Serve Scale Soar®

My 2026 Tech Stack: The Tools I Use to Run a 7-Figure Business

• Brandi Mowles • Episode 294

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Ever wanted to snoop behind the scenes of a seven-figure business and see exactly what tools keep the whole thing running? Same. Brandi is nosy like that too.

In this episode, she's pulling back the curtain on her full 2026 tech stack, every piece of software she uses to run Serve Scale Soar and all seven of its revenue streams. But here's the honest part: you do not need all of it.

Brandi walks through what she recommends for service providers, what she'd do differently if she could go back, and the three tools she's actively cutting as AI keeps getting better. Grab your coffee and let's do the dang thing.

IN THIS EPISODE, YOU'LL LEARN:

  • The only two all-in-one tools a service provider actually needs (and when to add more)
  • Why Brandi runs 90% of her business inside FG Funnels, and who should skip it
  • How Claude built a full Notion revenue dashboard for her in 15 minutes
  • Why she still recommends Asana over ClickUp and Notion for most freelancers
  • Which AI tools she pays for (only 2) and which she uses on the free plan
  • The 3 tools she's cutting in 2026 and the real reason why
  • Why simplifying your stack matters more than the software bill itself

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:


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Now go do the dang thing.


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Brandi’s 2026 Tech Stack

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Brandi: [00:00:00] Have you ever wanted to go behind the scenes of a seven-figure business and be like, "What are they doing? What tools are they using? What does their tech stack look like? What do they use to run their business?" I know that if you are nosy like me, that is something that comes up a lot. And so today I am diving in to what we are using tech stack-wise in 2026. So if you are one of my favorite type of people and so nosy about what's going on behind other people's businesses, this episode is going to be for you. So let's jump on in. Welcome, welcome back, my friend, and welcome to another episode of the Serve Scale Soar podcast.


My name is Brandi Mowles, and if this is your first time listening, oh man, you are hopping into such a fun episode. And if you are a long time listener, you know I've done these in the past. And last year at our live event, which is happening again this September, but last year I went [00:01:00] over my tech tools, and it was a total random this is what people wanted to know.


And so me and one of our strategy society members, Mandy, we got up there and talked about tech stacks and what type of software we use, and everyone loved that session. And they were like, "You should talk more about this." Here we are almost a year later, and I am recording an episode for you, taking you behind the scenes on what tech, what software we are using in our business in 2026.


Now here's the thing I want you to understand as I go through this episode is one, I run a seven-figure business. Two, I have seven revenue streams in our business. So we have conversions for clients, we have Strategist Society, we have live events, we have affiliate marketing, we have low-ticket product sales, I have my one-on-one services, and then we also have certified So we have seven streams of revenue, right?


So you probably don't [00:02:00] need all this software. I'm also gonna tell you the ones I recommend for you, ones that I wish we would've done differently, but now we're kinda in it forever and ever, amen, and the ones we're transitioning off of. And so I'm gonna give you a deep dive into what's going on in our business, but just know you don't need all of this, okay?


So let's jump on in. I've kinda categorized these in a way that I thought worked best for my brain and how mine works. So I'm gonna start with our two main ones that are kinda like our all-in-one, and the ones I would kinda recommend for y'all. So the first one is HoneyBook, of course. We are a big fan of HoneyBook.


We even have our program, HoneyBook in a Hurry, that we will link up in the show notes if you wanna grab that. It's $37, and it is such a steal. I give you all the emails, all the one-click installs that you need, everything. So HoneyBook is how we run our client contracts. You can do invoice, schedulers, all that kinda stuff.


So how do we use it? Because we have so many moving parts of the business, when it [00:03:00] comes to my one-on-one consulting services, done-with-you services, that I use HoneyBook for my contracts, for my appointments, for logging all the information. So all my emails, all of the Zoom calls, the appointments, are all scheduled through there, so then the transcripts and everything are housed in there.


I put all their documents in there, so that's my client portal. The only thing that we don't do through HoneyBook that I would suggest you do is the payments. The only reason we don't do payments through HoneyBook is 'cause we are deep into Stripe. And so what happens is Janessa just sends them an invoice through Stripe, and we do it that way.


