“Dick Costolo, co-founder of FeedBurner and now COO of Twitter, describes a start-up as the process of going down lots of dark alleys only to find that they are dead ends. Dick describes the art of a successful start-up as figuring out they are dead ends quickly and trying another and another until you find the one paved with gold.”

–WV partner, Chris Yeh.

What are you doing to quickly make decisions at your start-up?

Are you going down enough alleys to even determine if they are dead-ends?

About the Author: Elinor Stutz is CEO of Smooth Sale, LLC, International Author, Sales Trainer & Coach, and Motivational Speaker.

Efficiency is a boring subject, but in light of year end and the New Year upon us, it’s important to consider. This will allow you to find more time in your day to focus on your bigger projects.

Tips worth considering:
1. Delete out-dated computer files.
2. Shred manual files no longer needed.
3. Go through your calendar(s), and check off everyone with whom you were to follow-up; if you “don’t feel like it”, send a greeting card!
4. Clean up your email boxes: in, sent, trash.
5. Vow that for in-person appointments you will schedule locales near each other to be efficient with time vs. repeatedly driving across town.
6. Schedule calls and online appointments on particular days to establish a routine; however, flexibility for emergencies is key.
7. Writing a book? Schedule either a set amount of time or pages to be written for each day.
8. Establish your next day schedule the night before; list major tasks to be completed.
9. Use a combined database and calendar to keep on top of follow-up .
10. Create a to-do e-mail mailbox, and never lose track again!
11. Review your customer service policies; check for consistency and that they are reasonable.
12. Build relationships with everyone you meet.
13. Organize your desk; if you need, help hire it out!

Some of these tips may sound like New Year resolutions, but those fade by mid-January. Instead, change your mindset to making these strategies permanent.

Your efficiency will translate to expert leadership and marketing-communication skills attracting new and larger audiences to your business. Prospects will convert more easily to clients and business development will appear to be on auto pilot. You will be closing more sales.

I hope you find these tips helpful and wish you a very Smooth Sale!

When you think of bootstrappers you don’t often think of people who work in the finance realm.  But that is exactly what you find in RJMetrics.

Jake Stein is a co-founder of RJMetrics.  RJMetrics offers hosted business intelligence dashboards and database analytics to companies that operate online and facilitates the real time monitoring and reporting of business data to investors, managers, and advisers.

RJMetrics was described by Jake as :

RJMetrics is a securely hosted business analytics tool for database-driven sites. After profiling thousands of potential investments during our time in venture capital, a trend became apparent: e-businesses had mountains of untapped data in their back-end databases, but managers were unable to produce deep analyzes, keep them current, or use them in business decisions. Based on this insight, we founded RJMetrics to make business intelligence solutions accessible to any company that operates online.

Our QA with Jake about RJMetrics:

Q:  How often have you had to turn down VC overtures?
A:  We’ve turned down overtures from five different investors.  Of course, there’s no way to know if they would have panned out into actual investments if we had pursued them,  but I think at least some of them would have. We like everyone we’ve dealt with, and we know several of them from our prior jobs in venture capital. They would certainly be on the short list if we do take funding.

Q: What is the biggest sacrifice you have had to make having gone the bootstrapping route?
A: Our biggest sacrifice has been narrowing the scope of the problem we address (helping web businesses monitor and analyze the data in their back-end databases). We have a ton of ideas about improvements, features, and ancillary products that we have not rolled out, but I think that is a good thing.

If we had a bunch of cash on our balance sheet and hired a lot of people, it would be tempting to do a lot of things at once. As a resource-constrained company, we have to carefully prioritize everything we do, and postpone or nix anything that will not result in a dramatic improvement.  We are successful if we do a small number of things extremely well, not if we do a decent job at a lot of different things.

Q:  Do you ever see yourself taking a round of funding?  If so, what would be the driver to do that?
A:  I’d say the chances are 50/50 we take funding.  There may come a time when the capital, advice, connections, and resources that a venture firm brings would outweigh what we would have to give up in independence and equity value.  I know that’s not a particularly specific answer, but we don’t have some plan like “When we get to five million dollars in sales, then we’ll get funding to take it to twenty million dollars in sales”.

We have gotten plenty of business so far through referrals and free advertising from some of our popular blog posts and a business intelligence rap video (really), but we may look to augment that with traditional advertising that we fund through an investment round.

Q:  What is the biggest thing you are missing as you bootstrap without the assistance of a VC?
A:  My honest answer is money. The politically correct answer would probably be that we’re missing out on advice, connections, or something like that, but I don’t think we would make significant changes to the business if we took funding today. It would be very nice, however, to get a little bit closer to the salaries we were making when we worked in finance.  We’re focused on maximizing for the long term though, so we’re trading off a little now for (hopefully) a lot down the road.

We are going to try something different at the bible this week. We are going to do a weeklong study of how social media is being used successfully by start-ups.

As you know, we are strong believers in the fact that customer support is the key to growing any company.  Combine that with the fact that Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms are dominating the landscape completely, and we thought it would be important to look at some successful start-ups who are solving customer issues with the help of these tools.

This week you will be exposed to some great companies and their special ways of interacting with their customers using these tools.