What tools should we actually be using? A working guide for growing businesses.

One of the questions that comes up in most first conversations with growing businesses is what they should actually be using to run better. Not what’s on offer in the market, which is roughly infinite, but what would genuinely help this business, this week, at their scale.

It’s a fair question and it doesn’t have a single answer. But most of the answers fall into one of three categories, and knowing which category is right for a given piece of work saves a lot of time and money.

Category one. The tools you already have.

Most UK businesses of any size are already paying Microsoft for a package they use maybe 20% of. Word, Excel and Outlook get used every day. Teams gets used for chat and calls. The rest of it, most people have never really opened.

Which is a shame, because inside that package sit several tools that would do real work for a growing business without another line item on the subscriptions bill.

Power Automate lets you build workflows that connect the Microsoft tools to each other. When a form is submitted, save the response to a SharePoint list, create a task in Planner, and email the person who needs to action it. All done automatically, no clicking through five screens. Straightforward to set up if you spend an afternoon learning it.

Power BI turns spreadsheet data into proper dashboards. Not the sort of thing you build in twenty minutes, but for a business that already lives in Excel it’s the natural next step. Once the report is built, it refreshes automatically each time the underlying data changes.

Forms handles the surveys, feedback and internal data-collection that most businesses still do by email. Lists gives you shared, structured tables that everyone can update. SharePoint holds documents in a way that stops the “which version is the latest?” question. Copilot, if you’re paying for it, handles the meeting notes and the first draft of the email that no one wants to write.

None of this is glamorous. All of it is included in what you already pay for. The right first question for any business is usually: what would we build with the tools we have before we go looking for new ones?

This is where the honest note comes in. The Microsoft stack works beautifully when your business fits the shape Microsoft designed for. When it doesn’t, the tools start to feel like they’re pushing back. That’s a signal, not a failure. It just means you’ve reached the edge of what off-the-shelf can do for you, and the next question becomes whether to bend your business to fit the tools, or the tools to fit your business.

Category two. The off-the-shelf tools that fill the gaps.

Between what Microsoft gives you and something built specifically for your business, there’s a whole layer of tools that connect systems that don’t talk to each other, automate the workflows that repeat, and let you build light custom tools without writing code.

Zapier is the best-known. It sits between hundreds of other apps and moves information between them automatically. When a lead fills in the form on your website, it appears in your CRM, gets assigned to a salesperson, sends them a notification, and adds a follow-up reminder to their calendar. Set it up once and it runs forever.

Make.com does something similar with a more visual editor, which suits people who think in flowcharts. It handles more complex workflows than Zapier at a lower price point, though the learning curve is steeper.

For lightweight databases and forms that need to do more than a spreadsheet, Airtable is worth knowing. For document workflows, PandaDoc and DocuSign handle the sending, signing and tracking. For teams that live in email and want smarter drafts and summaries, tools like ChatGPT and Claude have paid tiers that do the job for a few pounds a month per user.

Some of these tools have quietly become AI-driven in the last year or two. That’s a good thing, and it’s why they can do more than they used to. But the point of using them isn’t the AI. The point is that a task that used to take someone an hour a week now takes no one any time at all, and gets done more reliably than when a human was remembering to do it.

The trap with this category is that the tools work best when the business has someone who owns them. Someone who understands how the workflows are built, who checks when something breaks, who updates them when the process changes. In small businesses that person is usually the founder, and the founder rarely has the time. So the workflows get built, work for six months, and then quietly stop working when the underlying systems change and no one notices.

The other honest note. Off-the-shelf tools are built for standard processes. If your business does something the way ten thousand other businesses do it, there’s probably a template. If your business does something in a way that reflects why customers pick you rather than the competition, the template won’t quite fit. You end up either bending your process to match the tool, or accepting that the tool covers 70% of what you need and living with the gap.

Category three. Something built for the specific business.

The third option is a tool designed and built for your business specifically. Not a template with your logo on it. A working tool that uses your actual data, matches your actual processes, and does the specific job you need it to do.

This is where we spend most of our time. What that usually looks like: a dashboard that pulls together the numbers you actually need to see, in the shape you actually need to see them. A quoting tool that produces quotes in the format your business uses, with the pricing logic your business follows. A workflow that takes an order from enquiry through to invoice in the way your business runs it, without the six manual steps the current system requires.

The reason this category exists is that most growing businesses eventually reach a point where the standard tools no longer bend to how the business actually works. Usually the signal is one of three things. Someone is spending several hours a week doing manual work that a tool should be doing. The same information is being typed into three different systems. Or the founder is the only person who can see the full picture, because the picture only exists in their head.

At that point, a bespoke tool pays back quickly. Not because it’s fancy, but because it removes work that was quietly costing the business every week.

The trade-off is real. Bespoke costs more upfront than a subscription. It takes longer to build than downloading an app. And it needs to be built by someone who understands both the business and the tooling, which is a smaller pool than either side alone. But the tool that comes out the other end is yours, works the way you work, and doesn’t need to be replaced when the business changes shape.

Which category do you need?

The three categories aren’t in competition with each other. Most growing businesses need some of all three. The Microsoft stack does what Microsoft is good at. Zapier and Make handle the connections between systems. Bespoke tools cover the specific things that make your business work the way it does.

The right question isn’t “which category is best?” It’s “where is the actual friction right now, and which category would remove it fastest?” A business where staff are still emailing spreadsheets to each other needs the Microsoft stack sorted first. A business where systems don’t talk needs some off-the-shelf plumbing. A business where the founder is still doing manual work that reflects the specific way the business operates needs something built for it.

Most of the time, working out which of those three descriptions fits your business best is the useful first step. The tools follow from there.