If we weren't so deep into Stripe, then I would say 100% use HoneyBook's payments. They're built in. Why wouldn't you? So that is how I manage my one-on-one clients from the consulting side. I highly recommend it for anyone who's getting started. And if you use brandimowles.com/honeybook, you can get a 30% off discount for your first year.


And some people are like, "It's [00:04:00] $30 a month," or whatever it ends up being, but y'all, it runs your business. I would pay $100 a month for HoneyBook. So think about how much time it will save you instead of trying to duct tape a bunch of pieces together. The other thing I love about HoneyBook from our students' reasons is because all of our one-click installs, like our proposal templates, our contract templates, all of that that we also give you inside of HoneyBook in a Hurry, it's one-click install.


So you don't have to have them upload it. You don't have to redesign it. You just click a few buttons, and it is in your HoneyBook account, which saves you so much time. So we're a big fan of HoneyBook. Then the second one that's an all-in-one that's probably, like- The backbone of our business at this point is a white label of High Level.


So we use the white label version of FG Funnels. So if you go to brandimowles.com/fgfunnels, we also have discount codes and you can check them out. But what we use [00:05:00] FG Funnels for, and the reason I went with FG Funnels instead of a white label, one is because we started using FG Funnels several years ago, and that's before High Level had some of the support that they do now.


If I went back and got was able to say "Oh, do I wanna use FG Funnels?" I think we would. It is a little bit more expensive than if you go through High Level, but we get a lot of support, and there's a lot of additional training, and their support is really good, and there's a few other things that helped us when we were just getting started.


And if you're someone who wants templates, you don't wanna have to recreate everything from scratch, then yes, a high... fG Funnels is the way to go because they have so many built-in templates already there for you. So we are on FG Funnels, and what I love about it, or what we use about it, what we use is everything.


That's where all of our sales pages are built out on. That's where our text messaging is. We go through Twilio because that's what they had. I think now they have another service, but we [00:06:00] use Twilio, which is built into High Level. It's our email platform. That's where we send all of our emails out. We do our contracts for Strategist Society, so those one-on-one service providers.


Those are done with the contracts there, are done with FG Funnels. We also have all of our calendar schedules, so if you book a call with me, if we do the podcast interviews, all of that's housed in FG Funnels. Pretty much we live and breathe and die as a business in FG Funnels. And so that's after working on a lot of different platforms.


So over the years we've been Kajabi fans, we've been ClickFunnels fans, we've done all the things, but I do think that this has been the most robust and the best fit for us. Does that mean there isn't problems? No, there, of course, there's problems with software. But for what we need and the price point, we can't beat it, right?


Now, do I think a service provider needs it? No, I think you... All you need is HoneyBook. Now, if you're [00:07:00] someone who wants to, you know that you wanna create digital products, you know you want a course, you know you want a membership, you know you want something like that, like group program, and you're thinking long game, then I think yes, it makes more sense to start in FG Funnels if you're gonna be growing an email list.


If you're gonna be doing all that, then you should start there. You have the long game in mind. It is more expensive. It is more robust, which means that it gets overwhelming. We have several people in Strategist Society who get very wellm- overwhelmed when they try to move from HoneyBook to FG Funnels because there's so many more moving pieces that have to go together to make everything work.


So I do think that if you're not tech savvy, it's not a good platform for you. I also think that if you are someone who wants simple, HoneyBook is where it's at. If you are someone who knows that you want to grow a second revenue stream or a digital product, then yeah I would invest in it because it's gonna set you up for a really good start.


And if you ever wanna run ads, [00:08:00] it has the most amazing tracking with the conversion API and all that kind of stuff. So we highly suggest High Level or FG Funnels to clients when they're looking to switch off their platform because it is so robust, but we do tell them, "This is very robust, so just be ready for that."


