My firm Keenan Reid Strategies builds 9-figure business models and the financial engines behind them. We help enterprise B2B leaders:

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When you’re running an independent practice, everything goes through you. 

Client work. Admin. Money. Planning. 

At first, you brute-force everything.

That works for some time, until you make a big mistake – like forgetting to send an invoice. Eventually, you realize that some of this work shouldn’t take so much effort.

It’s time to start using tools.

But instead of clarity, you find noise: endless platforms, overlapping features, and contradicting advice from people running different businesses. 

Remember, your tools have one job: minimize the number of clicks between you and real work.

And in this article, we’re helping you choose the right ones to add to your consultant toolkit.

Let’s start with a simple definition.  

When we say tech stack, we’re not talking about anything complex or enterprise-level. 

Think of it like a stack of pancakes.

It’s simply the set of platforms that lets you run your day-to-day work without everything falling apart. For example, tools that are made for how projects are managed, documents get created and shared, or money gets tracked. 

Every indie consultant already has a tech stack, whether they call it that or not.

Most conversations about tech stacks start in the wrong place. 

They start with tools – what to buy, what’s popular, what everyone else is using. Most of the time, that approach just leads to unused subscriptions.

Building a tech stack right comes down to two steps: 

Let’s get into it.

As a business of one, the goal isn’t to automate everything – it's to find parts of the business where simple, well-chosen platforms deliver high return quickly. 

In practice, these opportunities tend to show up in the same business areas: 

These are the places where you lose time or duplicate effort. 

Once you’ve identified the specific area, only then does it makes sense to browse the tools you can use.

Some tools will save you a surprising amount of time almost immediately. Those are the ones worth paying attention to.

After identifying the business area, you do the research: ask for recommendations, read online reviews, check out comparisons. Eventually, you end up with a short list of tools that could work.

But this is where discipline matters.

Every marketing page makes the tool sound amazing – until you start using them, and find out they’re more complicated and harder to integrate.

Before adding to your stack, there are two questions worth asking:

How much time or brainpower will it actually save me? 

Think about it in the context of real work and current workflows. If the tool simply moves friction around instead of reducing it, then cross it off the list.

To narrow it down further, here’s a second filter:

Within 30 days, does this tool integrate cleanly and free me to do better work? 

A learning curve is normal – but it shouldn’t be steep. You should be able to handle core tasks without watching tutorials or checking the help page every few hours.

If the tool feels intuitive early on, that’s usually a good sign. 

This is also where free trials earn their keep. Use them to see whether a tool works with how you already operate, not against it. 

Another misconception about tech stacks is that they need to evolve constantly.

But starting with a well-chosen set of foundational tools carries you farther than expected. Once the critical areas of the business are supported, there’s no urgency to add more. 

That’s why I have my core four: Asana, Ramp, M365, and ChatGPT Plus. 

They’re enough to cover the most critical opportunities of our work. 

I’ll walk you through each of them and how they measure up to their top competitors: 

Asana and Monday are more alike than different. Both track work, timelines, and teams. Unless you’re a power user, the differences are minimal. 

But I ultimately chose Asana because it offers a better view of how work should be organized.

It expects work to live in projects. It demands tasks to have clear owners. Its default structure is already close to how most people should work.

It gave me structure without inviting unnecessary customization, meaning less time managing the system and more time doing the work.

And ultimately, it’s easy to use on my phone.

Monday’s flexibility is powerful, but it becomes a distraction if you’re not into designing your own workflow.

If a tool requires me to manage the tool itself, it doesn’t belong in my stack.

Asana cleared that bar. I just wish I knew about it way before I did.

I’ll be honest: I got lucky with Ramp. 

After years of using QuickBooks, I never got comfortable with it beyond the basics. You need accounting knowledge – and even then, it feels technical and dated. 

For a long time, there wasn’t a better alternative.

QuickBooks was the default, even though it doesn’t handle day-to-day financial tasks for consultants. You still end up layering separate tools for expenses and visibility. 

One of those tools ended up being Ramp, which was only recommended by a friend. And I was pleasantly surprised at how much friction it removed. 

It’s easy to use, and the integration is clean enough that I don’t need to live inside QuickBooks anymore.

Another advantage with Ramp is that it grows with us.

I’ve been using it for two years now, and our business has changed a lot since then. I still use it for bookkeeping and paying our vendors, but also for great perks like its high-yield bank account.

This is a hill I’ll die on: Microsoft 365 delivers more value than it gets credit for. 

Between Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, Bookings, and CoPilot, it replaces a long list of separate tools that work together out of the box. That matters because the alternative is tool sprawl: dozens of platforms and subscriptions that don’t talk to each other. 

I learned this the hard way. 

We started on Google Workspace (plus a bunch of other tools like Loom and Dropbox). And when we eventually moved to M365, the domain migration alone was painful enough that I’d never want to do it again. 

That experience changed how I think about early platform decisions. 

For a consulting business, alignment, integration, and cost efficiency matter. That’s why M365 earned – and keeps – its place in my core four. 

AI tools are different from the rest of the stack.

At this point, it doesn’t matter that much whether you choose ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, or a mix of them. The capabilities are increasingly similar, and the space is evolving quickly.

What matters is not overcomplicating it.

I use ChatGPT Plus because it’s useful across almost every part of the business – whether it’s for problem solving, planning, or writing. The upgrade is worth the monthly cost because of how much my team and I use it. 

This isn’t about picking the “best” AI platform. It’s about picking one and learning it well. 

In my tech stack, one flexible AI tool is already plenty. 

Most enterprise clients already use dedicated platforms, so you’ll usually sign inside their workflow. In those cases, you don’t need anything on your end.

Otherwise, you need a simple way to send, track, and store signed contracts.

I use DocuSign, but any reputable e-signature software works.

I strongly suggest getting one as soon as you’re working with clients who aren’t routing contracts through their own signing system. 

At the end of the day, most consultants don’t need every “smart” tool for their toolkit. 

They need fewer clicks between decision and execution – and a well-planned tech stack is the best way to achieve that. 

Before buying subscriptions that don’t get fully used or understood, know which parts of the business to automate first. Then, let the tools do their magic. 

From there, you’ll have clearer systems and make fewer decisions over the long run. 

The right tech stack doesn’t make your business smarter. It supports how work actually happens. 

🚨 Chart crimes! 

Ah yes, my favorite kind of bird – the airplane. 

But having an airplane here isn’t the worst atrocity this chart has committed. 

Nonsensical colors. No order in the numbers. A chicken that looks like a pigeon.

This might be one of the worst chart crimes we’ve featured yet.