. They do some nice transcriptions to put them in a blog post on the website and some other stuff. Podetize is definitely not cheap, although it’s not as expensive as some of the other similar services that are out there. At the end of the day, it all gets hosted on Libsyn. Podetize has its own hosting option which is more expensive. I may switch to that at some point but right now, I don’t see the need.
The other one that I use that you probably don’t is called Thinkific. I use this for my Systematic Due Diligence online training course. It’s $49 a month, which is middle of the road for these online training platforms or probably a million online training platforms out there. I looked at a bunch of them. Some of them are very expensive and some of them are free and mileage varies throughout. This is one that you’re probably not using. I find it very easy to use. It uploads videos and spreadsheets for students to download all your content. You can also design the website. The SystematicDueDiligence.com website, instead of being run through Bluehost is run through Thinkific. They have their own editor, which is very similar to WordPress. We can make updates to that and you can do all kinds of cool things within Thinkific.
There are some tools that I’m in the middle of incorporating. Here’s one you may not have heard of. It’s called Outfunnel and I’ve done some experiments with this. I’ve got the subscription turned off. This is email marketing so Outfunnel would be a replacement for Mailchimp. What Outfunnel does that’s cool is it integrates with Pipedrive. It also integrates with some other CRMs but the people who created Outfunnel used to work for Pipedrive. They’re over in Estonia. I talked to one of the founders one time and what they do is you can send emails. It’s like Mailchimp from that standpoint but it’s a more simplified Mailchimp. Outfunnel doesn’t have quite all the bells and whistles, but what it does that’s neat is it integrates with your CRM. You can send very specific emails to them.
For example, where I was testing it out were emails to asset managers. If you think about communicating with asset managers, there are different kinds. I’ve got my shortlist of people that I have closed deals with before that are my go-to sellers. There are other asset managers who maybe have sent me tapes of good stuff, but I haven’t closed with them. I know I’m going to eventually. They’re at that next tier where they’re hot leads. There are other ones where I know they’re an asset manager. I may have emailed them before but they’ve never even opened anything up or never done that. They’re the asset managers that I want to send emails to on occasion. I’m often going to communicate differently with someone that’s one of my go-to sellers versus somebody that I don’t even know very well.
What you can do in Pipedrive is it’s a CRM, so you’re managing your contacts, but you can categorize them differently. You can send very specific emails depending on what category the contact is in. Pipedrive is so customizable. There’s no limit to how well you can refine things. The other thing that’s cool is I was talking about how email software will do things like track opens, clicks and behavior. What Outfunnel does is it takes all of that data and it dumps it into Pipedrive. If I get an email from an asset manager or I want to get in contact with an asset manager and I pull them up in my CRM in Pipedrive, not only can I see all the data for them that I already had, I mentioned the email integration and I can see our email chains. I can also get the email marketing data.
One of the cool things that Mailchimp does is you can see which asset managers are opening my stuff, opening it several times and interested and which ones are not interested at all. With Outfunnel, I get all that data in one place within Pipedrive. The big challenge for me between Mailchimp and Pipedrive is having data in two different places. Some people refer to Mailchimp as a CRM but it’s not. It’s just an email tool. Outfunnel brings those together. I’ve done some experiments with it. I haven’t had the time yet to dig into it, but I will at some point in 2020. It’s a pretty cool tool. It’s one I bet you haven’t heard of before. If you’re already a Pipedrive user, it’s something that’s worth checking out. If you’re not using Pipedrive, it’s not going to do much for you. You’re going to want to learn Pipedrive first before you start trying to tackle Outfunnel.
Confluence is a new one. I’ve used this before my corporate life. Confluence is owned by a company called Atlassian, which makes another software called Jira, which is used mainly for tracking software requirements. That’s where I knew Atlassian. Atlassian has a bunch of other apps that they make and one of them is called Confluence. What Confluence is it’s a thing to build Wikis or an online repository. I spent a lot of time over the winter break, and I’m not done with this yet, building a library of standard operating procedures for my business. One of the things that I’ve found interesting is when I was working for large companies in the aerospace industry and Oracle, everybody looked down their nose at standard operating procedures. It seemed like everybody always wanted to reinvent the wheel.
