“Alright class, settle down!” boomed Chris Walsh, my 9th grade science teacher. As the high school freshmen entered the classroom, the first thing each student did was dart to the right side of the blackboard to look at the day’s agenda. Each morning, Mr. Walsh would write the objective for the day, the specific topics the class would be covering, and that evening’s homework assignment. I headed to my desk, confident I could attack the day’s challenging astronomy curriculum because I knew what to expect.

The daily agenda was one of the most effective strategies I saw a teacher use because it kept the entire class on the same page. Everyone knew what was going on and what was expected of them. Both the teacher and students were held accountable for accomplishing the clear task outlined on the blackboard.

As I thought about ways to use this strategy for my team at influencers@, we ended up trying a new idea deemed One Goal a Day. With the help of Eileen Han and Devon Grodkiewicz, we drew a big chart on the whiteboard next to the door with every team member’s name on it. Next to each name is a spot to write one goal that they want to accomplish each day. As everyone walks into HQ, they go to the chart and write one concrete goal that they want to accomplish by end of day.

What is so great about this system? 

1. It keeps people organized

Occasionally, we will get to the end of a day and think to ourselves, “What the heck did we accomplish today?” Writing a goal keeps us on track with a clear path towards exactly what we need to complete.

2. It keeps people accountable

When we proclaim publicly on the One Goal a Day chart that we are going to accomplish something, the rest of the team now knows about it. That social pressure holds us accountable to ensure the task is completed.

3. It forces people to think in the morning

Since writing the goal is the first thing that we do in the morning, it forces us to think about how the business day is going to be a great one before arriving at the office. This way, people are already coming in with a mission, ready to attack it.

What kind of tactics do you use to keep people in your organization on track, organized and accountable?

“Damn, this thing is tough to look at” I thought to myself as I stared at the Campaign Tracker spreadsheet during my first day as COO of influencers@. This master spreadsheet contained all of the information about the marketing campaigns we were working on and was used to keep track of who is working when, locations, payroll and everything in between. As I scrolled through the seemingly endless spreadsheet I could see lists of campaigns we worked on months ago, stacked next to the ones we had scheduled for the next day. Thinking aloud, I mutter “there has to be another way to do this… it may have worked in the early days, but if we want to scale this business we need something better.”

Part of the job of a COO is to analyze business processes and craft solutions to make them more efficient. Our campaign tracking process was a prime example of one in need of serious improvement. In order to improve, I knew that we needed an:

• Appealing view of what marketing campaigns we need to focus on at a given time
• Easy way to track which student Brand Influencers are working on a campaign
• Automation of the time-consuming billing and payroll process
• Effortless reminders for staff regarding when they are working and where to go
• Access to rich data and intelligence on what is effective and not so effective on our campaigns

I quickly realized the best way to improve this process was to leverage technology and software, and thus I decided to code my second back-end PHP project, a web app called Campaign Tracker that has left our old spreadsheet collecting dust in the corner and given our team access to unparalleled insight and efficiency for our service business.

The software takes the same data about our marketing campaigns that was initially entered into the spreadsheet and instead stores it in a database. The simple value of this is that we can pull that data out in a variety of different ways and use it to make better business decisions. Using Campaign Tracker, our Service staff can instantly find out which Brand Influencers are the most effective through ratings on each campaign, how much payroll needs to be issued and a wealth of other vital business statistics. Our senior leaders can use Campaign Tracker to get a quick pulse on our Service division’s performance.

I learned a ton from this project, and am proud of how beneficial it has been for our business. I’m understanding more and more how valuable it is to be a “technical operator” – one who gets both the business side of things and how to use technology to work smarter. I’m excited to continue to learn about how to grow a business and develop great software. 

Special thanks to Kirill Klimuk, Drew D’Agostino and David Thor for their selfless assistance on the many code questions I asked them throughout developing Campaign Tracker.

How fast do you think I can bike from my house to the influencers@ office? Turns out it’s 8 minutes and 51 seconds. I started the timer while standing in front of the house and stopped it when arriving in front of the office. However, that time doesn’t tell the whole story.

