If you are an entrepreneur, a budding entrepreneur, or even just a keen viewer of ‘The Apprentice’, you will know that one thing all entrepreneurs can be sure of is that they will be busy. Very Busy.
Running your own business is all-consuming and it requires a special sort of person to make a success of it.
They need to be motivated, focused, and have complete confidence in the product of service they are delivering. They also have to be dynamic, flexible, and able to mold the right team around them to make their business work.
No-one can achieve everything required of a successful entrepreneur alone. They all need support of one kind or another. It used to be the case that a reliable personal assistant or an able secretary was what was needed. But finding an effective and loyal assistant in this day and age is a lot harder than it used to be.
Fortunately, technology has helped to fill this gap, and then some. The advent of mobile technology, and particularly the smartphone, has revolutionized the working lives of most professionals, but it is perhaps entrepreneurs that have benefitted most of all.
Why? Because no entrepreneur has a single role to play. They will all have at least three or four wildly different responsibilities, and some will even be doing all of the work themselves; at least at first. But smartphone technology has made that burden a whole lot easier to bear.
Firstly, it has given you an internet-connected device right there in your pocket. That means if you find yourself out of your comfort zone, there is a whole world of expert advice and support just a few swipes away.
But there is more. Because you can now download apps onto your smartphone that can help you to do pretty much anything. Many are tailored for the needs or professional people and quite a few specifically for entrepreneurs.
They can help you with everything from design to finance, and from diary management to communication. Indeed, the biggest problem many budding entrepreneurs have these day is choosing which of the myriad of support tools to use.
Well, I have run a number of tech start-ups over the years, and tried out most of these apps at one time or another. So in article I am sharing with you my 3 essential apps for successful entrepreneurs.
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Workflow:
Managing your time and the tasks you have to complete can be a nightmare for entrepreneurs. There are often a hundred and one different things you need to do and as soon as you feel you are getting on top of things, something else crops up.
It is essential to plan and schedule your day properly and for that the best app around by some distance is Workflow.
Using Workflow will help to save a huge amount of your time as well as ensuring you never miss a deadline or hat crucial meeting.
It interacts with all the other apps on your smartphone or tablet to help automate everything, bring all your different tasks together in a single schedule. It can even create specific apps for your device if there is something you need to do on a regular basis.
It revolutionized the way I work and I know it will have the same positive effect for you too.
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Humin
Humin makes networking easy, and as an entrepreneur, building contacts is one of the most important tasks you will have.
Humin makes the job a lot easier because it organizes your contacts by how you know them. It can bring together contacts from your phone, Facebook, LinkedIn and combine with your email, voicemail, and calendar to provide context on who people are.
It can give you information like how you met, how you are connected to them, and what exactly they do. It will ensure you never forget who that random contact actually is, and allow you to maximize the potential of your networking efforts. A great app.
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A VPN:
Lastly, I would recommend all Entrepreneurs invest in a VPN. A VPN will help to ensure your online security and privacy. As an up-and-coming business person this can be important, especially if you want to ensure your intellectual property is protected from those who might want to profit for your ideas.
A VPN will encrypt all your online traffic meaning everything you do online will be safe from prying eyes. It also redirects your online traffic via an online server which allows you to go online anonymously and so helps to protect your privacy.
And there are many more benefits besides the security and privacy ones. For example, as an entrepreneur you are likely to be doing a lot of travelling. With a VPN, you are able to access geo-restricted content around the world. This can mean you are able to access censored content if you are visiting somewhere like China, but also you can enjoy your favorite TV show or sports event, no matter where in the world you are.
Put together, these three apps alone have the potential to make a whole world of difference to the life of a busy entrepreneur.