Punctual Payments

imageThere are few things that cause us more paranoia than money. Where is it? How do I get it? Is anyone taking it? When a business provides services and sends its customers an invoice, the expectation is to be paid the proper amount in a timely manner. For some businesses, the timing of payments is a critical component because they need that cash to buy more raw materials to make more products to sell.

One of my responsibilities as COO of influencers@ is to manage all of our vendor relationships, in addition to handling all billing of our customers. Sitting on both sides of the table as a vendor and a customer, I quickly learned the importance of paying on time. Similar to being a good neighbor and not blasting music at 2am, being a good customer and paying your bills on time signals to your vendors that you are honest, trustworthy and value their relationship.

Sometimes, paying on time is not so simple because your customers are waiting for their own invoices to be paid so they can pay you. Consider the follow guidelines to ensure you are a good customer for your vendors by making punctual payments:

1. Organize invoices properly

Whenever a vendor sends you an invoice, be sure to organize it properly so it doesn’t get lost in the shuffle. I work with Eileen Han on our team to log each invoice in an expense form and check that form at the time of each payment period to make sure we don’t forget anything.

2. Keep vendors updated on payment status

Knowledge is power and comfort. Let your vendors know when you have received their invoice and when a check has been sent. If they send you the invoice on the 7th of the month and your company policy is to pay invoices on the 15th, simply let them know that you’ll be sending a check on the 15th.

3. Be brutally honest

If there is ever an issue with paying an invoice, the best course of action is to be completely honest with your vendor. They are business owners too and will likely understand. They might be willing to work out a payment plan or write off a part of the invoice. After all, they want to keep you as a customer and help your business grow so you’ll continue to buy more from them.

4. Treat vendors the way you want customers to treat you

This one is simple – just remember that you are to your vendors as your customers are to you. You would hate it if your customer didn’t pay you on time, so give your vendors the same courtesy that you expect from your customers.

One Goal a Day

“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?

Exceptional Developers = $explanation++;

image“Version Control is an essential part of our engineering process, so I want to make sure you totally understand it,” says David Thor, Lead Developer of ChatterMob, as he begins a Tuesday night lesson on Github for Product Manager Matt Bilotti and I. David proceeds to use a whiteboard to draw out exactly how uploading files and other Version Control tasks are completed. Throughout, he goes slowly and always stops for our exhausting questions. The next morning, I receive an email from David with a new front-end layout he threw together later that night after our lesson.

There are many factors to consider when identifying the best developers, and one crucial element is desire and ability to explain. Similar to Drew D’Agostino, David has an ability to explain complex concepts to technical and non-technical stakeholders. More importantly though, David also has a seemingly innate desire to do so – he prides himself on making wiki documents, doing lessons and even writing detailed articles. At the same time – David is as technical as they come – an architect that has the rare expertise to think 3 steps ahead when building systems that are scalable and adaptable to an ever-changing start-up climate. 

When I hire technical leaders, I want them all to be like David – technical masterminds who also crave sharing their knowledge with others. Teammates like David want the entire team to succeed because they make an extra effort to ensure everyone “gets it” and can contribute when necessary. So, if you are a developer and want to be well respected by everyone on your team just like David is for us, consider the following:

1. Document and comment like crazy

When you work through a process, write it down. Maintain a team-wide wiki that is shared with everyone from designers to the CEO. You never know when something breaks and someone random needs to jump in to help – it’s good to have instructions. 

2. Spend the extra time to explain

Impatience sometimes gets the best of us and encourages us to keep information to ourselves rather than spend an extra few minutes to explain it to someone who is still learning. Great developers understand the power of collaboration and sharing responsibilities. Explain what you are doing to both technical and non-technical people. Stop and spend more time if they are confused. It’ll enable everyone to make better decisions and ultimately act quicker.

3. Think outside the code

While companies like influencers@ rely on the crank culture to push hard through developing products quickly, it’s important to consider when it makes sense to unplug and huddle with the entire team to communicate issues and come to a consensus before you get too deep into a project and have to refactor. 

No More Spreadsheets

image“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.

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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.

The ROI of Smiling

“Good morning, welcome to Unconference!” I said with a smile as hundreds of entrepeneurs, CEOs and students alike trickled into MassTLC’s signature event of the season. 

As a volunteer at the event with Ryan Durkin, my assignment was easy: stand at the entryway and greet everyone that comes in with a smile while directing them into the check-in room. I jokingly thought to myself, “So this is what it is like to be a Walmart Greeter.” But what I quickly discovered is how much of an impact a simple welcome and smile from stranger to stranger is.

