How to Improve your Startup with Smart Tools

by Petar Djordjevic, Guest Contributor

​So many people nowadays have the ambition of starting and running a successful startup. After all, why wouldn’t you? Today’s market is full of young (and old) entrepreneurs and their success stories. And even with this abundance of people already striving to have a perfect startup, there are still enough customers for everyone to prosper!

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However, you will find out that having a good idea is not enough in getting to the point when your business is self-sufficient. Instead, as the business grows, running it only gets harder and harder. You will be getting more and more clients – and thus more and more project. At that point, optimizing your production and trying to streamline the workflow will be a priority. But why not do this at the very start? Today, we take a look at three important things you need to think about in order to improve your startup, and how you can do it with smart tools.

Figure out how you will manage your clients
Learning how to deal with clients is an important aspect of every business. After all, without your clients you cannot prosper. Thus, having a good, honest relationship with them will only lead to prosperity. Finding out ways to manage your clients, though, is another story completely. Sometimes, it can seem like an impossible feat. There might be many people wanting to work with you – with different wishes and needs.

The goal is to realize that they are all pretty similar, even if they do not seem like it. After all, they all want the same thing – for your project to succeed. In the moment you realize that your clients are your allies – and not your enemies – you will have done a huge part of the work. Once you have them on your team, you will be able to always have a positive outlook on working with them.

Of course, there are many tools that can help and boost your client management and collaboration process. With them, you can automatize many processes in the client communication – like giving them feedback. Tools like Nifty will give your clients an instant overview into the project progress, and ability to give their own feedback and ideas if there is a need for it.

Learning how to manage your projects will improve your startup immensely
The second thing you will learn how to manage is your project load. As we mentioned, a growing business means the number of things you will need to do at the same time will grow as well. Sometimes, though, your resources will not allow for you to hire extra staff. Instead, what you can to is to learn to manage projects well.

First, you need to realize that not everyone can do everything. Instead, you need project managers who will analyze the team its members and figure out the right tasks for everyone. Then, you (or they) will need to figure out exactly what tasks to give each person from all of those projects.

This is where project portfolio dashboard tools shine. With a good tool, you can categorize projects by department, location or similar filters. This way, you will have complete control of the operations, but also a unique and useful overview of the whole workflow. What’s more, tools like Nifty will let you manage your projects even further, by changing up the deadlines, moving people and resources around and much more. This flexibility is very important, because businesses – and especially startups – need to be able to adapt to the changes that happen daily!

Make time to for time management
The final important aspect for improving your startup is learning how to manage time. There are two main things to look into here – deadlines and your team’s productivity. They are interconnected, but we are still making a distinction between them.

This is because deadlines are very important in the client communication. Respecting them will make clients happy, while disobeying them will certainly not. On the other hand, productivity is something more internal – and based on your project management skills. Both affect each other – less productivity means less respect for deadlines and vice-versa.

There is no better way to get this in order than with some smart productivity time tracking tools. With them, you will easily see what your team can accomplish in time – and just how much time it takes them for each task. This way, you will be able to also shift people and tasks around in order to align them better with each team member’s skills. With good time tracking tools, you will be able to speed up some dragging tasks or afford to put more effort into others to get better results, which in turn is a great way to improve your startup.

Final thoughts
To conclude, running a startup might seem difficult, but it does not need to be so. As a matter of fact, you can easily improve your startup with smart tools. All you need is to learn how to organize your business properly. First, pay respect to your clients, communicate well with them and learn to manage them in order to grow your business. Be careful how you with your projects and learn to assign the right people to the right tasks to get the most out of them. Finally, manage and track time in a smart way and you will succeed in no time!

About the author:

​Content writer at Nifty, the best Wunderlist alternative. Petar Djordjevic is also a Math student working to become a professional novel writer. In the meantime, he is learning about online writing, content optimization and ways to boost client’s website users’ experience.

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