So that is the backbone of our business. We use FG Funnels for I would say, to run 90% of our business. Okay. So then what are we using now for project management? So if you've been a longtime listener, you know we have done ClickUp. We were ClickUp fans for a long time. We did Asana, which I have a whole episode on why we went to Asana from ClickUp that we can link up.


And then now we're on Notion. We've been on Notion for about a year now And I love it. I think Janessa is impartial on it. She's getting used to it, but I love it. It is something where you have to be someone who likes to create, but also you don't get stuck in the creation, and I would never buy a template.


I think that's where [00:09:00] most people get overwhelmed with Notion, is that you buy a template and the template doesn't fit your brain, and then there's so many moving parts. One thing that is really cool now is that Claude is connected to Notion, and so sometimes when I get stumped on how to build something, Claude will actually build it out for me.


So one of the things that I just recently showed our Strategist Society members is I do a gap analysis, which we teach all this. The gap analysis, we have a podcast, we'll link up on that, and mine's always been on my whiteboard in my room. The problem with that is Janessa also needs to see where we're at with our numbers so she knows what she needs to do to help increase.


I know where I do, and it's usually me just telling her all the numbers. We wanted something in Notion where it was updating and she could see, but same effect, the little dots that circled in as the revenue grew. And so I told Claude what I wanted, and it built me out a full dashboard in Notion with Claude.


And I only had to go in and make a few changes, but pretty much it built out the whole dashboard for me in 15 minutes. [00:10:00] But the thing is, I knew what I wanted. I think that's where a lot of people mess up, is you think that Claude's gonna solve something, but you don't know what you actually want, and then it can't fix that for you.


So I do think Notion's never been easier to get started on with all the AI. However, I do think it's overkill for the majority of people, especially if your brain doesn't work like that. I still highly recommend Asana for most everyone. I think it is the easiest, the cheapest, the best platform to get a project management system.


And inside of Conversions for Clients, we even have one cl- click installs for Asana for your onboarding and everything like that. ClickUp, once again, very robust. I think it's got too many bells and whistles for what the average freelancer needs for it to work. Okay, so Notion is our current project management.


Now, when we get into communication, we have Slack, Voxer, Help Scout, and Zoom. These have pretty much been tried and true for forever and ever, amen, right? We've used Slack since I started my business. [00:11:00] For me, this is only how I communicate with Janessa. So this is our team Slack. This is me and Janessa chatting away.


Voxer is how I work with clients, and that is my one-on-one Strategist Society clients and my one-on-one consulting clients. I don't love Boxer for my one-on-one consulting clients. I'm just gonna be really honest with you. When I was u- working with retainers, I had them in Slack, and I would... If I was taking on more retainers now and running only a retainer-based business, I would go back to Slack in a heartbeat.


100% go back to Slack. Or I actually have changed my mind about this. With HoneyBook having the emails all in there, I would almost do email and have everything run through email. I think Slack can get scope creep. You have to have really strong boundaries. I'm someone with really strong boundaries, so I can ignore it.


I see a lot of people answering their Slack on the weekends and stuff because they don't have s- strong boundaries. And in that way, I would go to email, but [00:12:00] I'd keep it going through HoneyBook, not your email service provider. Then Voxer, that is where I communicate with Strategist Society members and one-on-one with me, and I think it's massive.


If you've listened to our episodes, they all say that they don't know how I manage 60 people and know the conversations and know what's going on in their life. But it's because, to me, every single one of them is family, and just like when I talk to my family on a daily basis, I'm talking to them on a daily basis.


I don't need my family to recap what they've told me. I know it. And so it's the same way. Voxer really works for me for one-on-one support for our Strategist Society clients. Then Help Scout, this is where all of our emails go through. We have used this forever. Janessa runs this. I do not. I maybe log in once a month, but this is how she assigns any emails that we need.


She can see who's opened, who has responded. She keeps tabs on people, like what's going on in terms of customer support. So this isn't our [00:13:00] email that we're sending out that goes through FGA Funnels. This is email supports that are coming in and things like that. Okay, and then Zoom, of course, we've used Zoom forever and ever and ever for eight years.