In the last few years, I spent a lot of time hanging out with entrepreneurs who have some interesting businesses, not generally notes or real estate related. What’s interesting to me is you look at some of these large companies and they were not that interested in standard operating procedures. I have some other friends who are these very freewheeling entrepreneurs. They like to spend time living in Asia, working out of coffee shops, traveling here and there who are fanatical about creating standard operating procedures for the business. This is another subject I should probably do a deep dive on at some point.
Whatever you do, don’t just put all your stuff on your local hard drive on your laptop or computer. Click To Tweet
By having those standard operating procedures drilled down, you can make your business more efficient. You can optimize it. It also makes it easier to bring on help when you need it because everything is documented. I’ve got things in Confluence like how to do repeatable tasks within the business. For example, if you buy a new note and there’s a new deal. How do you create the folder structure for that within Dropbox? What do you do if you get a letter in the mail that there’s a delinquent water bill on a contract for deed? How do you write up a case study after a deal has been exited? Once you buy a note, how do we document the chain of title and organize all of the collateral files?
There are other things you do periodically like checking for missed payments. Once a month you want to go through the portfolio and look at which payments came in and which ones didn’t. After that, it maps to potentially different loss mitigation actions depending on what happened. One of the great things about a notes business is that it’s very rinse and repeat. Unlike a lot of the engineering projects I’ve worked on where we’d work on them for a year or two and then go do something completely different. You can reuse everything you do in notes. This is going to be a big focus for me in the early part of 2020 getting these dialed in. I’m in the beginning stages of it. The other thing I like about it is how within Confluence these pages get linked together. It’s very easy to link them to Google Docs.
That’s one of the things that’s driving my shift over towards Google Docs. I know if I build all these elaborate Wikis and I put all these links to stuff in Google, I’m not going to destroy all the links if I have to reorganize a file or a folder or rename something within Dropbox. This is another thing I’ll probably deep dive in on later. It’s key especially as my business scales. What I’ve been doing up to now works fine for 50 to 60 notes. Is it going to work for 500? No way in hell, it’s not even close. I know a lot of stuff is going to change. This has been a focus for me. It’s something I’ll probably be talking more about as the year goes on.
The other one is Trello, which I’ve used as my personal to-do list for the last few years or so. What I’m going to begin to do, and I’m setting up the framework but I haven’t started doing it yet, is I’m going to start using it with assistance to assign tasks to them and then track the progress. With Trello, you can set up what’s called a Kanban board. There’s this flow that goes from left to right and you have different buckets. For example, you might have a board that you’re going to share with an assistant and then you have buckets for the things to do, what’s in progress, what’s ready for me to review, what I review that has feedback on, what’s been edited and what’s done. For those different tasks, you can create different templates with checklists. Once I get all this built out, this is another thing that would probably be a good idea to deep dive on. This is all part of me trying to get more efficient and preparing to scale as Fusion Income Fund gets going and some other things.
New Tools To Test Out
Here are some tools that I’m looking at and considering but haven’t done much with. One is Slack, which is used for team communications. I’ve had very limited experience with Slack but a lot of people I know especially software developers swear by this tool. I haven’t used it much but as I understand I think it was like an online chat tool. You can have different threads for different conversations. Let’s say you’ve got an assistant and you’re talking about loss mitigation efforts on a particular note or an issue with some delinquent taxes on another note. One of the big problems I’ve had that I’m trying to combat is when we get into these things, I end up in these long email chains that fill up my email box and it drives me nuts. Whereas with Slack, it’s an easy way to move those things off of email. When you get into larger teams, that’s nice because there can be other conversations going on that you need to be aware of but you don’t need to be in the middle of it. This is where I’m going to experiment with some more.
