Behind the Curtain: My Essential Tech Stack for a Solo Business

💡 Want to run a thriving business without a full-time team? In this episode of Big Deal Energy, your host Laura Khalil pulls back the curtain on the exact tech stack that keeps her business running smoothly—without hiring full-time staff.

🚀 Tune in to learn:

• The must-have tools for managing operations, sales, content, and marketing.
• How Laura keeps everything organized and automated—without getting overwhelmed.
• The actual costs of her tech stack (spoiler: it's under $400/month!).
• Which tools help her stay focused and efficient, even with distractions.

📌 Plus, get links to every tool mentioned in this episode in the description below (some are affiliate links, which means you may even get a discount!).

If you’re a solo service provider looking to streamline, optimize, and scale without burnout, this episode is for you!

💼 Operations & Payments

✅ Honeybook ($40) – Handles contracts + payments, so I never chase invoices.
✅ Quickbooks ($50) – Keeps my CPA happy and my books clean.
✅ Thrivecart ($690 one-time) – I purchased it years ago and highly recommend it for those selling products online.
✅ Dex – My favorite lightweight CRM.

🎥 Content & Marketing

✅ Membership.io ($110) – Hosts Elevate’s content library, call recordings, templates, and scripts.
✅ Descript ($15) – Edits my Big Deal Energy podcast.
✅ ChatGPT ($20) – Does all my proofreading and helps me with any kind of routine task I need to do. (No affiliate link yet.)
✅ Kit ($50) – Where I write and send all my emails.

🌎 Website & Client Experience

✅ Squarespace ($23) – My website + sales pages, all in one place. (No affiliate link yet.)
✅ Zoom ($13) – Because, obviously. (No affiliate link yet.)
✅ Calendly ($10) – No more back-and-forth scheduling. (No affiliate link yet.)
✅ Flow Club ($40) – “Body doubling” magic that keeps me productive. Try for free for 14 days!

Please note that some of these are affiliate links.

Resources:

Follow Laura on LinkedIn and Instagram

Solo service providers can be just as profitable as million dollar businesses. You don't need more staff, more products, or a bigger audience. Join 1000+ email subscribers who are learning how to sign bigger contracts every week --> https://laurakhalil.ck.page/

Transcript

Hey team, I want to welcome you to this episode of big deal energy. I am your host, Laura Kalil. And today I actually wanted to pull back the curtain and share with you my tech stack for running a solo service provider business. One of the things that people are often very surprised to learn about me is that I don't have any full time staff.

There are certainly occasions where it will make sense to bring someone in and to get support in certain areas, which I'm fully in support of. Uh, but for my business and how I want to run it. Uh, I am, I am the one, I am the one who takes care of things. And if you see all the things I'm doing, that can sometimes look like, Oh my gosh, how the heck does she do all that?

So today I'm going to share all of the tech stack behind the work that I do, what it costs me so that you can get an idea of how to really streamline your business and optimize your business. Um, if you do want to stay small or if you are feeling Overwhelmed  by all the things. Cause like, yeah, there are a lot of things.

I'm going to have links in the description box below to all of these things so that you can check them out. Some of these links are affiliate links. That doesn't mean it costs you any more. In fact, in some cases, it's an extra discount for you, but it gives me a little bit of a kickback if you decide you want to use one of these tech products.

I'm going to take you through each different sort of  pillar of the business starting with sales operations and payments.  So in terms of my contracts with clients. and proposals and payment of those contracts, I use something called  HoneyBook.

HoneyBook handles all of that for me. In fact, it allows me to templatize that work so that I'm not actually, like, rewriting proposals and rewriting contracts all at the same time.  I also, using HoneyBook, never have to chase money. Now, I'm very lucky because I don't work with clients who need to be chased, but Sometimes something happens where like someone's credit card expires and you know, there's those types of issues.

HoneyBook takes care of all of that for me. I actually never see it. I just get paid. So that is a huge benefit to me.  And that is about 40 a month.  The next thing I use is QuickBooks. And QuickBooks is mainly to keep my books organized. It integrates really well with HoneyBook.  Most CPAs absolutely love QuickBooks. I am a huge fan of using QuickBooks to keep my books in order and my, and to keep my CPA happy, to be honest with you.