So Zoom is how we do all our meetings. I will say that we did change this year. We were doing Zoom for our webinars and our live boot camps, and the quality has just been so degraded when it comes to the clarity of the videos. So we have went to using YouTube Studio and YouTube Live through Ecamm. So but for our weekly calls and stuff like that, we still use Zoom.


That is our go-to Okay, so then we get into podcasts. So once again, this does not matter if you don't have a podcast, but you may want to suggest some of these things to your clients if you, they ask you about podcast hosting. So the first thing we do is Buzzsprout. Now, we've been on Buzzsprout for a long time.


That's what hosts our podcast. If we could cancel it, I [00:14:00] would. But to cancel it means all the players on all the blog posts would have to be switched out, and that, we have over... We're about to hit 300 podcast episodes. We'd have to go back and change 300 blog posts. So to me, it's not worth, the juice isn't worth the squeeze.


And the reason we would get rid of it is not because it's not a good hosting platform, but it's because we have Hello Audio. Hello Audio, we got a lifetime pricing thing, where we can have as many feeds as we need and all that when they first started. So we already pay for Hello Audio each year, and we do private podcast on that.


You can also host regular podcasts, like public podcasts, so in the perfect world, Serve Scale Soar would be housed on Hello Audio. But because of how many episodes we have, it doesn't make sense to move off of Buzzsprout. But with Hello Audio, we do use private podcasts quite a lot. Strategist Society members, they have all of our calls and everything go on the Strategist Society.


[00:15:00] In Certified, we have our content, like the actual course curriculum, it's on a private podcast, plus all of our Q&As. We do Hot Off The Press for Certified. That's a private podcast. We also do conversions for clients. All of our Q&As are


on a private podcast for them. So we really try, try to use the private podcast in a way to serve our students, so no matter if you're, like, going in carpool line or running around doing dishes or whatever you're doing, that you don't have to sit down in front of a screen, but you can pop your headphones in and listen to me on the go, which a lot of our students do.


So we love that we have the private podcast feature And then the way that we edit all of our content, so podcast, video, what I'm recording in right now is Descript. We've used Descript for years now, and that's just a video editing software. You can also record in there. It has some AI features. But we just keep on keeping on, 'cause that's what we've always [00:16:00] used.


So Descript is our editor for all videos and podcast. Okay, so now let's get into AI. What AI am I using? I use Claude probably every day. So that is our go-to AI that we're using. If I'm making images, I go to ChatGPT. Also, we have some really cool bots that we use from the Chasing to Chosen. And the Chasing to Chosen workshop has two bots that are so good.


Even now, they're just so good. And so we use ChatGPT for that, for that workshop so we can share them with you. We also use ChatGPT for images, of course. I use Perplexity for deep research. So if I need to do some deep research... Also, this is what I teach to pull numbers and businesses for your audience.


If you're looking for cold calling, cold emailing, that kind of thing, deep research, I usually use Perplexity. Manus we use to pull ad [00:17:00] reports, so that's all connected. We go over that in my ad copy shortcut of how we use these different ones. And then Claude is definitely our main one, but Manus I use to pull reports from Meta.


ChatGPT I use for graphics. And then Perplexity maybe once a month for deep research. I do not pay for Perplexity. I do not pay for Manus. I'm on free for both those. Claude, I have the $100 plan. ChatGPT, I have the $20 plan. I use... And then personally, not in business, but I use Gemini a lot in my personal life, and I think it's easy just 'cause I can pull it up on my phone.


But it's very "Hey, is my sourdough starter ready?" type deal. Like, how are you thinking my bolt fermentation's going? That kind of thing. But I don't really use Gemini that much for business. Okay. So then we get into miscellaneous. This is ones that I didn't really have a place for that worked well.


Of course, we use Google Drive. That's our email, [00:18:00] support@brandimowlestraining.com. That's our email. That's also, That is where we house all of our documents, stuff like that, in the Google Drive, shared drive for Janessa and I. Then, no surprise, we use Canva. We've used Canva for eight years now. That's how we do all of our graphics.


