Founders tell us three mundane things about running businesses that are anything but

Rinse and repeat.

Startups pride themselves for operating lean. At the very early stage, taking advantage of free or low-cost business utilities from WiFi to open-source software means lesser operational costs. For the founding members, it also means taking up multiple roles and the inevitable scenario of self-learning be it with coding, sales, creating legal documents and so forth.

As the business matures, the volume of work increases and so does the manpower needed to handle the tasks. At this stage, your business processes and operational playbook must also be ready to scale. Yes, it’s the mundane, day-to-day things and these Founders tell us why they are anything but mundane.

1. Creating Agreements and Contracts

When we were new and ignorant, we got a few bad experiences with demanding clients. There were too many stakeholders, the project timeline dragged, the scope of work exceeded, there were clashing opinions on what an effective presentation should be and we were undercharging. These taught us big lessons on the importance of a well-crafted project agreement.

Now our contract is 11 pages long! While it is long, it helped a lot in aligning expectations, protecting both the clients’ interests and ours. It also minimises tonnes of possible complications during the project engagement. Processes are refined and new frameworks are developed to improve the overall experience.

–Koh Kai Xin, HighSpark

e27 Pro-tip: Need help with your startup’s legal documents – term sheets, agreements, checklists and whatnot? Check out these free legal templates especially for Southeast Asian startups.

2. Hiring and HR Administration

Tech entrepreneurs often do not have enough experience in human resources, which causes them to neglect this very important field. They do both recruitment and HR administration tasks themselves, which results in higher expenses and slower administration process that can lead to labour disputes and lawsuits. This mistake can easily be prevented by hiring experienced HR professional or by outsourcing all HR tasks to third-party agencies.

HR automation can also help companies free up their HR department workers and enable them to do their job more efficiently. Calculating benefits, payroll and work hours or managing health insurance are much easier and faster with the help of employee management software.

–Oscar Waterworth, Bizzmark Blog

e27 Pro-tip: If you’re in Singapore, look no further. Check out these home-grown HR tech startups who might just be able to help you manage your growing team.

3. Product Marketing

Of late, marketing technology (martech) has gained steep significance, but taking up these tools can prove a bit intimidating for business owners. Well, the intimidating element is rightly justified because these tools can be complex to use and learning them can be a time-consuming affair. Alas, this means that companies are missing all those products that can help in making life and business much easier.

Thankfully, there are low-cost and even free tools that could be used for departments such as marketing and tech that you can implement from day one to start collecting precious customer and audience data.With these solutions, you could boost your revenue, optimise your time, effort and money. 

–Lisa Coffey, IB.com

e27 Pro-tip: Marketing tools work best when you have a solid content marketing strategy for inbound leads coupled with your usual outbound efforts. With your leads coming into your landing page, be proactive and establish best practices to convert your visitors into paying customers.

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Enjoyed reading? These are excerpts from some of our most popular guest contributors this month. If you would also like to be a guest contributor on e27, visit our contributor page today. We look forward to hearing from you!