The other one is called Claritysoft. This is another CRM. This would be a potential replacement for Pipedrive. I’ve got a call coming up with one of the reps from Claritysoft. I have some friends who are not note investors, they’re not even real estate, but they had recommended Claritysoft as a CRM. One of the things it does is it has a lot of different functionality with it. It’s not just the CRM, but it’s got modules for calendar and tracking stuff. It does some email marketing things. It’s supposed to do a little bit of product project management type of stuff. This is one I’m going to look at and stay tuned. If this ends up showing promise, I may talk more about that.
The other one is called Toggl, which is a time tracking software. I haven’t done anything with this yet but I’ve had a lot of other people recommend this. One of the main reasons I’m considering this is not that I need to track time as far as billing or anything like that, but I’m curious to know myself how many hours I’m spending on my business and what I’m spending them on. If I had that map, then that might clue me into some other things I can do to make my business run better. One question I get a lot from people when I talk to them especially when they’re not real estate related, “You have this business. You work for yourself. How many hours do you work?” I honestly don’t know. I know it’s a lot. I’ve always got my laptop. I tend to do stuff early in the morning. I tend to do stuff at night and on the weekends, but I also tend to go to the gym, hit golf balls and do other stuff. I’m not even totally sure how many hours I spend working. I know it’s a lot but I’m not sure how extreme it is.
I also don’t know how much time I’m spending on doing stuff on email, fighting fires, tracking the business and pulling metrics versus doing marketing, building processes and standard operating procedures that are real assets. That’s something I’m looking at doing. I may do an experiment with this for a few weeks. It can also help to bring on assistance to track time. Not that I want to be the big brother to anyone but it can also be helpful from the standpoint that if I created a standard operating procedure.
One of my big ones is the quarterly reports that I send to joint venture investors or joint venture partners. I spend a lot of time doing those. Those quarterly reports are something that most people who do what I do don’t. It’s one of the big reasons why people choose to work with me, but I spent a heck of a lot of time on those. One of the other things that we’re working on focusing is improving my processes to be able to get those out more efficiently and put more data into them. If I have assistants helping me with some of that stuff, if I understand how much time they’re spending on different tasks, then that can clue me into where certain processes need to be improved or where other ones are fine as is.
The final question to you is, what do you use? I’m very curious to hear what other people out there are using. As I spent some time looking at different tools in these areas, I came across a million different tools in each of these categories. It’s hard to even scratch the surface. That’s why we tend to default on using what we know. I’m sure there are some cool stuffs out there that I haven’t even heard of before. If you have any suggestions, drop me a note at Dan@FusionNotes.com or leave a comment on one of my videos and let me know. I’d love to hear from you. That’s what I’ve got for you. That was a long one but hopefully, that was helpful. If there are any of these tools that you want me to deep dive in on the future like Pipedrive or other things, I can work on doing that as well. Until next time, thanks.
Important Links:
- Pipedrive
- Noteproz, https://noteproz.com/home
- G Suite
- Podio
- NPL Manager
- Infusionsoft
- Claritysoft
- Salesforce.com
- Dropbox
- Microsoft OneDrive
- Bluehost
- WordPress
- Squarespace
- Wix
- Dan@FusionNotes.com
- Mailchimp
- Microsoft Office
- Zoom
- Movavi
- Google Hangouts
- GoToMeeting
- Calendly
- www.Calendly.com/fusionnotes
- IPVanish
- Libsyn
- Podetize
- David Putz – previous episode
- Thinkific
- SystematicDueDiligence.com
- Outfunnel
- Confluence
- Jira
- Trello
- Slack
- Toggl
- https://www.Pipedrive.com/
- https://www.Dropbox.com/
- www.Mailchimp.com
- https://Zoom.us/
- https://www.IPVanish.com/
- https://Libsyn.com/
- https://www.Thinkific.com/
- https://Outfunnel.com/
- https://Trello.com/
- https://www.Atlassian.com/software/confluence
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