Which do I value more: my time, or my money?
This is a constant battle for me as I’m growing as a business owner. My default mode is to bootstrap something myself to avoid paying for it, because I could use that money for something else! (Jury’s still out on what that something else is, but I digress.)
Most recently, it’s been evaluating different CRMs (for the n-th time) to find something that I like. First I was using HubSpot, then a Google sheet, then back to HubSpot, and until recently a Notion version that I constructed myself.
I had signed up for Clay.earth (an app which pulls all your LinkedIn and email contacts into one single place) which would directly connect to Notion and keep contact profiles updated. I had been playing around with directly using those Clay profiles in my Notion pipelines, versus making a second database that was fed by the Clay profile database, and yes it’s as much of a confusing mess as it probably is to read this.
Earlier this week I was poking at another option, folk CRM, which has a nice Chrome extension that pulls information from LinkedIn profiles to feed into your contacts’ info, and lets you log interactions right on the LI site. That’s pretty neat! And basically all of my prospecting is on LinkedIn so that would be a big help.
But folk is $20 a month for the base plan. And in my head I was thinking “ugh, I don’t know if I want to pay $240 a year for this, I can probably work with my version in Notion to capture interactions and have Zapier send emails to a new database” and and and.
And then I stopped. I considered my current rates. I considered how many hours I’ve objectively thrown away playing with all these CRM options, how many hours I would spend setting up my Notion CRM, fixing the broken Zaps, inputting data by hand, having to go through and keep everything synced…
For less than two hours’ worth of my time, I could just pay for a service that would take care of it all for me, and reduce the friction of me using it more often. Two hours of my time, for a full year of ease. And that’s not just two hours of time, that’s the energy I’d expend doing the work, energy I wouldn’t have to do the things that actually move the needle, like client work or content creation or LinkedIn conversations.
Reframing things as a business expense, not a personal frivolity, is hard. But thinking of it in terms of my time and energy, and understanding the true cost of any choice, helps to put it into perspective and think about what my investment really is.
So I’m going to go ahead and subscribe to folk and have that nice LinkedIn extension, and spend those hours of effort doing something that earns me more than $20 a month. And if there’s something you’ve been waiting to pull the trigger on for similar reasons, then I hope you decide to do the same.