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7 Tools Female Entrepreneurs Should Use to Get a Competitive Edge
The business world is a dog-eat-dog world, and there’s always a bigger dog. It’s no short of a battlefield, and since all’s fair in love and war, the only thing that makes sense is always doing your best to be a person with a bigger gun.
The best way to outgun your opponents in the 2024 business world is to embrace all the most efficient, latest business tools. With that in mind, here are the top seven such tools that female entrepreneurs should definitely use to get a competitive edge.
CRM
With a good CRM, you can get a much better idea of who you’re dealing with. A lot of entrepreneurs base their business plans on data provided by others. This third-party data can be quite misleading, so why not focus on first-person data instead? You can gather your own data and use CRM to process it.
With the right CRM, you can keep track of all customer interactions, but the real challenge lies in finding the right tool for you. Ideally, your decision of which tool to use will be based on thorough research, with Alice Martin from Techopedia recommending reviewing factors such as functionality, scalability, pricing, and reputation before making a choice.
Another thing you need to consider is the importance of a centralized customer database. It’s great to have a lot of data on your clients, but keep in mind that you also want to have it all in one place so that you can make it more usable.
You want to conduct better and more accurate analytics, as well as handle an easier customer profiling process. It’s much easier to make a great offer if you know exactly who you’re talking to.
Project Management Software
Another thing you want to use is project management software to organize tasks and deadlines. This is equally as important, regardless of whether you’re developing a new app, enhancing your start-up website, or conducting a digital marketing campaign.
It simply gives you a way to keep your team collaboration in one place and better organize all your daily tasks and processes. The thing you need to understand here is that this is not just something for remote teams. Most modern offices use it because it’s more efficient than a whiteboard.
Moreover, it’s subtler than a whiteboard, which is important to a lot of modern office workers. People find the modern workplace as anxiety-inducing as it is, but the idea of keeping all their daily tasks on display for all to see makes them feel extra pressure. This is just a more elegant way to handle this issue.
Such a tool will also give you a more elegant way to monitor your project progress. You can integrate them with time-tracking features and enhance the dashboard further.
Social Media Management Tool
The next thing you must do is schedule some of your posts in advance. This keeps you more organized and ensures that you’re not just running one of those businesses that are trying to make it day by day. You need a long-term plan and a social media strategy; having a tool will ensure continuity and consistency.
Different platforms and different industries have different ideal engagement times. If you track engagement metrics, you can program your posting schedule for maximum efficiency. Sure, you can always go and take a look at a chart regarding what are the optimal posting times and trends for various social networks but it’s always better to work with your own data for your own audience.
Remember that you’re simultaneously managing your brand presence on social media, as well as your personal brand. You want to manage multiple accounts easily, and with a platform, this will be a lot easier.
This tool also gives you a simpler way to analyze audience growth. In a way, this helps you measure the results of all your changes and decisions.
Accounting Software
With the help of accounting software, you can make even some of the most complex accounting software into a relatively simple matter. Most importantly, accounting software simplifies financial tracking. It automates most of your transaction recordings, which means that if you ever need something, it will be there and easily searchable.
It also automates invoicing, which is much more important than you think, and it will save you a lot of time.
It helps you track your expenses in real time, which improves the way you manage your day-to-day.
Lastly, it generates amazing financial reports.
Every single one of these issues would be enough to help you get accounting software but together, they make it an opportunity you cannot afford to miss out on.
Email Marketing Platform
With the right email marketing platform, you can automate email campaigns. Why is this important, and how big of a difference does it make? Well, take it this way. Even with a good template and years of experience, an average email marketer can manually send hundreds of emails. A good platform can send tens and hundreds of thousands.
Because they’re all AI-based, these tools can help personalize email content to an absurd level. They do more than just market segmentation; they do an in-depth analysis that makes you feel like every email is hand-written for that exact recipient.
The tool also tracks open and click rates, which means that you get to track the efficiency of your email marketing campaign in real-time.
Lastly, it can help you with building and segmenting email lists, which was always one of the hardest (and the most hated) administrative tasks.
Cloud Storage Solutions
Modern female entrepreneurs are remote workers, which is why it’s imperative for them to be able to easily access files from anywhere. They’ll receive tasks and submit tasks while half a world away, and this is a lot easier with cloud storage solutions.
The reason why this is so great for collaboration is that it provides you with secure file-sharing options.
You get to collaborate on documents in real-time and track all the changes because every activity leaves a digital footprint. This is amazing for tasks like version control.
