The Small Business Toolkit
Tools we use and recommend for running, marketing, growing and monetizing a small business.
Running a small business means doing a little bit of everything — sales, payroll, marketing, bookings, the website, and the fifty small things nobody warns you about. We have spent more than a decade building businesses in travel and tourism, first Like A Local Tours in New York and now Like A Local Guide. These are the tools that actually stuck.
Affiliate disclosure: some links on this page are affiliate or referral links. If you sign up through one, we may earn a commission at no additional cost to you. We focus on tools we pay for and use ourselves. If we include something we haven't personally used, we'll tell you plainly.
Like A Local Tours has run guided food and culture tours in New York since 2014. Like A Local Guide grew out of it. Both are small businesses with real payroll, real vendors and real bookings.
Everything marked WE USE THIS is software we pay for and use to run the business — not something we found in a roundup.
One tool on this page is a pointer rather than a firsthand endorsement. We say so in the write-up, and we explain what we use instead and why.
Sales, prospecting and lead generation
The hardest part of a small business is reaching people who don't know you exist yet. For us that means corporate and private-group work — the bookings that don't arrive on their own.
Snov.io
What it is: a prospecting and outreach platform. It finds business contacts, verifies email addresses and runs sequenced email campaigns from one place.
Best for: small teams doing their own outbound sales without a dedicated sales department.
How we use it: to find corporate leads, verify contact information and run personalized email campaigns.
Before you sign up: outbound only works if you have a specific offer for a specific kind of buyer. Write the offer first, then buy the tool.
Try Snov.ioEmail, content and staying in touch
Most small businesses lose more money to people who forgot about them than to people who said no.
Drip
What it is: email marketing and automation. You build a sequence once and it keeps sending the right message at the right moment without you touching it.
Best for: small businesses that want automation without an enterprise price tag. Pricing scales with list size.
How we use it: it's the email marketing behind our newsletters and our review requests.
Before you sign up: a small engaged list beats a large indifferent one, and you pay by list size. Clean the list before you import it.
Try DripMoney, people, operations
The unglamorous half of the job. These are the tools that stopped us doing things twice.
Quo (formerly OpenPhone)
What it is: a shared business phone number and inbox for calls and texts, with call and message routing you can set up and change yourself.
Best for: small teams where more than one person needs to answer the same number — especially when who is working changes constantly.
How we use it: one business number our whole team shares. Guests text it and everyone sees it. On top of that we have built an automated system that gets guests through to the right tour guide, and we update it daily as our guide roster changes.
Why we recommend it: it has saved us a lot of time and money. Changing the routing takes minutes and we do it ourselves, which matters when your staffing is different every day. For what it replaced, it has been remarkably cost effective.
Before you sign up: the value shows up the moment a second person needs to answer the same number. If that is already true for you, it will pay for itself quickly.
Try QuoNotion
What it is: a flexible workspace that can be a wiki, a project tracker and a lightweight CRM at once.
How we use it: our entire ops manual, tour scripts and planning live here.
Before you sign up: the blank page is the hard part. Start with one process you repeat weekly.
Try Notion →Trainual
What it is: software for documenting how your business works so new people can learn it without shadowing you.
How we use it: it's how we train new guides without repeating ourselves.
Before you sign up: worth it once you're hiring regularly. Before that, a written checklist may be enough.
Try Trainual →BILL
What it is: accounts payable and vendor payments, with approvals and records in one place.
How we use it: invoices and vendor payments, without the paperwork.
Before you sign up: pays off when you have recurring vendors and more than one person approving spend.
Try BILL →Xero
What it is: cloud accounting for small businesses — income, expenses, reconciliation and reporting.
How we use it: our books live in Xero.
Before you sign up: talk to your bookkeeper or accountant first — switching accounting systems mid-year is more work than it looks.
Referral link pending
Gusto
What it is: payroll, benefits and HR for US businesses.
How we use it: it's how we pay our team and keep onboarding and payroll organized.
Before you sign up: US-focused. If you pay people in several countries you'll need something else alongside it.
Referral link pending
Earning from traffic you already have
This is the part we've spent the most time on. Like A Local Guide is a travel website that has to pay for itself, so we've had to learn what actually converts and what just looks busy.
Stay22
What it is: a monetization layer for travel content. It turns mentions of places into bookable links for hotels, attractions and experiences.
Best for: anyone publishing destination guides, hotel recommendations or travel tips who isn't earning anything from them yet.
How we use it: we use it across Like A Local Guide — on city guides and on individual venue pages.
Before you sign up: it monetizes intent you already have. If a page isn't attracting people who are actively planning a trip, a booking link won't create that.
Explore Stay22Referral link: we may receive a bonus if you qualify and reach the booking milestone.
For tour and activity businesses
Your reservation system is the one piece of software you can't casually swap out, so we want to be especially clear about what we do and don't have experience with here.
Bokún
What it is: booking management, channel management and OTA distribution software for tour and activity operators. It is owned by Tripadvisor.
Who it's for: tour and activity businesses comparing reservation platforms, particularly those weighing how they distribute through online travel agencies.
Why it's here, honestly: we have not used Bokún to run a tour company. Like A Local Tours uses FareHarbor. We include Bokún because it's one of the platforms operators most often shortlist.
Before you sign up: evaluate it against FareHarbor and any other platform yourself, with your own booking volume and channel mix. Ask about contract length, payment processing and what happens to your data if you leave.
Learn about Bokún →Why this list is short
There are affiliate programs for hundreds of products we could list here. We'd rather recommend a short list of things we actually use than sixty we don't. If a category is missing, it's because we don't yet have a recommendation we'd stand behind. We'll add tools as we adopt them — and if we stop using something, we'll take it down.
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