Smack Happy

When success is the biggest problem

In 2011, web designer Nicole Hanusek was a successful freelancer, and her business was growing rapidly. Nicole, who had been organizing her projects and paperwork in physical notebooks, quickly discovered that finding information and sharing it with her team was unmanageable. She needed a better solution for managing her business. As her client portfolio grew, it became clear she needed more hands. Nicole hired a team and Smack Happy Design was born. However, as Nicole’s business scaled, her time shifted away from developing websites to onboarding new employees, managing complex design projects, and tackling a multitude of administrative tasks experienced by many small business owners. Making things a little more difficult was the fact that, her team was distributed across the United States.

Closing information gaps and opening the door to greater efficiency

When Nicole started using Evernote, she was able to centralize all her team’s information and make it easily accessible from anywhere. She relies on Evernote to onboard and offboard contractors, deploy templates and processes, manage projects, and share work with clients. Nicole and her team can easily find everything they need with a quick search or a set of shortcuts. “All of our internal practices are outlined in Evernote,” Nicole said. “That way, I know my team can provide the level of service my clients expect."

More time for clients means increased revenue

Now that Nicole is no longer burdened with administrative work, she can focus on what she loves—partnering with her clients to create beautiful, high-end design and websites. By organizing work and aligning her distributed team and processes in Evernote, Nicole is spending less time on administrative work—so she has time to take on new projects and additional clients. In fact, she says, using Evernote Business has increased Smack Happy Design’s productivity by around 20 percent. With more time to do what she originally set out to do, she says, Smack Happy is poised to increase revenue and grow even more.