Most importantly, you get to back up important data automatically. You don’t have to invest any effort into it.
Online Payment Processors
Charging for your work sounds easier than it is, which is why online payment processors are so popular. They make the concept of payment collection easy and effortless. Whoever had to do this the old-fashioned way knows just how big of a drag this can actually be.
You also get access to secure transaction processing, which is a service that companies of the past had to pay a hefty sum for.
These tools also accept various payment methods. This versatility gives your customers freedom of choice and avoids turning this into a massive bottleneck.
Lastly, you will get an easy method to track your payment history.
With every tool, you’re making one aspect of your job a lot easier
Remember that each of these tools either resolves a problem that you have or helps you get more efficient at a task that you’re currently dealing with. The old rule that if something isn’t broken, you shouldn’t fix it doesn’t really translate as well to the business world. Here, every improvement is welcome (and likely overdue). With these tools, you can introduce the positive change in question the easiest.
A new Female Health Hub launched by the English FA will support women and girls in grassroots football in England with trusted advice on health issues affecting play.
The hub brings together expert-backed guidance, practical tools and player insights in one place, giving women and girls practical advice and reassurance on female health in football.
It has four core aims: to help women and girls better understand their bodies and how female health affects performance and participation, to educate players on key health topics and when to seek further advice or support, to provide practical strategies to help navigate common female health challenges, and to help break down taboos and normalise conversations around female health in football.
Users of the hub will also be able to hear directly from members of the England women’s national team, who share their own experiences of navigating female health matters while playing at the highest level of the game.
“Our ambition is to create a game where women and girls can thrive,” said Sue Day, the FA’s director of women’s football.
“To achieve that, it’s essential that players feel supported in environments that understand and respond to their female health needs.
“We’ve heard directly from grassroots players that they want better information and support around female health, but that they often don’t know where to find it.
“The launch of the Female Health Hub marks an important step in changing the landscape.
“We want every player to feel confident in her own skin and supported without judgment, so she can feel empowered by her body, rather than held back by it.”
The platform was launched following research conducted by the FA that highlighted the need for better education and support around female health in football.
According to the FA, 88 per cent of adult players surveyed said their menstrual cycle has an impact on their ability to train or play, but 86 per cent reported they had never received education about the menstrual cycle in relation to football performance and training.
The research also found 64 per cent of women experience issues related to sports bras or breast health while playing football, despite sports bras being considered one of the most important pieces of playing kit.
Players also expressed strong interest in learning more about injury prevention, at 87 per cent, nutrition, at 84 per cent, and mental health, at 77 per cent, in relation to female health.
The first phase of the Female Health Hub focuses on three of the most requested topics: menstrual health, breast health and injury resilience, with further content to follow, including nutrition and pelvic health guidance.
The Royal College of Midwives (RCM) has referred to the women’s health strategy as a ‘missed opportunity’ to address maternity services.
The renewed strategy was released by the government this week, with the aim of putting women’s experiences at the centre of care and ensuring they are “better heard and served”.
However, the government stated that because of ongoing investigations into maternity services across the country, the strategy “does not seek to address safety in maternity and neonatal services”.
The RCM described this as a “missed opportunity” and urged the government to ensure that, following the inquiries, maternity is placed “at the very heart” of the strategy.
Gill Walton, RCM chief executive, said the college was “deeply disappointed” that maternity services “do not feature as a headline priority” in the renewed strategy.
She said: “This is a significant missed opportunity and one that is very difficult to understand.
“Pregnancy, birth and the postnatal period are not a footnote in women’s health – they are one of the most significant and consequential phases of a woman’s life.
“A strategy that treats maternity as an afterthought is not truly a women’s health strategy at all. It is exactly the kind of thinking that has allowed maternity services to reach the point they are at today.”
Walton acknowledged that the strategy contained commitments on ensuring women’s voices shape their care, on supporting families through pregnancy loss and on the principle that services should be held accountable when they fail to listen to women.
She added: “But a strategy that addresses one part of women’s health while leaving maternity care behind is only doing half the job.”
Walton urged the government to ensure that this is addressed when the ongoing investigations into maternity care conclude, with any recommendations placed “at the very heart of this strategy with the seriousness and urgency that women, families and midwives deserve”.
In the foreword to the renewed plans, health and social care secretary Wes Streeting referred to the ongoing independent National Maternity and Neonatal Investigation as action being taken by the government to improve safety in maternity services.
