When an emergency strikes, you’ll be glad to swoop in and save your own day.
Over the past decade, I’ve been involved in, founded, and run businesses that have ranged from less than a handful of team members to thousands. Across the board, I’ve noticed one concerning correlation: The larger the team, the less individually competent the founder. While this isn’t always the case, it’s pretty safe to say that entrepreneurs who manage large teams or outsource 99% of tasks run the risk of losing — or failing to develop — their own skill set.
The last thing you want is to wake up to a business emergency on a Sunday morning when the one team member familiar with the software required for the fix is out of town or out of pocket. You don’t need to be an expert at everything, but if you’re an early-stage or new founder starting or running a digital business, here are 8 basic things you should absolutely know how to do and feel comfortable tackling yourself, if need be.
If you do any type of online lead generation, you’re probably capturing prospect emails. If email marketing and automated sales funnels are at all relevant to your business, you should be comfortable — at a minimum — with the below:
- How to tag prospects to trigger and deploy individual automations
- How to funnel the information received on a landing page or lead gen form into your email CRM and check open and click rates
- How to pause or stop a live sequence
- How to spam-test your email contents and trust-check your address
If you’ve outsourced your email marketing to an admin or a full-service marketing team and have never personally set foot inside your CRM, you’re creating a huge gap in your competence and your confidence. Get comfortable with this — even if it’s uncomfortable at first. Worst case scenario, you accidentally send the wrong email to a few thousand people. Best case, you know how to avoid making those errors.
Again, this is basic, but I know more than a few CEOs who would never be comfortable diving into the admin panel of their company’s website. Why? They have a web developer, designer, or technical virtual assistant for that.
While you can let the tech experts handle the larger structural, sitewide, or custom code-related changes, you shouldn’t be afraid of your own website. If you don’t know how to update the copy, add or change a product, or make other superficial edits, you should ask your developer to teach you or sprint straight to a YouTube tutorial and learn now.
Ad managers are scary, clunky, overwhelming, and mysterious, right? That’s why you avoid them or hire a professional, like a social media or google ads team to deal with those highly complex platforms, right? Sure, if you want to enable the people you pay to pull the wool over your eyes because you handed it to them and blinked.
I’m not suggesting great advertising teams aren’t worth their hefty retainers, but employing them as an excuse for remaining ignorant to how your ad manager works and how to check the stats isn’t efficient; it’s lazy. You don’t have to become a digital advertising expert or start messing around in the live ads your marketing team is managing, but it’s worth an hour of your time to educate yourself on the platform you’re throwing thousands of dollars at.
Picture this: A customer reaches out on a Friday afternoon, requesting a custom payment plan for the service you offer — and they want to begin the engagement next Monday. If your VA has already checked out for the weekend and the live chat bot in your digital invoicing system says they’ll be back on Monday, what are you going to do?
Wait? Ignore them? Risk losing a sale? You could, and perhaps the delay would be fine, but you shouldn’t have to simply due to unfamiliarity with your own invoicing or checkout software.
Even if you don’t have a live customer asking for a custom payment plan option, it’s worth taking the time to make a few practice checkout pages or invoices testing various payment plans, discounts, and custom coupon codes, in case you’re ever in a pinch and need to do so yourself.
Remember when you asked your developer to hook up that payment processor to your website, after which you ignored it entirely, since the revenue flows into your company bank account automatically? If you’ve forgotten how — or simply neglected — to log into your company’s payment processor, this is a band aid to rip off soon.
A few reasons to understand your payment processor dashboard:
- To see if or when payments fail (and address the issue)
- To provide evidence to fight wrongful disputes
- To process requested refunds or duplicate charges
- To monitor suspicious or high-risk payments
In other words, you won’t really need to log into your payment processor dashboard until you really — quickly — need to do so. Better save yourself the crisis mode and get comfortable with it now.
Do you back up every piece of important content your business uses or creates? If the answer is no, you need to start — like last year! However, I’ve met a segment of solopreneurs and newbie founders who do believe they backup their content; they just have no idea where it goes or how to access it.
Backups should not be mysterious. Whether you’re using a USB, an external hard drive, OneDrive, iCloud, or some other digital backup option, you should know exactly how to back the content up, where it is, and how to access and retrieve it at any time.
If a customer purchases a product, do you know what happens next? Perhaps an email sequence is triggered or a text deployed or a custom enrollment link to a course or online portal is created. If your business relies on any type of automation tools (like Zapier or plugins), you should be 100% comfortable with how to recreate, edit, or pause those functions.
This typically involves the click of a button or choosing a few selection criteria in a user-friendly automation tool, so the fancy buzzwords “digital automation” shouldn’t intimidate you one bit.
One of the best things you can do to gather real customer testimonials, proof points, and suggestions or requests for product or service improvements is to offer a post-purchase or post-service customer feedback form. This might be through a form embedded on your website, an email, or a text message, but there are countless tools to make gathering feedback a breeze.
You can use Typeform, a plugin tool like Yotpo, or any other data-collecting feedback or review tool, but whatever you choose, you should understand how to edit, deploy, and implement it, as well as how and where to access the feedback it collects. You’d be surprised to hear how many newbie entrepreneurs have no clue where they’re collecting or storing this intel, simply because they’ve backed away from the seemingly “technical” software.
