Resources I Use In my Business (2023)
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Here is a list of all the tools, platforms and resources I have used in my businesses over the years. I only recommend products and services that I’ve found easy to use and that have also helped me grow my business.
If you’re looking for a recommendation for another type of product or service that you don’t see listed, feel free to email me!
Website building platforms
Squarespace
If your primary focus is not either a blog or a physical product then Squarespace is always the website building platform I recommend. It’s incredibly easy to use and starts from as little as £12/month.
There are tons of pre-made templates to choose from, meaning you’ll have an incredibly beautiful website, without needing any complex design skills yourself. The drag and drop builder allows you to edit your design without any coding too.
They also have great in-built SEO and other critical marketing tools.
Shopify
If you’re selling physical products my recommendation would be to use Shopify. Whilst you can sell physical products using a Squarespace website, Shopify is far more powerful and comes with far more tools to manage and grow your store.
From a design perspective, it may look like a little more effort is needed to set up a Shopify store but there are a lot of great pre-built themes you can use.The primary focus of these will always be your store front.
If you need additional static pages, for example for pages like ‘about’, there are page-building plugins you can use to add these easily too.
Wordpress.org
If the primary focus of your business is a blog then you could use Squarespace, however, Wordpress really is the go to here. There are two versions of Wordpress - here I’m talking about the free .org platform.
The advantage of using Wordpress for blogging is that it’s open source, meaning you can use any supported 3rd party plugin with it. This makes your website fully customizable.
The reason this works well for blogs is that you can add on tools to manage your blog posts universally. For example, so you don’t need to go back into each one individually if there’s a link that needs updating.
Website hosting
Siteground
Hosting is an online service that makes the files and data that makes up a website available to view on the internet. Squarespace and Shopify plans have hosting built in, meaning that you don’t need to worry about self-hosting for your website.
However if you’re building a Wordpress website you will need to set up separate hosting. Don’t panic - that is far easier than it sounds!
Siteground is seamless to use, reasonably priced and renowned for having great customer service. It’s configured to make setting up a Wordpress website seamless.
Website analytics tools
Understanding the data behind your website performance is critical to optimising it. Below are a few tools I’ve found immensely helpful over the years.
Google analytics
It’s free and can tell you an awful lot about who’s visiting your website, where they’ve come from and what they’re doing when they get there. Getting the basics set up in Google Analytics will take a minute but it’s seriously worth the effort.
You’ll be able to see which marketing channels are sending you high quality leads vs those that aren’t. You can use this data to increase your efforts in the right place and improve things in other areas.
If you don’t have Google Analytics set up for your website, please do it today.
Hotjar
This is another free tool I love using, to see how people are interacting with my website.
Hotjar records user activity, so you can see exactly how a user moves across your site, what they click on and how long they spend on any section or page. It also creates heatmaps that show you how much any particular CTA is clicked on across the website.
Email marketing providers
Which email marketing provider to use will come down to the kind of business you’re building and which platform you’re running your website on.
Mailchimp
If you’re not running an online store via Shopify then my recommendation is to use Mailchimp for your email marketing. You can get started with it for free and the price grows with you as your business does.
Sending beautiful emails with Mailchimp is easy, thanks to its excellent drag and drop builder. It has great tools for segmenting your audience and insights to show you how people are interacting with your emails.
All-in-all it’s both affordable and makes it very easy to run an effective email marketing strategy.
Klaviyo
That being said, if you’re running an online store via Shopify, I highly recommend you go with Klaviyo.
The reason being that Klaviyo and Shopify talk to each other extremely well, meaning that you can both segment your audience and send out super targeted, automated email campaigns from the data held in Shopify.
Such as what someone bought or considered buying, how much they’ve spent with you, when they last bought, etc.
Being able to personalise your email campaigns to this extent has a huge impact on their performance.
Design tools
Canva
By far and away the number one design tool I recommend you get is Canva. It contains thousands of free design templates to help you create any graphic you need for your business, including gifs.
You can start for free or upgrade to the paid version, where you can upload your brand fonts and colours to tailor it even further.
Adobe creative cloud
If you’re looking for more than Canva can provide then I recommend you look at Abode. It’s actually extremely reasonably priced, given its capabilities.
I’ve worked with Photoshop, Illustrator and Lightroom for a long time and love them all. You need to learn a bit more about deign to get the most out of them but there’s plenty of free tutorials online for that.
Photography equipment
Apart from photos of myself (obviously), I do all my own photography. It took me a little while to get the basics right but it was an investment well worth making. Professional photography is very expensive and you always need to refresh it, so learning to do it yourself saves you thousands down the line.
Despite what you think, you don’t need to invest too much money to get started. And then you can spend more as your business grows.
iPhone with portrait mode
These days, camera phones are incredible. I’m an iPhone girl through and through, so my go-to recommendation for taking great photos on a phone is any iPhone with portrait mode. This setting gives depth of field, meaning it blurs the background slightly, and makes the image look super professional.
Nikon
As I take so much photography, I invested in a great SLR camera. What I love about this is that I can change lenses, depending on where and what I’m shooting, and I also have far more control over editing the photos.
Investing in an SLR is a great decision, if you’re planning to do your photography yourself and actually pays back pretty quickly. The one professional product shoot I paid for cost £1,600 and that was before any royalties were added on. So, you can see how it actually saves you money over time.
Photography lights
Getting great photos is highly reliant on having good lighting. You can’t rely on the weather for this and getting some basic lighting doesn’t need to cost too much.
I started off with these, easy-to-use lights, which were perfectly good to get going.
Light box
If you’re shooting small products and need to be able to create a ‘cut-out’ to place on any background then this little light box is great. It folds away nicely, is easy to put up and gives great results.
