This week we feature Nate Wright, Founder of Small Biz Triage. Small Biz Triage is obsessed with relentlessly helping small biz owners grow their kingdoms to support an independent generous lifestyle, while injecting humanity into their business.

In this interview, you can read more about his work at Small Biz Triage, favorite marketing tools, productivity tips as well as his advice for budding marketers.

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Your location: Oceanside, CA.

Your favorite gadget: Yellow legal pad with Pilot G2 .7mm Blue Gel Pen.

You start your day with: not my inbox.

Your favorite time-saving trick:  Gmail shortcut to label and archive (e).

Your top 3 blogs you read daily: James Clear, Mark Manson, Anthony Iannarino.

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Describe an average day at Small Biz Triage?

Each owner has a different early morning (I'm in San Diego, David in LA, Seth in Seattle). I start at 5:30 am with incremental work on Inbox Attack. Then at 8:30 am all three of us hop on an Uberconference to discuss any projects (internal or client work) requiring coordination. After that half my day is meetings booked with ScheduleOnce for current or prospective clients. David and I usually have a 30-minute working meeting to hammer out some of our internal marketing ... that's enough time to craft and send a Mailshake campaign for example.

As a marketer, what is your favorite productivity hack?

I use several philosophies and modalities I fuse for the day-to-day (e.g. touch once) ... but if you are asking for hacks, I'd have to say shortcut keys in Gmail and Google Drive. I have a few dozen of them regularly every day.

Gmail favorites are:

e - archive

v - move to

SHIFT + # - delete

j - next email

CTRL+ ENTER - send

Google Docs:

CTRL + SHIFT + e - center

CTRL + b - bold

and of course CTRL + C and CTRL + V to copy and paste.

As a person who is well-versed with online marketing, I’m sure you rely on a few marketing tools to automate your efforts. What are the top 3 tools you use?

Zapier, Zapier, Zapier ... our favorite Zap takes new client payments from WooCommerce, logs them as a paid invoice in Freshbooks, creates a Google Drive project folder named correctly, updates their email status in MailChimp, and creates a Zoho Project named correctly.

Your company has a growing community of users. How do you use this treasure trove of customer insight to power your marketing efforts?

Conversations reveal all sorts of new tools (and new issues) faster than we ever could. ScheduleOnce - our go-to scheduler - was introduced to us by one of our vendors.  On the tactical side, half of our clients fall under the training category, and regularly share cool copywriting snippets or targeting adjustments for more effective email, LinkedIn and Facebook Ad campaigns.

What is your strategy for getting people to your site and then converting them to a customer?

80% of our new business is inbound leads through Upwork or the MailChimp Expert Directory. Keeping our profiles and reviews optimized is critical.

Nothing is automated or completely pre-canned from there ... personalized note addressing their issue, and inviting them to a 20-minute Uberconference call / screenshare with me. From there, a follow-up call with David (B2B) or Seth (B2C) gives us enough info for pricing. As a rule, we always start with small project (less than $1K) that we can finish in less than a month.

Is there any advice you’d like to give to budding marketers to help them work smart and stay productive?

1) your inbox is *not* your to-do list.

2) touch each task only once ... multi-tasking (and that means a kazillion Chrome tabs too) is a total myth.

3) manage energy *not* time ... meaning you need to front load your day with the highest impact AND hardest task.

A big thanks to Nate for taking the time out to answer these questions! If you haven’t already, we highly recommend that you check out Small Biz Triage.

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