The next thing I have under payment is a different payment system.

This one is called Thrivecart.  So  Thrivecart I will use in different scenarios. Typically when I'm doing proposals, I will use HoneyBook, but if I'm doing  different types of payments such as workshops or courses, I will use thrive cart, which is. a checkout cart, essentially. Um, so it's different from a website.

It's just a checkout page and it has a lot of really cool functionality on the back end. It hooks in with,  Stripe if you're using that.  Um, which you probably should be using, uh, if you're doing any sort of like online payment stuff and, uh, it's really, really helpful. So Thrivecart is really interesting because they have a one time payment, which I purchased it years ago.

It's under 700. Once you purchase it, you never pay again. So Thrivecart, um, is not a recurring cost for me. Uh, they don't take a percentage of sales. The percentage of sales is taken by my credit card processor that talks to Thrivecart. And in my case, that's Stripe. So everything from Thrivecart talks to Stripe.

Stripe takes their percentage for processing the payment of things.  And then I just deal with Stripe on the back end.  And Stripe connects into QuickBooks. Okay. Hopefully that was not too confusing. So, uh, if you were doing things where you want a very robust shopping cart, I recommend Thrivecart.   The other thing I do is I use a CRM.

That's for remembering who the heck I've spoken to,  what, what we talked about last time, and importantly it reminds me of when to follow back up. My favorite CRM is called Dex. Dex is under a hundred dollars a year. It's very inexpensive. It's lightweight, but it works really well for me as well. So, um, I recommend it to all of my clients to get Dex, to get it set up.

And it just makes it so easy to keep in touch and remember who you're talking to and who you need to talk to.  So those are the main things I use for operations and payment. Like, yes, there's Stripe on the back end, but if you're running any kind of online business, you should probably already have that set up. 

In terms of content and marketing, all right, let's talk about the things that like make my life pretty easy. So the first thing is all of the content for my main offer, which is Elevate, is located on membership. io.  This is around 110 a month. They have lower priced options as well, but that's the option I pay for.

This hosts our content library, our call recordings, our templates, scripts, um, kind of, it just, it is amazing. And what I love about it.  is that unlike a typical quote unquote course, Elevate's not really a course, but to use an analogy, um, unlike a typical course where there's like a lesson plan and you have to go one by one by one and you have to read through the whole thing to find certain things, um, or, you know, spend hours watching videos, like who the fuck has time?

I do not have time, like, I do not have time. And so when we're teaching the Elevate Method, what I can do is I can, where a client is at in their journey, I can direct them to the things I want them to watch. And all of the items that you have in membership. io are keyword searchable. They use artificial intelligence so that you don't have to like sift through things trying to find the right thing.

You just type in like for us, I'll type in  scripts for warm outreach, and it'll actually pull up the right scripts for you. It'll pull up where we've discussed how to do this in some of our Elevate mastermind calls  so that people can actually get the right information that they need to move them forward.

It is so cool. It's so powerful,  huge fan, and it is a big part of I think why we have such a phenomenal customer experience inside of Elevate. , the other thing I use for this podcast, whether you are listening to this or you are watching the video is I am a big fan of Descript, uh, which is about 15 a month.

Descript  does some really cool things. Um, it allows me to easily edit these videos. I can create clips now with Descript. That's a newer functionality. Um, it's just really cool. It's very easy to use. It's very easy to export your stuff. So. I'm a big fan of Descript.



I also use ChatGPT. Um, ChatGPT has been absolutely life changing for me.

It does all of my proofreading and it helps me with sort of like routine tasks of things I need to do and things that I'm working on. Um, I will bounce ideas off of it from time to time. I don't use it  to write my stuff, but I may ask ChatGPT to help me Take some ideas  and bring them together, and then I can work off of that.

One of my clients describes Chet GPT as an endlessly patient intern. And I think that is absolutely the case. So, um, I am a big fan if you find ways to use it, um, for your business. It can be very, very powerful.  The other thing I use is something called Kit, uh, formerly known as ConvertKit. This is where I write and send all of my emails.

It is, um, my favorite thing to use and for the plan that I am on, it's about 50 a month. Uh, there are less expensive plans. And, um, there is also, like, different functionality. So I pay extra because I, um, have on more than one occasion put a link in an email, sent the email out to my list, and then about three minutes later said, Oh shit, that was the wrong link. 

