Successful business owners know the advantages of scaling through delegation and at the same time, preserving the quality of the service experience. Success is not something you achieve “all by yourself”.

Handing over some of the reigns is something most one-man businesses struggle with.

It makes me think of a good friend who launched her own public relations agency just over a year ago.

She told me about having just acquired two influential new clients, on top of how well some of her existing clients were doing, creating a lot more work for her in the process.

But instead of being happy and excited about her successful venture, she was complaining about the additional workload, and quite apprehensive about how it might increase even more in the future.

“How can I duplicate myself?” she asked nervously.

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When you sell a coat or a bar of chocolate, customer success isn’t necessary.

Those are simple, self-explanatory products that everyone knows how to use.

Even with things like a new vacuum cleaner, customer success isn’t required. A user manual and a hotline is as far as most things go.

With your SaaS product, however, it’s not going to be so easy. Complex analytics platforms, SEO tools, and landing page creators can be set up and used in a variety of ways, solving different problems for customers from marketing agencies, e-commerce stores, factories, and farms.

For software companies, the golden days of unbreakable contracts and technical lock-ins are gone. The industry has diversified, and there are a lot of companies your customers could be choosing over yours, with more attractive branding, master salespeople or better customer success.

When your product needs follow-up and guidance to ensure the customer gets full value, that’s when customer success becomes a must-have.

This is because a customer who speaks to your sales team or reads your landing page is sold on the benefits, not the features.

The customer knows your product can solve their problem, but not exactly how to get that value.

(Click here to skip ahead and get a full high-touch customer onboarding process for SaaS companies)
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The Problem Small Businesses Don’t Want to Admit

Every small business owner is an entrepreneur and a technician, but not everyone’s a manager.

Most people start a small business after working a job that involves ‘making’. Programming, graphic design, SEO, you name it – small business owners usually get their idea when they realize that they could be doing the same thing as they’re doing now and getting rid of their boss.

Motivated by the mythical entrepreneurial drive and true technical experts in their field, founders don’t realize that they can’t just get rid of the boss — they have to be the boss.

Being the boss involves management of time, people and money. While this can be possible if it’s your only responsibility, on top of everything else it will be overwhelming.

Unfortunately, in starting a small business, suddenly you have a boss again – your customers, the amount of hours in the day and your revenue.

This idea, from Michael E. Gerber‘s The E-Myth is key to understanding why small businesses face the problems they do, especially when growing fast.

Don’t worry: that’s where productivity tools come in.

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What happens if you make software too difficult to use? Probably the same thing that happens if you never made it at all — no one uses it.

It’s easy to get users to adapt to familiar concepts like drag-and-drop, but what if you made something totally new? You need a creative user onboarding process, like the one Microsoft used back in 1992 and the others I’m going to look at in this post.

The Software User Onboarding Process

I already talked about concierge onboarding, so this time I’m going to look at the total opposite — a style known as low-touch user onboarding. It’s not always possible to work with every customer, especially if you’re distributing software on a massive scale like Microsoft Windows, so writing onboarding into your product is a necessity.

James Hunt‘s excellent article on Mental Floss reveals the true purpose of Minesweeper, Microsoft Solitaire, FreeCell and Hearts: a gamified way to teach users concepts vital to success using Windows 3.1.

Let’s take a look at exactly how they did it.
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Best Real Estate Apps to Close More Deals This Year

The real estate industry has come a long way since a long-dead entrepreneur decided to rent a part of their farm land to turn a profit. Down the line we’ve seen verbal agreements and contracts written in stone, all the way through to the mass of paper stored in unorganized filing cabinets we’re still unfortunately dealing with.

Even though computers have been widely used by agencies for over 20 years, paper documents are still around causing trouble. Maybe it was software industry’s fault for a long time, but now thanks to Android, iOS and the huge number of productivity tools at our disposal, there’s no excuse to be disorganized

Take a look at the 5 best real estate apps for simplifying your operations and closing more deals.

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[ Download our Free Ebook ] – Click here to download our free 111 page ebook on “How to automate the tasks you hate at work using Zapier“.

As a small business grows, and the number of employees increases, it is no longer possible for the person at the helm, the business owner, to attend to all problems as they arise. Without systems in place, you may find that you are dealing with issues in an ad hoc, time-consuming and often chaotic manner. It will mean that your employees are constantly bringing problems to you and that your business cannot run without you. This can be enormously stressful for you as a manager and frustrating for your staff. Systemisation of your business will be a key factor in helping you create a scalable, sustainable business that operates equally effectively whether you are present or not.

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It may not necessarily occur to the entrepreneur of a one-person start-up company to document the processes and procedures that are followed in the day-to-day running of the business, but as the business grows, there comes a time when it will be vital to have records of how things are done. “Documenting business processes”, or “business systemisation” as it’s also known, will make the difference between a business that plods along with a business owner constantly on the verge of burnout, and one that is successful and grows and prospers, and where the business owner is secure in the knowledge that things will go smoothly whether he or she is on site or not. Here are some of the main reasons why you as an entrepreneur need to document your business processes.

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[ Download our Free Ebook ] – Click here to download our free 111 page ebook on “How to automate the tasks you hate at work using Zapier“.

Communication is a crucial element to success for any business. But for businesses that have an outsourcing operation or runs on virtual teams, communication is life or death. Virtual environments do not have the luxury of being in the same room or building as their co-workers, so the natural communication benefits from working in an office disappear.

Poor communication can lead to lower quality, productivity, and morale across the organization.

Here are 5 tools that can get you and your team back on track and chatting up a storm.

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Andrew Schrage is the co-owner and CEO of Money Crashers, a financial education website that has been featured on Forbes and CNN. Schrage was educated at Brown University and currently resides in Denver, CO.

In this interview, we talked with Andrew about how he designs and documents processes in his organization.

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Many business owners start their business with the desire to create and go it on their own. They want to create a business that generates a healthy income for their family and gives them the lifestyle they desire.

The problem is that most of the time, they end up creating a job for themselves instead.

As the saying goes…

“I want to start my own business so I can work whatever 15 hours a day I choose!”

I know when I started my first business I did it all. Designing websites, creating sales materials, answering the phones, billing, etc. I was the one man show and proud of it.

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