This is the first post of a new series I’m calling Inside Tridea. We’ve been asked numerous times how we go about managing our company, projects, etc. I must say that it is quite the challenge managing all aspects of our business, especially when the team is decentralized across the state of Michigan. We don’t have it all figured out quite yet, but thus far we’ve been running fairly smoothly.

One thing that will help any business run smoothly, is great communication. And our tool of choice for managing our company is Basecamp. Though this is primarily for project management, this is our tool for keeping our business together. We’ve setup a project specifically for internal Tridea business, where we store files, passwords, and general information needed to keep our business afloat.

One feature in Basecamp that has been amazing is built-in Campfire (a business chat app), where we have our weekly meetings to go over business items. Since we each have different schedules (and of course personal lives), we setup a weekly time that we meet. The fact that we don’t get to meet in person often means that we have to make the extra effort to stay on the same page as a company, and Campfire has helped us do that.

This is one of the many tools that has been essential to managing our business. Of course there are tons of other tools we use as well, which I will cover in other posts in this series. But we would like to give our readers a look at the tools and processes we go through to run Tridea, in hopes that others may find some of our tools/processes useful. So stay tuned. If you are curious about any aspect of how we run Tridea, don’t hesitate to ask, and we might make it into a post for this series.

What tools have you found essential for running your business?