If you are in a bad mood, and a stranger is nice to you, you instinctively respond in a nice way back. If you get smiled at, you smile in return and start to feel happier. If someone was coming into that conference after a lousy bus ride or not enough coffee in the morning, my quick smile ensured that they walked in feeling better.

This has important implications for customer service – when one of your customers (sometimes a stranger to you) seems to be on the warpath, ready to scream at anyone from your business, the best way to respond is with shocking kindness and a smile. A straight forward response back that is apologetic, includes action and demonstrates genuine kindness and respect throws anyone on the warpath immediately off. 

Bottom line advice:

  • Smile at everyone
  • Say please and thank you
  • Throw off someone’s anger with genuine kindness

So remember, whether it is at an event or in your office, play the role of a Greeter and keep everyone happy.

Student Startup Dilemma

There is a problem with student-run startups: the vast majority of them flop. They rarely move past the project stage and become real businesses. As the former President of the NU Entrepreneurs Club and the founder of multiple “student run startups” like Quiree, I know this problem well, and I want to solve it.

What causes the problem?

  • NOT talent. Students are as talented, or more so, than their peers who have recently graduated. I’ll hire a student any day of the week and expect huge performance from them.
  • NOT drive. Students these days are more ambitious than ever. They push and push, with the firm belief that they can do anything.
  • NOT lack of resources. Here in Boston we have everything from university programs like IDEA to organizations like GreenhornConnect and Venture Cafe, complete with no-strings-attached $10,000 funding grants and access to the best mentors. 

Instead, the problem is, overwhelmingly: student startups do not solve real problems.

A real problem must have three key attributes:

  • Cost people money. (Remember, time equals money.)
  • Cause people pain.
  • Cause people to seek an alternative. 

The majority of student startups I see—including several of the ones I did myself—focus on alleviating small annoyances and building widgets. A widget is a simple app that might seem novel, but doesn’t really solve anything or have a way of generating cash. These are easy to think of and usually cater to college students. Unfortunately, they are also not designed to grow into the real businesses that student founders think they have the potential to become. 

Now, these “startup failures” can still be fantastic learning experiences and I wholeheartedly encourage any entrepreneurial student to pursue whatever project they are the most passionate about. In order to help guide you in the right direction on what startup project to attack, consider the following:

1. Think outside of the campus. 

While life may seem tough at times, the truth is college students don’t have a lot of painful and costly problems—except perhaps college itself. If college students are your buyer, you better come up with a compelling product that they need. If they are your user, there must be another group (i.e. businesses, advertisers, etc.) that stand to make a lot of money by paying you for having students use the product.

2. Use the three problem points. 

Those three characteristics of real problems should constitute your checklist. Whenever you are considering an idea, ask yourself: “Does my problem cost people money? Is it causing pain? Are people actually seeking solutions?”

3. Gather a ton of feedback. 

Email or cold-call your way into meetings with successful post-graduate entrepreneurs in town and pitch them your idea, while also explicitly asking for genuine feedback. Ultimately, you may need to hear that your idea is not solving a real problem, so you can find a real one to focus on.

4. Build something quickly and see if people will use or pay for it. 

A pretty good indicator of whether you are solving a real problem or not is if people are quickly willing to try it, use it or even buy it. If this is something that will take you months to develop and years to “monetize,” it might not make sense as a student startup project.

5. Ignore the consumer-web giants like Facebook, Twitter, Groupon, etc.

This one is tough because, as students, these are the companies we look up to thinking, "Wow, we want to be just like them.” The harsh reality is that while these are the companies we see and hear about all of the time, the statistical probability of a student startup turning into one of them is so incredibly low, that it might make more sense to learn through working on something more attainable, and leverage that experience to create the next Facebook. Northeastern student Jacob Mulligan’s first venture was painting houses. He made real money and learned invaluable lessons about how to handle cash and manage employees. This was a fantastic experience and should be looked to as a model.

If students consider these points, we’ll all still learn a ton and maybe even have some new businesses, ready to hire. 

Focus for Startups

My head was spinning. Sales seemed to be exploding in growth and service delivery was sprinting as it tried to fulfill all of the new customers that influencers@ marketing agency was getting. My task seemed simple – ensure service delivery can keep up with sales and scale operations to do so. Execution proved to be a lot more challenging and I couldn’t quite pinpoint why. There was more work to do, so we could just hire more people, add a proportional amount of resources, etc. I then stumbled upon an interesting dilemma: sales was selling new stuff that we had never done before. It wasn’t super different, but it was outside of our core competencies, and the processes and people we had in place were not designed/trained to deliver the new services. 

While we absolutely wanted to scale our start-up, we quickly learned a very important lesson: sometimes, scaling up is far more effective than scaling out. Instead of trying to add lots of new services to our offerings that require totally different people and processes, we should instead focus on building up ultra core competencies in a few distinct service offerings, and recruit the very best people to run them.

