The crunch came for my expanding music workshop business in January 2025. On a lengthy holiday I still needed to run my small business, I’d taken a laptop and we were staying in places with reasonable wifi. I thought I’d be able to get away with a few hours a week just to keep it ticking over.
Annoyingly this wasn’t the case and I spent far more time hunting around for information, correcting stupid mistakes and generally feeling stressed about unnecessary work whilst I was meant to be de-stressing and enjoying the break. Working on a small laptop, as opposed to my multi-screen home set up, also added to the pain.
Being married to a Vtiger CRM professional compounded my annoyance. He’d been encouraging me to use a CRM for some time and I just hadn’t made the space in my schedule to do it. I knew it was like the General in command of rifle-firing troops telling the machine gun supplier he really didn’t have time to look at his new invention. The holiday was finally the impetus to get it over the line, especially seeing his Facebook posts of me sweating in the sub-continental heat in front of the laptop “Yes, she’s working again!”. The joke wore a little thin after a few weeks.
I feel much more in control of the relationships I have with my customers and suppliers, everything is in one place. Invoicing has become so much quicker and easier and it’s easy to see at a glance who owes me what, including which customers need a little nudge to pay. I now no longer live and die by spreadsheet.
I quickly got comfortable navigating the system and have found creating my own templates really easy and intuitive. I know if I want to grow the business further it will scale up with me. If I want to integrate it with an accounting package in the future I know I can, at the moment I don’t need this.
Tasks are easy to create and tick off, I’m the only one on the system but I know in the future I could allocate them to others and track them.
Small features, like a follow up reminder for an email, just gives you a bit more control and stops things falling down the cracks.
So I’d definitely recommend having a look at Vtiger, it’s fully featured but cost effective enough for smaller businesses like mine, offering an easy 15 days trial to check it out, plus a free entry level version.
Don’t let work ruin time when you should be relaxing, this year I definitely won’t be.
https://www.vtiger.com/small-business-crm
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