We’re on our sixth project management platform… Here’s what we’ve learned.
Up today, the rather less-sexy, yet unavoidable, portion of business ownership: Project management and back-end logistics.
What’s crazy, though? We’ve found, via our handful of years in operation, that it’s the seemingly mundane that often yields that flashiest opportunities for meaningful growth. Why’s that?
A couple reasons:
First, on a personal level, no matter your line of work, you simply have to manage tasks, time, and client/customer communication. When allowed to reign freely, such things threaten to dominate your mind and your life, making you feel less like your own boss and more like a slave to whatever needs urgent attention at whatever moment you happen to remember.
However, with repeatable processes contained and systemized, you’re free to brain dump and forget until prompted. That makes time management an actually attainable goal and your free time actually free of worry.
Second, let’s be honest–freelance creatives can sometimes get a bad rap for poor logistical management ability. That combined with monetary values of creative work often beholden to its purchaser, it’s true that you’re up against kind of a lot marketing-wise.
Imagine, however, the advertising effect of prompt and thorough communication, smooth client-facing processes, tight deliverable timelines, and mechanisms for quality control bolstering the appeal of your amazing products and services. Such would propel you to that next level of well-rounded professionalism so attractive to your many type-A-minded prospective customers and clients hailing from outside the creative industry.
So, below we’re examining the list of platforms, grouped by similarity, that we’ve tested over the years:
*None of these subscription possibilities are sponsored, though we can dream. ;)
Asana & Trello
Best for simple task management. If you’re a service provider, either of these work great for managing recurring to-do items designated among various projects, clients, and team members. However, neither of these platforms currently feature proposal, contract, or questionnaire capability.
Dubsado & Honeybook
Ideal platforms for photographers, and great starting points for creative service providers, though less efficient as task managers if working as a team. However, these do currently include proposal, contract, and questionnaire capability, in addition to great CMS tools for tracking leads and the option to generate a very simple client portal.
Clickup
Honestly a BEAST of a project management platform. It’s robust to say the least and can be quite overwhelming—we suggest hiring a Clickup expert to help you with set-up and customization. It’s likely the best out there, though, specifically for task management among teams and does currently feature questionnaire capability, but not proposals or contracts.
Notion
By far our FAVORITE platform among everything we’ve tried. We do pretty much everything in Notion–it houses all of our projects, both client-facing and internal, and supports our detailed signature client portal, full of questionnaires made from scratch.
In truth, Notion can also feel quite overwhelming because, rather than housing extensive templates like Clickup, it’s essentially a giant blank page on which you can build literally anything. We both love and hate that because you’ve really got to know what you’re doing from the start for anything to work, but the benefits an entire platform fully customizable to your specific needs far outweigh the struggle.
We had to work hard to learn it, but now that we’re deeply familiar with all Notion’s nuances, it’s serving us so beautifully that we’ve begun to offer platform set-up and customization as a service to project clients!
If interested in discussing the possibility of Notion Project Management Set-Up with Sela Vie, use this link to schedule a meeting with our project manager.
