How to save your time and make your business efficient and automatic? Real lifesavers! (A Founder’s Toolkit and Guide) Part 1
About Me
I founded Vast Dreams, a software services business in April 2020, and have learned from various costly mistakes on how to survive and the tricks to use in business.
When reading you will think, this is too much effort, well you either put this effort in now or feel the pain throughout.
Navigating This Guide
Lesson 1: Pretty Sells
Lesson 2: Create Each PDF or Email to Perfection
Lesson 3: When you send messages and emails, break them down into dot points
Lesson 4: Never forget the funny bone #PersonalOpinion
Lesson 5: The real deal starts here with storing everything you do
Lesson 6: Do not waste
Lesson 7: Make meeting notes
Lesson 8: Tracking Tasks
Lesson 9: Be Conservative in spending and not in asking
Lesson 10: Build a reserve from your profits
Documents and Business Processes are important so trust me and start with this
As you grow, it is inevitable you will have to deal with more and more emails, documents and content creation in its various forms. Whether this is technical documentation, cost breakdowns, client proposals, resource tracking, marketing concepts or task allocations. You will find this to be your hell if you do not focus on templating everything you do to avoid repetitive tasks.
Lesson 1: Pretty Sells
The first thing you should do with your time is to create a branding and colour guideline. Soft designs are what is hot.
If you are a founder/entrepreneur and do not know how to design, you then need to learn. My favourite design tool is Figma and there is plenty of guides to help you figure it out, I prefer youtube videos. This tool is a bit hard to start with but once you get used to it, you will fall in love. Below are the guidelines our Design Lead, Tanmay, made for Vast Dreams and its documents.
Do not be scared to suck, your logo will change, so will your branding, it is only natural that you improve over time. The aim is to get it done, not perfect the first time, this is why you version things. This branding guideline was achieved in version 6, our first logo was two dragons with no colour guidelines. Yeah, then I thought it was a great idea for a software development company focused on business automation solutions and startups with banking customers to have this logo :)
Now start making a presentation about what your company does, and try to make it as beautiful as you can, just make sure your structure is right.
I find this structure the best:
- Introduction and Brief Summary
- Your Vision and why should someone care?
- What is it that you solve or serve? Use divisions if necessary, for example, RPA & IoT solutions, AI & Big Data Solutions etc.
- What are your strengths and who is your team?
- Who are your clients or testimonials and a summary of how you solve problems? Include your traction and boast about your achievements.
- Introduce past work if in services or case studies, if a product a use case in the form of a story.
- Introduce your partners and sponsors, tell them how to contact you and then finish with a graceful Thank You.
Why should you create this Introduction Document?
- It gives you clarity of what you do, just because you think you know what your company is about until you start explaining it to others, you do not know…
- It also gives you a start of something to copy from for all the other things.
The most important skills a founder has is being able to copy the relevant to reduce workload.
Lesson 2: Create Each PDF or Email to the best you can
Believe it or not, improving how you to present things and how you sound when you write, can be the difference between a closed deal, and a dud. Even if the email is to your employees, being concise is very important. Quality is a long term investment, so start now, those templates we are making with the extra quality will only compound over time. I use Grammarly to perfect my sentence structure.
Lesson 3: When you send messages and emails, break them down into dot points
Having dot points help, see how easy a ready it made this? Especially if you are sending this to busy people, like CEO’s, get in the habit!
- Saves time reading
- Easier to track for the reader and you
- Categorises the points
Lesson 4: Never forget the funny bone #PersonalOpinion
A well put sense of humour can do miracles for your business and your mental health.
Lesson 5: The real deal starts here with storing everything you do
I store each email I send and label it, allocate a category. For example, if I send a client an email about clearing a dependency, I will label it with Industry: Construction, Type: Dependency, Service: RPA and Addressed: Founder. This will slowly build your folders, I use Figma so it is easy for me to see the text side by side and navigate, you need to carefully structure your navigation so it is easy to copy-paste and access. Each time I edit the email sent before for a similar response, and then improve it when I send 5 of the same emails, I create a general template of response. There you go you have just created a business process for responding to clear dependencies for your RPA service in the construction industry to founder level communications. Now just put it in your sorting system, I am creating a framework for organising so this is easier to categorise in my portal, if you want to also have it, email me at abhishek@vastdreams.com.
Lesson 6: Do not waste
So you have created a cool sorting system where you can organise your documents and emails efficiently as part of your lead management strategy? Well, don’t just keep it to yourself, white-label it and SaaS it, then sell it, or give it away for free to earn goodwill!
Lesson 7: Make meeting notes
Whether during or after the meeting, date it, summarise it and categorise it. Currently, I use google sheets to do it. Why sheets, I am used to collaborating with it.
Remembering actions and information about people can be really hard when all you start doing is talking to people, so take time to organise it until you have a personal assistant to do it for you. This too I am creating a program for, email me? See I am upselling you something I have not even created to a) Gain CF before the product even launches and b) Get an idea about the interest. Waste not even a blogging opportunity to connect and SEO!
Lesson 8: Tracking Tasks
Learn what is Scrum Meetings, Kanban Boards and RAID Analysis. Click the links on them. In a small team do not try and use complicated tools, only use them if you grow, sometimes too many documents and reporting are annoying and destroy innovation when you have 6 people in your team. You can talk to them…
The task managing tool I use: Trello.com, it is free
Lesson 9: Be Conservative in spending and not in asking
Negotiate the salary you give, negotiate a deal by valuing on fair market prices, avoid under billing, especially if you have done a few projects or know the value of your product, track your cloud expense, lower your subscriptions and check your banking fees. You never know when on a rainy day those little saving you do will come in handy. For international transactions, I like using wise.com
Lesson 10: Build a reserve from your profits
Yes, it is tempting to use that money on growing bigger, but say no, instead focus on saving, it will come in handy, trust me it always does when things go wrong, and they always do. How much reserve? 12 Months Operational Expenses. This does not mean 100% profits, do not be silly, a portion of eating each day, week and month. Keep this habit up.
If you find this useful I will continue with part 2 :)
I am the founder of Vast Dreams where we design intelligent systems to make your data work for you.
Get help with your Software Solutions: vastdreams.com