And then Showit is our website. So I wish I could go back... Once again, we have th- almost 300 episodes of the podcast, so there's no moving. There's just no way to move over. We have our website on Showit. I never, ever log into the website. Janessa does to upload our blog posts. So our blog posts are always updated.


The rest of it is not updated 'cause I never log into it, and I think websites are so silly. I want a sales funnel, I don't want a website. But we have one. We built it on Showit. If... We had Showit before we had FG Funnels. If I could go back now, I would just have my website on FG Funnels, connect it to WordPress, have the blog with all of our podcast episodes on that.


But it's [00:19:00] not... Once again, the juice isn't worth the squeeze to move, right? So our website is on Showit with a WordPress blog that's connected to it. Yeah, if I could go back and do it again, I wouldn't make that same decision, right? It was very much about the aesthetics, and now I can build very, very pretty pages with code in Claude that look just as good as my current website.


So I probably wouldn't go that route. If you have FG Funnels, I would just use that. Or you could even make websites now with AI and stuff where you don't need that. Our str- our Conversions for Clients, y'all have your Work With Me page websites on Canva. Showit is such an expense, and it's, it's an expense that every time it goes through, I get annoyed because I would do it different, but once...


I just don't think the juice is worth the squeeze, right? Okay, then money management, QuickBooks, another one that I do not ever log into. My bookkeeper does QuickBooks. I could log in there, if I wanted. She sends me my [00:20:00] report. That's all I need. So I'm very rarely ever in QuickBooks. Okay, and then 16 is member.io.


This used to be called Searchie. We have used this for seven years. It's Stu McLaren's business and we use it for housing all of our videos. That's how we have transcripts, captions, all of that. It has all of our videos. Also, Conversions for Clients is housed in membership.io. It was always called Searchie, so now I have to remember.


It's membership.io. So we use that for Conversions for Clients. It makes a really great experience. Strategist Society was on there. We just recently moved it over to FG Funnels as well, because we have the community feature. We never had a Facebook group for Strategist Society. We have the community feature, which I think everyone really likes.


It's a super active group, and it's attached to their hub now. So we do use membership.io pretty much to house all of our videos and for Conversions for Clients platform. So most of you are [00:21:00] not gonna need something like that. Okay, so let's talk about the three that when I was talking to Janessa, we were like, "These are the ones that we wish we could cut, and we're in the middle of moving off of."


One is Airtable. We use Airtable currently. Before we went to Notion, we used Airtable for, like, all of our databases, our forms. It's how Janessa also does payment stuff like, whenever someone purchases something from us, it goes over to Airtable, which is great. Also, then it tracks the payments. So it comes through, and it'll say "Okay, Susie made a pa- Conversions for Clients, bought Conversions for Clients.


She's on the 12th pay." So she paid $197, and then each month that she pays, there's another zap that goes off that shows that she has 10 payments left or whatever it is, and then if it's a failed payment, Janessa gets notifications. That's h- all of Janessa's world, not mine. I don't do anything with Airtable anymore.


So that is where Janessa does all her payment [00:22:00] stuff. That I don't know what the process would be to move over. So at this point we'd like to move over to Notion. We just don't know what that would look like, and if Notion has the capabilities. We're pretty sure it does, but we'd have to figure that out.


So that is one area where we would like to move off Airtable, but we're not there yet. And then the second one is AtEvent. We just paid for AtEvent in May, and then I found out that we didn't need it anymore. There are some really cool things that you can do with Claude and embedding code and stuff into your webpages and your buttons, where when people clicks it, click the button, it adds them to their calendar without needing something like AtEvent.


Right now, what AtEvent does is when people click it, they can subscribe to our event. If we're doing a boot camp, they click the button, they can add all the dates to their calendar. Claude now, I was able to, like- work in some code on a page and a button where it has the exact same effect as AdVent [00:23:00] does.


And so we would be able to get rid of AdVent and use a Claude code in order to code those things. We just paid for it, so we still have it for another year. But come next year, we will be able to cancel AdVent. Then Zapier we only need right now because we have Airtable, so we have been able to move a lot of our Zap stuff down, so I'm thinking we're gonna be able to downgrade soon.


