It’s tax season! So let’s talk about taxes. TLDR – Hire someone to do them asap, if that hasn’t already happened… To read the article I did on taxes, see: https://www.bootstrappers.mn/post/it-s-tax-season

Previously we looked at founder-led sales. Any organization that finds success in selling then needs to scale a sales team. We’ve looked at basic steps to help founders find success but the ability to grow means finding a sales methodology that works. We don’t operate in on island and can learn a lot from those who came before us. A sales methodology is the phased, or staged approach an organization takes to selling products. There are about as many documented methodologies out there as there are really successful sales teams. This is because every organization is different and most are best left to pick and choose aspects of a methodology…

We work hard to start a company. No matter how hard we try, or how good we are, bad things can happen. Unexpected things. We share the responsibility for those things by getting an insurance policy. It’s never too early to get insurance for the business. Even if incorporated as an LLC there are limits to the protection. Even if not charging for products, we can still be liable for damages occurred in their use. The answer for this is usually errors and omissions insurance. E&O insurance, as we end up calling it to shorten things is a liability insurance that protects the company and the people that work at…

Every organization needs to account for all the dollars and cents that flow through our doors. We can usually handle the basics of a general ledger but even for a sole proprietorship, we will likely need to handle someone to do taxes at a minimum, and often end up with a second to help us with basic accounting throughout the year. The easy stuff is tagging receipts to categorize expenditures and entering money as it comes in. But there are a lot of complicated aspects of accounting that career professionals will need to handle. Especially if we find success and there’s real money being made or raised. As those trusted…

Many a founder will have no experience in sales – and yet selling is one of the most important aspects of our jobs. It’s often the difference between making money and not making money. While we’re building a product, we might ask for feedback from people we consider potential customers. But at some point, we release a product into the world and need people to give us cold, hard cash (or the digital equivalent) to buy or use the product.  To read my article on getting started in sales, see https://www.bootstrappers.mn/post/founder-led-sales

We often see leadership and management used interchangeably but it’s important to keep in mind that they are not the same thing. In fact, while some traits overlap in what it takes to be a great leader and a great manager, they are often quite different. The biggest difference is probably that between the two, leaders have others follow them and managers have people simply work for them. As companies grow, there are paths for leaders and managers. But for small businesses and startups, owners who want to be successful need to be both a strong manager and a solid leader in order to get their team on board while…

House Bill 1668 was introduced in the house in March of 2019 and signed into law in December of 2020 as Internet of Things Cybersecurity Improvement Act of 2020 or the IoT Cybersecurity Improvement Act of 2020. You can read the bill at https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/1668 it’s a pretty long way of saying “hey these IoT devices are computers.” But it certainly needed to be said. Background Grace Hopper developed the first standards for testing computers and programming languages for the Navy, protecting the government in the wake of rapid innovation. Those tasks are now handled by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the result is often guidelines on…

Customer advocacy often starts in the most authentic of ways. A customer tweets something nice about us and we retweet it. It feels natural and in exchange for promoting us we promote them. Maybe another customer posts a link to a blog post on LinkedIn and we share that. We promote them and they promote us. There’s no quid pro quo. There’s no expectation. It’s just natural. Over time, we get busy. Especially in startups. Competing priorities pull us in different directions. We don’t open the social accounts during a mad dash to get a new feature out, get a round of investments, or close some sales. Our interactions go…

Political capital is often thought of as a currency of influence and trust that can be deployed or lost in order to achieve a given goal. We use political capital in various aspects of our lives. Let’s focus on how we accumulate and deploy political capital internally at a startup in this article. To read more about political capital, see: https://www.bootstrappers.mn/post/political-capital

For those in newer fields, the scale of growth in a given profession can feel like a revolution. We’ve gone from a world where organizations mostly get by without a discipline to that discipline driving us towards a better world. That world is increasingly about trying hard to listen and develop empathy for the people they serve. Still looking for productivity gains but also allowing for custom workflows.  To read more about evolving industries, see: https://www.bootstrappers.mn/post/sometimes-it-s-about-evolution-not-revolution