Sure, it did take me 8:51 to go from door to door, but is that the time that I care about? Probably not, because we need to take into account turning off the lights, picking up my bike, putting on my helmet, locking the door and going down the stairs.

These are the “little details” that we often overlook, yet they play a key role in making decisions. If I based when to leave on 8:51, I’d be late every day. If I was getting paid for my time and I overlooked those details, I’d lose money. When it comes to business operations, it is critical that we look at the details and account for them in our cost and time projections. In a real business, the small intricacies compound and have a magnified effect.

“Every business should have a team whose entire purpose is to destroy the business”

Sounds a bit insane, but it actually might be one of the more brilliant pieces of advice I’ve heard as I sat at dinner with PXT Payments Chief Marketing Officer Rivka Tadjer (an influencers@ client) last week. Considering the fast pace of today’s business climate (especially in technology and entrepreneurship), if we want to survive, we need to innovate and find new ways to delight our customers before our competitors do. However, many businesses don’t do that. They get comfortable with products or services that people liked last year, and assume they will continue to work in the future. Consider Blockbuster’s bust – when Netflix first came out, Blockbuster management didn’t think much of them.

Now suppose Blockbuster had a crazy internal destruction team. Let’s call them the assassins. When brainstorming “what might mess up our physical retail locations?” online streaming might have made its way into the conversation. The thing that could “destroy” your current business might actually be your next product or service release. 

Even for earlier stage start-ups, we need to constantly be thinking about how our business model and product can evolve. We start early be leveraging lean principals to continuously user test and iterate rapidly (Jason Evanish is my go-to expert there). While it might not be feasable (especially at the early stages with limited capital) to have an actual team dedicated to “business destruction”, you might consider implementing the following at your venture:

1. Make it part of the culture

Everyone on the team should always be thinking about innovating and identifying potential threats to the business. Consider encouraging openness and collaboration where people are comfortable enough to say “look what this other company is doing… this might hurt us, how can we beat them and do it ourselves?”

2. Apply pressure

Blockbuster must have not felt much pressure or anxiety to address Netflix’s entrance and rise in the market. We need to apply pressure that says to teammates “while we are doing a good job now, this won’t be enough to last forever. Lets push harder.”

One thing is for sure, I will be taking Rivka’s advice and making it a part of my regular brainstorming meetings at influencers@. We will always consider what might destroy our business, and align ourselves so potential destruction becomes profit.

The best learning takes place under pressure. While you can observe someone making a mistake and learn from it, it is not nearly as effective as making the mistake yourself. Consider the following challenge I encountered back when I was a 14 year old computer repair technician:

“I can’t believe this thing won’t turn on” I said to Jeremy Blum, my business partner. We had built our first computer for a customer that wanted a custom gaming desktop and it wasn’t working too well… in fact it wouldn’t even turn on. The sleek red case glistened under the glow of the florescent lights in our office as Jeremy and I hovered over the desktop with the side of the case ripped open. “It might be the CPU, we can try that again” suggested Jeremy. “We’ve done that like 3 times now… I honestly just don’t know how to fix this. What are we going to do? It costs $1,300!”

This was one of the biggest challenges we had in our computer repair business: a customer had a problem and we didn’t know how to fix it. In fact, sometimes we broke it more. We were only 14, so $1,300 was a small fortune back then. There was tremendous pressure to perform… there was nobody to bail us out if we did not. In the end, Jeremy and I sat in that office and tried part after part until we eventually got the machine up and running.

If we had a boss that was ultimately responsible for servicing the customer and fixing the computer, Jeremy and I would not have felt that massive pit in our stomachs. It is that feeling though that forced us to learn so much. This is the essence of the learning process – pressure forces you to figure it out.

This is why I am a big believer in responsibility – if you want to learn, you need ownership and pressure. Whether you succeed or make mistakes, you are held accountable. This philosophy is the cornerstone of the culture I was proud to build at the NU Entrepreneurs Club and now at influencers@. It makes things harder and scarier – but pressure is an absolute must if you want to truly learn.