Tag: Business administration

The nature of deadlines

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

If school didn’t start at 9am what time would we turn up?

If tax returns didn’t have to be done by a certain date, when would we do it?

If childbirth was possible at any age, when would we conceive?

If our stomach didn’t have an eating deadline, when would we feed it?

Nature is smart and builds in deadlines for us.We ought understand the nature of deadlines.

Quite often in startup land we try to shun the usual behaviour of more established institutions like schools and corportations. And in many area this is a valid concept. But as far as deadlines are concerned this is something we should adopt. We should be strict on deadlines in the same way we had exams, and due dates at work. It’s a simple and vital discipline.

Work expands with the time allowed for it’s completion. So the time must be stamped. With an agreed deadline, we must cram to get it done. We must be accountable and our business will benefit.

deadlines

If we don’t embrace the simple discipline of deadlines our more astute competitors will evolve much quicker, and more quickly make their stuff awesome. Deadlines ensure we continue to make our company, product or website awesome. Because each deadline is an incremental improvement. Without deadlines all we end up with is awesome and ever evolving blueprints, which our customers never see, or gain any benefit from.

Startup blog says – embrace deadlines and win.

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Set up costs

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

When starting out in business the first thing we often do is set up the relevant legal structures:

  • Partnership agreement
  • Logo design
  • Business name registration
  • Operating company
  • Holding company
  • Non disclosure agreement
  • Holding company trust
  • Member terms & conditions of product / web usage
  • Specific bank account
  • Small business book keeping software
  • insert other legalese business recommendation here

Startup blog advice is this: Don’t waste your time or money. Get revenue first, register later.

With the only possible exception being a .com registration – which if you’re in the on line world may be an actual requirement to simply operate. No doubt this is contrary to all you’ve read in business guides. Sure, keep accurate cash flow books, run things professionally and stick to project deadlines. The reason for the recommendation is pretty simple. Most startups never get to revenue. If you’re like me you have a hard drive full of business ideas, half written business plans, and a spare room full of product prototypes. Until we have revenue (which doesn’t mean a couple of orders, it means thousands of dollars) we have nothing to protect. It also adds a strong reporting and administration burden which startups could well do without.

sand-castle

So why waste time and money building a fence around nothing? Build the castle first, or at least get the foundations in place. If we follow the lawyers advice, they may be the only people who ever make money from the venture.

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The urgent & the important

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

Lately I’ve been overly focused on urgent things. Urgent agenda items, like fixing bugs, invoicing and administration. They’re kind of like fires, so we must attend to them or things could quickly get out of control. The problem with urgent tasks is that they never go away, they re-appear day after day, and stop us from working on the real projects which will generate value for our users, members customers. In fact, when we are working on the urgent, we are ignoring the important.

urgent

So what we must do is set up systems and infrustructure which deal with the urgent, systems which remove us from the path of the urgent, only then we can focus on delivering value which will result in real startup objectives being met. So today we should stop for a moment and look at our task list.  If it seems dominated by the urgent, we shoud re-callibrate it to focus on the important, which may invovle setting up the systems needed to stop the folly.

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Invoices

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

Today’s task is boring, even hateful. Doing invoices. As with all great ironies, this ought be a task we revere look forward to and basically enjoy. ‘Payment’.

Given we often forget the important stuff we all know. I sometimes write a reminder and stick it to my office wall.

Here’s my pic: (Art’s never been a strong point)

invoices

Yep, I’m reminding myeslf that this somewhat laborious task is actually a cause for celebration, the celebration of hard work as we collect our earnings.

Startups struggling with boring stuff – remind yourself why it’s important!

Steve – founder rentoid.com