Reflectors
Another tool that won’t cost much but will help lighting is a reflector. Reflectors help minimise shadowing and generally even out the lighting for a much better result. I have this simple, fold away set and it’s great.
Planning & organising
reMarkable
I was a notebook obsessive until the reMarkable changed my life. It’s a beautiful digital notebook that feels just like writing on real paper and organises your notes into helpful folders.
I never thought I’d stop buying notebooks but I haven’t touched one since getting this a few years ago! One of the things I love about it the most is that you can send our notes to email, either as they are or by converting them to text first.
I know…
You can also screen share what you’re working on, so it’s great for brainstorming and presenting too. It’s saved me so much time and meant I know where everything is all the time. I love it!
Health & wellness
Starting and running a business is insanely hard work and can take a real toll on our health if we’re not careful. These are some magical tools that have helped me keep mine in check, no matter how busy I am.
Muse Headband
I never believed I could train myself to get my thoughts under control. As an entrepreneur, my mind was always racing with a million things to do and a million new ideas at the same time.
Then I discovered Muse. It’s a headband that reads your brain waves and shows them to you through sound. As you meditate (or attempt to) you choose a track to be playing - let’s use the rainforest as an example, as it’s my favourite.
The more still your mind is, the calmer the rain is. The more active your mind is, the heavier the rain is. If it gets really calm you start to hear birds singing. It’s such a clever bit of kit.
My Muse headband helped me understand what was going on and gave me something tangible to work on when meditating. Within a few weeks of using it I was able to get into a calm state super quickly and stay in it for the duration of the meditation.
If you’re looking to improve your stress levels and get better at meditation, I honestly can’t recommend it enough.
Recommended reading
You Are A Badass - Jen Sincero
If you need convincing that you can do anything you put your damn mind to then Jen is your girl. She writes in an incredibly accessible tone; introducing some pretty heavy topics while keeping it light and understandable.
She’s not shy of the odd f-bomb and will make you laugh as you take in her great advice. I love this in audiobook form and have listened to it multiple times.
The Power Of Now - Eckhart Tolle
I wouldn't be exaggerating to say that this book changed my life. Although I should first start by saying that the first time I read it I thought this guy was bat shit crazy. It wasn’t until i read it for a second time, a few months later, that I realised I was already starting to live by some of his principles and teaching, without even knowing it.
Tolle shows us that all of our pain in life comes from mentally living in either the past or the future. And that if we can master living in the now then everything gets a whole lot easier. He taught me how to see people and situations in a completely different light. How to maintain peace and joy when things feel like they’re going wrong.
He teaches us that everything we need to be happy and at peace is within us right now, no matter how shit everything might appear to be.
I must have read or listened to it now at least five times. Every time I find myself struggling with what’s going on in life, these teachings bring me back to my centre, help me to see things more clearly and allow me to feel joy and peace as I forge ahead.
The Chimp Paradox - Steve Peters
As founders and business owners we are constantly pushing ourselves beyond our comfort zone. In this brilliant book, Steve Peters shows us that our brains are made up of three parts, one of which he calls ‘the chimp’.
The chimp’s job is to sense danger and keep us safe so, while we’re out there pushing the boundaries our chimp is upstairs constantly jabbering away about why it’s a bad idea and why we should stop. I’m sure you recognise that voice!
Peters teaches us how to accept the existence of our chimp and learn to live with it, rather than either letting it rule the roost or trying to change the fact it’s there (which we will never succeed at).
Most founders I know are highly creative types and therefore not too excited by routines and systems. But great businesses are built on consistency. And consistency is a lot easier to achieve with good routines and systems!
Atomic Habits is a new bite-sized approach to develop the habit of habits. It’s a good place to start if you want to improve in this area.
Ever wondered which is more important - talent or hard work? Well, wonder no more. Angela Duckworth has spent a long time studying it to find out.
Plot spoiler - it’s the later, aka grit.
When you are building a business there’s so many scenarios you’re faced with that make you feel underprepared, unskilled and inadequate. Grit is a great book to read, to show you that sheer determination wins out over natural talent time and time again.
7 Habits Of Highly Successful People - Stephen Covey
It’s an oldie but a goodie. I was fortunate enough to be introduced to this book in my early twenties and it really helped shape me as a leader. I still recommend it to everyone in a leadership position of any kind and dip in and out of my well-worn, earmarked, highlighted copy on a regular basis!
This is one for anyone running a team. From leading corporate teams to running businesses in hospitality and manufacturing, I can’t tell you how much building a positive team culture is to the success of the team (and likely therefore business). Not to mention how much nicer it is to work in!
In this super short, easy to read book, Lundin tells us a fictional story based on a ‘world famous’ fish market where everyone is bursting with happiness, passion and joy every day, despite doing cold, smelly, tiring and mundane work.
It’s a lovely tale with simple lessons to easily incorporate into day to day life.
As soon as you get to know Amanda Frances, you learn she’s not one to beat around the bush. So many of us have hang ups when it comes to money and when you’re building a business these can really get in the way.
Frances has a refreshing way of getting you to strip back the money issues you might have, banish them and realise that there is no ceiling to what you can earn, both professionally and personally. Her infectious energy will have you manifesting your way to a better looking bank account in no time.
As ever, if you want more hands-on support in launching and growing your business reach out to me about 1:1 coaching. There’s really nothing you can’t do with the right support.
Hi, I’m Thea. I help ambitious entrepreneurs grow multiple 6-7 figure businesses.
If you want a crystal clear action plan to achieve your goals with full accountability and support, let’s talk.
You deserve to have the business and life of your dreams.