Business: 50 Tips for Early-Stage Entrepreneurs
Hey,
In today's blog post, I'm going to share with you some tips in which an Early-stage Entrepreneur can carry out to find success in his business. The tips for Entrepreneur was carry out by a Business Consultant,Alex Iskold . The 50 Tips are highlighted below. Go through them this might go along way to help you in business.
In
business, we often talk a lot about productivity, email, getting things
done, basic business development and fundraising culture.
Below is a
collection of general tips we give our founders. While nothing is ever
universal, these are generally helpful for any startup, especially for
first-time founders.
Productivity
1.
Prioritize and only do what matters. Avoid busy work and going in all
directions. Say no to stuff that won’t move the needle. See the post on the Power
of no.
2. When
everything is important, nothing is important. Establish a language of P1,
P2, P3 -- levels of priorities. You only do some P1s in practice. Relentlessly
prioritize.
4. Never
add new tasks in front of the queue, add them to the bottom. Complete what you
are doing first. See my post on action lists for more info.
5. Create
and manage your schedule in a calendar. Use time blocks for different types of
calls, meetings, heads-down work and even email, family time and workouts.
6. If it's
not on the calendar, don’t do it. Don’t assume that you will be working on
something unless it is on your calendar.
7. Tweak
how much time you spend on what. Find the combination that works for you.
9. Review
each week ahead of time on Sunday so that you are prepared.
10. Avoid
synchronous communication channels. Use asynchronous ones.
11. Don’t
use chat clients or text messaging -- they are a big productivity killer
because they disrupt your flow. Be respectful of your own time and team’s time
overall.
13. Set a
time expectation and limit for all team meetings. Typically, one hour meetings
are the max. Thirty minutes is way better, unless it's a long
brainstorming session, but even then, break it out into chunks.
14. Be
respectful of other team member’s productivity -- don’t throw in tasks on top
of their queues. This sometimes happens with CEOs, who tend to ask people to
just do something quickly for them. A sequence of the quick things becomes very
hectic and disruptive to the team members, particularly engineers.
15. Take
care of yourself. Take breaks during the day and take time off to rejuvenate.
16.
Regular exercise is highly recommended. Block off exercise times on your
calendar, or it won’t happen.
17. Make
sure you get enough sleep (less than usual but enough). Watch out for signs of
exhaustion.
Email
1. It is a
beast. You need to rule it or it will rule you.
2. Do
not refresh or check for new messages, or have email opened all
the time. It will kill your productivity. Establish specific hours for doing
emails of different types. Read the inbox zero post for pointers on how to
start.
3. Master
CC. Don’t CC people unnecessarily and ask not to be CC-ed when you don’t need
to be. This particularly applies to CEOs, as they tend to want to be in the
loop on everything, and it can be overwhelming.
4. Master
BCC. Quickly move people who don’t need to be on the thread (like someone who
just introed you). Teach other folks to move you to BCC appropriately as well.
Same for reply all. Use your email signature wisely: Put in information
that's relevant and avoid logos and images. They feel heavy and get
filtered.
5. Master
the art of the short email -- two to three sentences or paragraphs max.
Check how it looks on mobile. If you scroll a lot, it's too long. Use the
least number of words possible and iterate on the emails before sending
them out.
6. Be
thoughtful. Do not copy and paste. It is better to send fewer emails that are
thoughtful than more boilerplate messages.
Asking for
introductions
1. Avoid
cold emails if possible. Use your network to get an intro.
2. Good
tools for intros include goconspire.com and LinkedIn.
3. Connect
and continuously build and expand your network on LinkedIn.
4. Master
reading LinkedIn profiles -- for hires, biz development, venture capital. It's
useful to spend time on the profile to understand people’s backgrounds.
5. Always
find relevant people and never ask for open-ended intros. See this post on how
to ask for an intro.
6. Don’t
ask for open-ended intros to VCs and angels. Study and understand what they are
interested in investing in by looking at their portfolios.
7. For biz
development intros, make sure that the person is in the relevant role. Find a few
people who could be right, and check their relationship on LinkedIn.
9. Master
forwardable emails. For someone to intro you, send them a brief and clean email
addressed to the target, so they can forward it and add their part. This makes
it easy to do the intro.
10. Have a
preference for email intros, but LinkedIn intros are fine too.
Scheduling
meetings
1. Get
efficient at scheduling meetings by creating pre-defined time slots for
different types of meetings in your calendar.
Intro call: 15
minutes -- people will love you for sending invites for 15 minutes
and sticking with it.
Intro meeting: 30
minutes -- one hour is a lot, stick with 30 minutes for most
in-person meetings you are traveling to unless the other person is asking
for more time.
If you are
not sure, ask them if you’d need more than 30 minutes. This is true for
business meetings and those with investors. The exception might be if someone
is coming to see you and expects more time because they are traveling to the
meeting.
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