Some of the tools we reach for.

Fireflies — Never lose what was said in a meeting again

Fixes: Lost conversations, word for word.

Best for: Anyone whose decisions, promises and follow-ups happen on calls — and then evaporate.

Fireflies joins your meetings, transcribes them, and turns them into searchable notes with the action items pulled out. The promise made on Tuesday’s call is still there on Friday, in writing. It’s one of the simplest AI plugs we know: no behaviour change, just nothing important forgotten.

Make — Connect the systems you already have

Fixes: Double entry and broken handoffs.

Best for: Companies with good tools that don’t talk to each other, and people re-typing the same information into two or three places.

Make is the automation layer we reach for when data needs to move on its own — an order lands in one system and shows up, correctly, in the next one without a human carrying it. Enter it once, and it flows everywhere it’s needed. That’s a leak plugged at the source.

Referrals currently receive Make Core free for 1 month via this link.

HubSpot — CRM, marketing and sales in one place

Fixes: Lost conversations and blind decisions.

Best for: Growing companies whose customer information lives in inboxes, spreadsheets and people’s heads.

HubSpot is the CRM we run Roch’n It on. It puts every contact, conversation, deal and follow-up in one place, so a customer request never disappears into somebody’s inbox again. If your team finds out about problems from customers instead of from your own system, this is usually the first plug.

Apollo — Find the right people, with the right contact details

Fixes: Search time and stalled outreach.

Best for: Owners and sales leads who know who they want to reach but burn hours hunting for accurate emails, numbers and company details.

Apollo is the prospecting database we use for our own outreach. It turns “we should be talking to companies like these” into a real, reachable list in minutes instead of days. Clean contact data in, honest outreach out — no spray-and-pray.

NetSuite — The ERP backbone for companies that have outgrown spreadsheets

Fixes: Spreadsheet chaos, mystery numbers and blind decisions at scale.

Best for: Mid-market companies running finance, inventory and operations on spreadsheets and disconnected systems that no longer agree with each other.

NetSuite is the ERP we point to when a company has genuinely outgrown its patchwork — one system for finance, inventory, orders and operations, with numbers that match because there’s only one set of numbers. We don’t sell it and we don’t take a cut of the licence decision lightly: our job is making sure the process is fixed first, so the ERP lands on solid ground.

Pipedrive — A pipeline your sales team will actually use

Fixes: Lost conversations and deals that quietly go stale.

Best for: Small sales teams who need a simple, visual pipeline more than they need a giant enterprise CRM.

Pipedrive does one job well: it shows you every deal, where it stands, and what happens next, in a view a busy salesperson will keep up to date. If HubSpot is more machine than you need, this is the honest lighter option — we’d rather fit the tool to the team than sell you the biggest box.

monday.com — See all the work, in one view

Fixes: “I thought you had it” — broken handoffs and invisible workload.

Best for: Teams juggling projects, jobs or requests across people, where nobody can say at a glance what’s waiting on whom.

monday.com gives a whole team one shared picture of the work: who owns it, what stage it’s at, and what’s stuck. When the bottleneck is visibility rather than effort, a board everyone actually looks at plugs the leak faster than another meeting about it.

ClickUp — Projects, docs and tasks without the sprawl

Fixes: Search time and work scattered across five different apps.

Best for: Teams whose tasks, documents and goals live in too many places, and who want one home for getting things done.

ClickUp pulls tasks, docs and project tracking into a single workspace, so people stop hunting for the latest version of anything. It’s the tidy-desk option for teams drowning in tabs — structure first, then the work moves faster on its own.

n8n — Automation you own, for the technical jobs

Fixes: Repetitive behind-the-scenes work — syncing, checking, copying, alerting.

Best for: Companies with at least one technical person, who want powerful workflow automation they control instead of renting by the task.

n8n is the automation engine we use for the jobs under the floorboards: moving data between systems, watching for exceptions, and kicking off the right next step automatically. Straight talk: the paid cloud version is what we recommend for most businesses; the free self-hosted version shifts the upkeep onto your team.

Zoho — A full business suite at a price that doesn’t sting

Fixes: Software sprawl and per-tool subscription creep.

Best for: Cost-conscious companies that want CRM, finance, projects and more from one vendor instead of twelve separate bills.

Zoho is the budget-honest all-rounder: dozens of business apps under one roof, at prices smaller companies can actually carry. It’s rarely the flashiest tool in any single category, but for a company leaking money on disconnected subscriptions, one suite that covers the basics is often the right plug.

Gamma — Decks and documents that build themselves

Fixes: Hours sunk into formatting slides instead of thinking.

Best for: Owners, consultants and salespeople who present often and would rather spend their time on the message than the margins.

Gamma turns an outline into a clean, presentable deck or document in minutes. We use tools like this for the same reason we recommend them: your people’s judgment is the valuable part — the formatting was always a leak.

Beautiful.ai — Presentations that stay on-brand without a designer

Fixes: Ugly, inconsistent decks that eat an afternoon each.

Best for: Teams that present to customers and boards, and need every deck to look sharp and consistent without design help.

Beautiful.ai keeps slides aligned, spaced and on-brand automatically as you type, so a deck built at 4:59 PM still looks like it came from a design team. A small tool, an honest one — it plugs exactly the leak it claims to.

Xero — Clean books without the accounting headache

Fixes: Mystery numbers and month-end scramble.

Best for: Small and growing companies that want their invoicing, expenses and bank feeds reconciled in one place their bookkeeper will enjoy using.

Xero is the accounting platform we point smaller companies to when the books have become a leak of their own — money coming in and going out that nobody can see clearly until weeks later. Live, reconciled numbers mean decisions get made on facts, not on last month’s spreadsheet.