This is all about focusing on a few key things and not trying to be the best at everything. When you are a huge company you can consider being a “one stop shop”, but start-ups just don’t work that way. Just focus on what you do best, the rest will work out.

My Solution for influencers@:

I broke our business down into 3 core service areas (I call them the 3 Revenue Channels). These are the 3 ways that we make money, the 3 things that our service delivery department must be great at and the 3 things our sales staff must know inside and out. Our entire team sat down around the conference table and went over each of the 3 Revenue Channels in detail, and then I printed them out on a 1 pager and taped it to the walls of the office. 

The results have been strong: we have focus and a common understanding. Everyone knows exactly what areas we are going to scale in and what our goals are. Now we go make it happen.

Welcome to Backend

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been hacking away at my first web application while learning backend development, and I’m thrilled to release Signin App to the world (well, for now the Northeastern Entrepreneurs Club).

It all started with a business case: the E-Club was growing like crazy last year, and as President, it was tough for me to get accurate insight on how many members were attending our events, which events were the most popular, and what demographics of members our club appealed to the most. We relied heavily on disorganized spreadsheets, creating hours of work for Cory Bolotsky doing V-lookups to get an accurate view of member retention.

So, I decided to leverage software to fix that problem. The Signin App is a PHP/MySQL web application that tracks member attendance for any event-driven organization and shows administrators real-time data on who their members are and how events are performing. 

With just the click of a mouse, the E-Club leaders can now find out which events are working, who their most dedicated members are and use that insight to create more engaging events. While the software is being piloted with the E-Club, it could be valuable for many similar organizations.

What I learned:

  • Coding is incredibly valuable to learn. This app revolutionizes a simple business process.
  • You need a real business challenge to learn to code. Online tutorials are not good enough. 
  • User feedback is key. I iterated on the sign-in page of the app 4 times before I got it right. 

So far, users have signed in using the app 1,500+ times. I’m looking forward to gathering more feedback, iterating and seeing how this project might add value to other organizations. 

Calm and Cool Wins the Race

“Slow and steady” wins the race doesn’t work for start-ups; you have to hustle. However, staying calm and cool through the crazy roller coaster ride of building a business is crucial. 

How are we going to do all of these promotions at once? We need so many people and so many resources… and we need them all yesterday. I know we want to grow and scale, but the pressure of scaling this fast is insane.

That was the feeling among my team at influencers@ this past week. Our business has been exploding in growth and as we get more clients and build out ChatterMob, the stress and pressure has built up as well. Tension is high and in times like that, it is really easy to lose your cool, panic and snap at everyone in your path. Leaders: listen carefully… don’t do that. As a leader, your team looks to you to have everything under control, because if you don’t, they might not either. Leaders who panic and snap appear to have no control. Consider the following to remain calm and cool even under the hottest pressure:

1. It’s all in the voice

Speak slowly and clearly. Don’t raise your voice or race through your words. It is amazing how effective this is… give it a try.

2. Speak logically

When there is pressure and agitation, it is easy to jump to circles: spitting out lots of ideas at once and spinning your wheels. Avoid that and instead, express your ideas in logical lists with as few words as possible. For example: “First, we will develop a new recruiting strategy and second we will travel to New Hampshire to execute it next Wednesday.”

3. Identify the Problems

Many times people can’t stay calm because they know there is a problem but cannot pinpoint what it is or the cause… and that is stressful! Figure out what is causing the problem before you start racking your brain on crafting a solution.

4. Stay Organized

It’s tough to be calm when everything is all over the place. Organizing your thoughts, your team and objectives are all helpful in staying cool.

Ask For Help

Some people (including me at one point) are too proud to ask for help. They think success will come if they sit for hours trying to do everything themselves and getting assistance is a sign of weakness. Today, I’d like to squash that theory.

Ask for help. It is one of the smartest moves you can make: getting something done better and faster because you asked someone else to help you make it happen. Even the most legit “experts” are only experts because they asked a lot of people for a lot of help along the way to learn what they learned.

I ask a lot of people for help. When I don’t know how to code something, I gchat Kirill Klimuk. When I have an operations challenge, I call Ryan Durkin. And if I can’t get the P&L statement to look right, I shoot Ed Jaworski an email. If you’re smart, you should compile a list of people like this and ask them for a lot of help. Each time you do, you learn a little bit more and get smarter.

At the same time, you should take every opportunity you can to give help. I talk to Jacob Mulligan about his career options and Phoebe Farber about how much forming an LLC should cost. Do this – and do it a lot. The more people you help, the smarter they become and the smarter you become from teaching.