The strategy also refers to the new National Maternity and Neonatal Taskforce, chaired by Streeting, which aims to help deliver “safer, more equitable care” for women, babies and families.
The foreword said that, because of ongoing initiatives, it was “important that this work continues without restriction and that the government can properly respond to the findings”.
It added: “This renewed women’s health strategy therefore does not seek to address safety in maternity and neonatal services other than that related to women’s health before and during pregnancy and the actions we are taking immediately to improve maternity and neonatal care.”
The strategy does, however, include plans to prioritise health education in schools, communities and healthcare settings to “empower women” with the “knowledge and tools they need to help control their fertility” and “prepare for the best pregnancy outcomes.
It also promises to provide women with access to “safe and high-quality contraception, abortion care, fertility services, preconception care and support after pregnancy loss in convenient settings.
Article produced in association with London Pregnancy Clinic and Jeen Health
For the majority of couples planning a pregnancy, genetic testing is not something they think about until a problem arises.
Pre-conception genetic carrier screening challenges this approach by identifying risk before pregnancy begins.
As panel sizes have grown and at-home testing options have become widely available, carrier screening is transitioning from a niche clinical referral into a mainstream component of reproductive planning.
What Carrier Screening Tests For
Being a carrier of a genetic condition means carrying one copy of a variant in a gene associated with that condition, without being affected by it.
In most cases, carriers are entirely unaware of their status.
The clinical significance of carrier status emerges when both members of a couple carry a variant in the same gene: in this scenario, each pregnancy carries a one in four chance of resulting in a child who inherits two copies of the variant and is affected by the condition.
The conditions most frequently included in expanded carrier screening panels include cystic fibrosis, spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), fragile X syndrome, sickle cell disease, and a range of metabolic and enzyme deficiency disorders.
The Beacon 787 carrier test, offered by Jeen Health, screens for 787 conditions from a single sample, making it one of the most comprehensive panels currently available to UK families.
Who Is Most Likely to Benefit
Any couple planning a pregnancy can consider carrier screening. It is particularly relevant for:
- Couples with a family history of a known inherited condition
- Those from populations with higher carrier frequencies for specific conditions, including Ashkenazi Jewish, South Asian and African communities
- Couples pursuing fertility treatment, where genetic information informs treatment planning
- Those who wish to have the most complete picture of their reproductive health before conception
Importantly, being a carrier of a condition does not mean a child will be affected. It means there is a defined statistical risk that can be quantified, discussed and planned for with appropriate clinical support.
How the Test Is Performed
Carrier screening is typically carried out on a blood or saliva sample.
For at-home options such as the testing offered by Jeen Health, a cheek swab collection kit is dispatched to the patient, the sample is returned by post, and results are delivered digitally within a defined turnaround period.
In-clinic carrier testing may use a blood draw and provides the advantage of immediate access to a clinical consultation at the point of result delivery.
London Pregnancy Clinic offers genetics counselling through its partnership with Jeen Health, allowing couples to receive and contextualise carrier test results with expert support.
Genetic counselling before and after testing is recommended by Genomics England as a standard component of any genomic testing pathway.
What Happens If Both Partners Are Carriers
If both partners are identified as carriers for the same autosomal recessive condition, they are typically offered further counselling to discuss their options.
These may include proceeding naturally with an awareness of the risk, using prenatal diagnosis (CVS or amniocentesis) during pregnancy to test the fetus, or pursuing preimplantation genetic testing (PGT) in the context of IVF, which allows unaffected embryos to be selected before transfer.
The purpose of identifying carrier status before pregnancy is to give couples time to consider these options without the added pressure of an ongoing pregnancy.
Knowledge of carrier status does not remove reproductive choices; it expands the information available when making them.
The Role of Pre-Conception Services
Carrier screening sits within a broader category of pre-conception care that includes fertility assessments, general health optimisation and, where relevant, management of existing conditions before pregnancy begins.
London Pregnancy Clinic offers pre-conception services encompassing fertility investigations, genetics counselling and carrier testing as part of an integrated 0th trimester approach, allowing couples to address genetic and clinical risk factors before their pregnancy starts rather than after.
Disclaimer: This article is produced for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.
Clinical guidance referenced reflects published NHS, NICE and RCOG standards as at March 2026. Individual circumstances vary; readers are advised to consult a qualified healthcare professional before acting on any information in this article.
This piece was produced in association with London Pregnancy Clinic and Jeen Health, which provided background clinical information for editorial purposes.
Hyperlinks to external sources are included for reference only and do not represent an endorsement of any product, service or organisation.
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