KANDY Outdoor Flooring is a growing brand with its head office in Vancouver and a very active 1^st franchise in Toronto. Whether it’s our weekly virtual leadership team meetings, our client service, interactions and communications, there are a number of apps that simply make our lives easier!

1. Google Hangouts

We’ve just switched from Office/Outlook to Gmail and the suite of apps available and Google Hangouts just has tickled our fancy. Four of us from across the country can meet via google hangouts (which includes video, so we can look one another in the eye) easily, seamlessly with little to no technical glitches. This is refreshing after many unsuccessful attempts with Microsoft’s Lync, which had so much promise but never worked for us, and Skype, which is fairly reliable but not free.

2. Magic Plan

Our business involves measuring our prospective clients’ outdoor spaces for accurate product calculations and design considerations. Magic Plan lets us very quickly and easily, during our free in-home consultation, produce a professional drawing of the floor space that accurately calculates the square footage.  Giving clients an immediate firm price is one of the hallmarks of KANDY, and Magic Plan let’s us look slick and professional in front of the people who really count.  There’s a free option, or for a $20 subscription, we can also export and share the drawings with our prospective clients.

3. Dropbox

It just doesn’t get any easier. Because we are spread across the country, working together to build a brand and develop a franchise network means we absolutely needed to find a solution that made file organization and storage a snap. While we are now experimenting with Google Drive, we have loved how easy Dropbox makes it to set up folder structures, share, organize and stay on top of all our documents. The one little hitch we’ve encountered is when two or more of us happen to be in the same file at the same time.  Dropbox creates a “virtual copy” so changes aren’t lost, but it makes it a little more work for us to then go back and ensure we all have the most up-to-date file.

4. Evernote

All those @#@!$%#@ passwords!  Man, keeping track of all those is really a challenge! Evernote allows you to take control of your passwords and more. We file, categorize and save handwritten notes, typed notes, and grabbed webpages,. We associate pictures with notes, and we are able to retrieve any of this information from any device: phone, computer, etcetera. We use

Penultimate and Skitch, both sister apps to Evernote. Penultimate allows handwritten notes you take on your iPad to be automatically saved in Evernote for later retrieval and review. Skitch allows screencapture for any webpage or image that is then saved in Evernote.

5. SignNow

We take electronic “Customer Sign-Off Sheets” to each of our outdoor flooring customization jobs and SignNow allows our floor designers to simply bring up the form, and our customers to sign on the iPad or iPhone screen - - and we’ve got an electronic copy all ready to digitally save. With SignNow you can also take a picture of the person signing the document - - so there is an additional level of assurance that the person’s whose scrawl (let’s face it, it’s hard to exactly reproduce our signatures on a touch screen!) is affixed to the signature line is actually the person we say they are. This isn’t a real problem with us at KANDY but we can see how this would be a benefit for anyone who needs these signatures to meet a higher standard of authenticity.

6. 100 pushups 200 squats 100 sit-ups

Many of the apps we use are used in our business, for our business. Well, we are the business! We believe it is important to keep not only our minds and typing fingers in shape but our bodies as well. Simple to follow, these apps start you off at your own level and slowly work you up to easily completing 100/200/100 reps of these exercises. It also takes very little time to complete so it’s realistic for us to follow. It also appeals to our goal orientation since we are always working towards the goal.

7. Songza

We love this app when we need a little ambiance while writing our latest blog or doing our 100 sit-ups. Unlimited play lists in the app that was recently acquired by Google.  There is something for everyone. Choose from genre, mood, activity, or era. You’ll hear everything from old favorites, to today’s top hits, to obscure and innovative indie.