And then I, and then like, we've all seen this.  Where then somebody sends out an email that's like, Oh, sorry, I gave you the wrong link. So now I've like given them another email and it's just like, I don't like that.

So Kit actually, um, at a certain level allows you to dynamically change the link in what you've already sent so that you don't need to send that email. That's like, oops, I made a mistake. It's totally worth it for me, even though it only happens maybe like two or three times a year. I'm just like, I love that.

All right. Website and client experience. So my website is on Squarespace. It's where I write all my sales pages as well, put all my testimonials, videos, all of that is there. That hooks in, um, if I'm selling something like a workshop, that hooks into Thrivecart, which like I said earlier is my checkout page. 

Um, that handles all the payment that will go to Stripe. But otherwise, my website is hosted on Squarespace. I broke that down. It's about 23 a month. I'm a big fan. Uh, I use Zoom because, hello, welcome to the world we live in. Um, I use Zoom all the time. I might be considered a Zoom power user. I love Zoom. I think it's amazing.

Um, Zoom is about 13 a month.  And one of the really cool features of Zoom now is that for about a year, they've had something called clips  in it. Clips is a lot like, um, if you've ever used loom, it's very similar to what loom does. It's actually like a loom knockoff. And so instead of buying loom, um, where loom creates like shorter clips, you can send to people.

I just use the clips feature in Zoom because it's included.  I also use Calendly because I am done with doing back and forth meeting scheduling, unless there is, certainly I always offer it to people when I chat with them to let them know, like, Hey, if these times don't work, let me know. But um, let's see, in the last maybe seven years I've used Calendly, that's happened once where someone's been like, yeah, none of these times work.

So Calendly saves me an incredible amount of time. in scheduling. I absolutely love it. I love, um, all of the qualifying questions you can ask. I love that you can create lots of different calendars. I use it in a bunch of different ways, whether I am vetting prospects for Elevate, I am having coffee chats, or, um, So, any of the other things I do, it's um, oh, it's also what we use for all my laser coaching calls.

So, in Elevate, we offer unlimited laser coaching. People don't need to contact me to be like, hey, when can I talk to you? They just put time on my calendar. My times for that are set. It's easy. We set it and forget it. Love it.  Uh, the other thing I use, and this is, um, the last one I'll talk about, and this is really different.

So how do I get all this stuff done? So I've got things to help me put my podcast together. I've got things, um, to help me organize my tasks or to talk to clients or schedule meetings or do my payments. Well,  What helps me be really efficient because I am prone to being distracted. You haven't seen them.

If you're watching this video, you haven't seen them right now, but like my two dogs are basically like, uh, my two children who would love to constantly distract me with whatever's going on with them. So I use something called Flow Club and what it does is it allows me. It does. You do something called body doubling.

If you've never heard of this before, it's essentially where you log into a zoom like interface. There's other people there. You don't know them. You just say, Hey, here's what I'm going to be working on. They share what they're going to be working on and you just get to work. And there's no like judgment around what you're doing.

There's no coaching around what you're doing. It's literally just kind of like an accountability group to get it. It's around 40 a month , so these are all the things I use.

There are free tools I use as well, like Fathom for AI meeting notes, which is an absolute game changer. It is free. I also use Luma, which is. It's also free for event scheduling. And these are the main tools of the trade I am using to run a multi six figure business without burning out, without getting overwhelmed, um, and also without needing a bloated team. 

So, um, hopefully this is helpful to you. As I said before, I'm going to pop a bunch of links, uh, in the, comments section of this podcast so that you can go check some of these out.

So all in all,  I am running my business with my tech stack for under 400 a month.  It's pretty freaking reasonable in my world.

And that's a lot less  than hiring an assistant to do all this. Cause guess what? If I hired an assistant to do all this, I would still need the tech stack to do it. So I hope that's helpful for you. I hope that gives you some ideas for what is possible. Check out some of these products, check out some of the things that, um, are resonant for you and see if they help make your life easier, they certainly help make.

My life easier so that I can spend more time focused on clients, building connections with great prospects, building my leads, um, and growing my sales.