But because FG Funnels, High Level, they have a lot of built-in Zaps now internal web hooks and stuff. We don't use Zapier as much as we used to, but we still have to use a lot of it from going from Airtable and stuff like that with the payments that Janessa uses. So Zapier, I think, is becoming less and less needed as other companies build in these thir- third-party integrations where you don't need something like that.


So that is where we're at with those three is Airtable, AdVent, and Zapier. I don't think any of y'all need AdVent, Airtable, or Zapier, and we're working our [00:24:00] way through it. So that is our tech stack. I don't think we're forgetting anything. The only one that I was thinking of as I was going through this that I did forget to mention is that we use Ecamm.


Ecamm is just how when I do our boot camps and stuff, I'm able to stream to YouTube and have all the cool sound effects and backgrounds and all that kind of stuff. But that is something we use, and that's also the platform I record any course content in. So if I'm doing updates for conversions for clients or something, I'll record in Ecamm so I can have the switcher, I can pull stuff up on my screen and stuff like that.


But that would be the only one else. So that is what we use. My... Besides payroll, our next biggest expense is software. But every year, we've been able to cut it lower and lower as the software we continue to use improves and gets better. All of this, I think my software... It's hard to say how much I spend each month on software because [00:25:00] we pay for the year with a lot of stuff.


FG Funnels, we pay $1,000 a year. I pay all of that upfront. HoneyBook, I actually don't have to pay for because I'm a top affiliate, so that I don't. Notion, I think we pay $43 a month for two of us, so that's with two of us, on a higher level plan. Slack, I think we're on the... That one is not a Brandi question, that is a Janessa question.


Voxer, I am on Pro. I think that's 20 bucks a year. It's cheap. Help Scout is more expensive. Help Scout, I don't know how much we pay, but I know it's several, several hundred for the year. Once again, we pay for the year, so I don't pay monthly, but Janessa's in there. But I do know it's 500 or something a year.


Zoom, we're on the 14.99 a month plan, so we are on that plan. We don't need anything more than that. Buzzsprout's $10. Hello Audio, we pay $1,000 a year for that, so once again, a yearly pl- [00:26:00] payment. Descript, I pay for the year. I have no idea how much it costs, to be honest with you. Claude, I already told you I pay $100 a month for.


Google Drive, we pay the 14.99 or whatever it is for that. Canva, I pay for the year, so I have no idea how much that costs, but we pay for the year for Canva. Showit is $500 for the year, which I know that because it annoys me every time we pay it. QuickBooks, I think I pay, Oh, I don't even know.


It's whatever the lowest monthly one is. And then Membership.io, we pay 1,000 a year. Oh, and then one I did forget that we use is 'cause I've never in it and neither has Janessa, is Gusto. So Gusto, we pay $43 a month, and Gusto is what r- runs my payroll. So I'm the only one on payroll in that sense.


Janessa's a contractor, not an employee. So Gusto runs my payroll, which takes care of putting my [00:27:00] stuff into retirement, takes out our payroll taxes to pay the state, sends me my W-2 check. So Gusto is our payroll provider. So that is all of our tech stack. It's definitely... I feel like some things that we could...


I wish we could move off of, but we are someone who's constantly looking through and seeing what we're paying for, and is this necessary still this day? We have definitely cut down how much we spend on software. As AI has rolled out, how can we streamline it? Mine's not so much about how much we're paying, because we have good profit margins.


Mine's more of, like, how can we streamline this so we don't have so many software that we use? So that's what I got for you. I hope this was fun and helpful. We'll link up as much that I talked about today. There are some special codes that you can do. I highly suggest HoneyBook in a hurry. If you haven't done that, we'll link that up in the show notes.


And then also, if you have questions about any of these, send me a [00:28:00] DM on Instagram. I love talking tech stack. I love talking simplifying our tech stack, and I am happy to answer any of your questions that you have about anything that we use in our business. Okay, my friends, until next time, go out, serve your clients, scale your business, and soar into the success you deserve.