Welcome, friend. We’re glad you asked! We get the confusion. Are we Alaskan fishermen netting tons of crabs and fish? Are we stocking up on a sporting emporium of basketball nets, goalie nets, and lacrosse sticks? Do we just happen to really love nets?
Alright, all those things are great, but we’re not about tangible nets. It’s the intangible net that we’re constantly chasing. The bottom line.
Net Net could be called a dynamic dashboard, an intuitive interface, or a powerful project management system. We’re okay with all of ‘em. If we were in the dictionary, you might find our definition looks a little like this:
Net Net is workflow management software that connects the performance dots. CRM - Estimates - Project & Task Management - Time Tracking - Team Chat - Reports. It helps make forecasting and managing projects and retainers easy! Net Net helps you answer questions like:
Okay, so Net Net can’t help you answer that last question. But with our fully integrated workflow management tools, you’ll get the answer to the rest of these (and so many more).
Cross our hearts and hope to die.
We’re all living and breathing in the 21st century—we’ve all seen a million advertisements and commercials. Companies love to make big, lofty promises to their customers. It’s rare for those promises to ever come to fruition; the big misses are much more common (looking at you, every As Seen on TV product ever). #thecornballer #neverforget
Here are our promises to our pro services family: they’re what we strive to do each and every day. Net Net’s passion and unshakable mission is:
Simple, straightforward, genuine, and honest: we want to set professional services firms up for success every step of the way. Net Net provides the resources and support that we wished we had when we were first diving into the waters of organizing, estimating, managing and tracking projects and retainers.
Read: what’s in it for me?
Net Net is really an entire ecosystem to help you organize and operate your pro services firm. The main tools include:
You have to have a simple way to keep track of all your contacts. Customers, Prospects, Leads, just about anyone all in one place. Import them, add them one at a time, or even pull them in from your website or marketing platforms using our zapier integration. You can slice and dice, segment and more. With our social stream technology, you can catch up what the person or company is putting out there on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram to get a feel for where they are. Every contact ties back to all the sales, projects, tasks that you've done with them. With our quick notes system, you can look back at previous convos you had when they call you out of the blue after 19 gazillion months just like you talked yesterday.
When you know something is coming up, you just don't know all the deets on it, opportunities are your best friend. You know, that prospect or client that says "Hey, call me in August about our needs for XYZ." Opportunities help you keep track of them. Projects and Retainers can be tracked. Using notes and tasks to follow up, you'll never forget or have them die on the vine.
So that time has finally arrived and you now have a better idea of what to sell them. You can convert any opportunity into an estimate or start from scratch. Estimates let you and your team (even your outside collaborators) write up the level of effort the team will have to execute on the deliverables, pre-define the tasks of those deliverables, set the timelines, decide on the budget, add any hard costs and crank out estimates (revision after revision if you need to) until the client gives you the go-ahead. You can estimate one-time projects or retainers. With our deliverable template system, you can reuse any deliverables and tasks you want in any estimate. You'll speed up the process and scale more easily following that repeatable system you've created.
Did that estimate get approved? Wonderful, convert it with a single click to a project/retainer with all the deliverables, level of effort hours, timelines and collaboration ready to go! No re-entering everything into a task management tool and separately into a time tracker. This is the backbone of Net Net. You can assign the tasks to your team, keep track of progress, due dates and get up to the nanosecond information on whether you are going to make it or go over on anything you want. Change Orders? No prob my friend. Our change order system is pretty sweet and totally easy. You'll always be able to compare your estimate to actual costs. Project notes help you identify areas of slippage or considerations that may affect your project so you can look back in the future with some context. Speaking of context, with our integrated chat tools, you can segment the chats by deliverable or even task to make sure you get a complete picture of what's been discussed. Oh btw... Yes, you can also create projects from scratch for internal or pre-approved client projects and retainers.
Not everything you do is a project. Sometimes it's the client asking for a one off request (Hey can run me a report? hey, can you update my website? Hey can you...) or it's internal (follow-up with that lead, run our own report, etc). With our Quick tasks, you can quickly set up single tasks and assign them to your team. They can be billable or not. Time tracking is fully integrated. Quick tasks are vital to make sure those little suckers don't get swept under the rug.
Oh boy do people hate tracking time, are we right? With Net Net, the chore just got a lot easier. Because time is so intertwined with deliverable and task management. As a task is assigned to one of your team members, they can use the timer or manually log their time against it. The time is automatically applied to all the KPI's reporting and dashboards. No more writing long descriptions, finding the right work type to assign the time entry to, just a simple start and end point and sure... if you want to add a note, feel free (or don't). Time tracking has never been easier or more integrated in your project management process.
We all love chat tools. We use them all the time, but like email, discussions on specific parts of any project or retainers can be lost. In addition to @mentions for people, with Net Net's proprietary tilde mention (that's the ~ key), you can mention any deliverable or task as well. This gives more context to the conversation and when you're looking at any deliverable or task, you'll see the associated chats about them automatically. What a great way for anyone to get caught up. Net Net is chat done right!
What's more important than having a clear picture on all the metrics you want to track? Why else would we use workflow management software in our project management process? Reports let you slice and dice information, spot trends, answer performance related questions. Everything is up to the nano second, so you always know it's your source of truth. No more pulling data to merge and sort form all those one-off tools you used to use. Net Net makes it easy and timely to get to the core vitals of your professional services firm!
Grow, grow, grow! Net Net U (the "U" meaning university, but we're guessing you already knew that) is our video training platform. Yep, you can learn and refresh yourself and your team on the Net Net platform, but we're also creating wonderful courses on starting, growing and exiting your professional services firm. We're partnering with some of the best minds in the business to bring you there content and their offers to help you grow.
Gone are the Mad Men days where all functions are under one roof. Hyper-specialization is necessitating more collaboration. You may be focused on design and need a technical team. Or perhaps, you're doing IT services but need a front-end application designed for the client. The net net is that we're all working more collaboratively with partners and sub-contractors these days. So why shouldn't your workflow management software? With Net Net, you can share both estimates and projects with collaborators. They work from their account and you work from yours and you meet in the middle by sharing specific info and workflow with each other. One account acts as the project "sponsor" who effectively owns and then invites one or many collaborators to work with them. You know what else? If your collaborator doesn't have a net Net account, you can invite them to set up a free account. You'll be a hero for introducing them!
These are only the tip of the iceberg. Behind the scenes, we’re working hard to finalize even more tools and functionalities to blow the old way of managing workflow out of the water. Early adopters will get first access to all of the tools and in-person onboarding and training.
We’re all in this together—and we can all learn a thing or two from each other. As Net Net grows, you’ll be able to grow, too.
What’s next for Net Net? The future of workflow! Stay tuned, friends.