Startup Admin Is A Time Thief
3 essential tips for minimising admin and staying focused on accelerating your new business
In the early stages of a startup, time is your best friend. But there’s something out there that’s not. The first step to getting your startup off the ground is staying focused.
Selling your ideas. Testing your ideas. Researching. Iterating. Listening to feedback. All of this requires time as well as space to think… And this is without even considering the conversations you will need to have with potential partners and angels a little further down the line!
The amount of admin that it takes to get the ball rolling with your startup can be incredibly overwhelming. The time you put into these activities can often feel essential too, but in this way admin is a real time thief. It’s important to remember that there are always shortcuts and any shortcuts you can find are going to give you the advantage over the competition as a startup.
Cleaning, laundry and admin…
What do these things have in common?. Well yes, that I’m bad at all of them and they take me too much time to get right… but also that they’re essential things that I pay someone else to do for me. I pay someone else because they can do them better than me.
If you’re on a budget, you’ll also often find yourself putting time into things that aren’t your speciality- designing your first logo, for example- but this is a mistake. Outsourcing is a cost, yes, but the cost to your time from not outsourcing your admin is very likely to be more disruptive to your success.
Time is the biggest thing you’ll never have enough of in the early stages of your startup. I’m going to run you through three ways you can buy yourself more of it and avoid the admin time thief.
Upwork
Upwork is a great place to outsource those tasks that quickly accumulate as you begin to turn your startup idea into a reality.
Take your logo as an example… You could spend hours brainstorming and perfecting your design idea, but this would very quickly become a real distraction. Unless you’re a designer yourself, you’d be watching the days slip away as you think over it. Trust me- I’ve been there!
Instead, head onto Upwork and get a logo mocked up. With affordable one-off costs, it’s easy to get a solid basis here, but remember that you don’t need to finalise your branding at this stage.
Be sure to keep in mind that many admin tasks are things you will return to at a later date. You can also create ongoing contracts on Upwork so that you have a remote team in place when you’re ready to come back to particular tasks.
Time etc.
One of the best things I did for our startup (and my sanity) in early stages was to go onto Time etc. and hire a virtual assistant. Having someone on side who is easily accessible and can tackle a range of admin tasks is essential to scaling things up. Of course, this applies to the classic VA tasks like data entry and email and diary management, but it also goes further than this…
After a fairly brief discussion of our startup vision, the VA was able to handle general market research, to process customer feedback and to research potential partners and funding options. This had a significant impact on lead generation and growth in early stages.
Superhuman
Superhuman is quite literally the email resource superhero to fight the admin time thief. As well as offering a range of advanced features such as social media insights, it incorporates scheduling tools that will really cut the time you spend on email admin.
Superhuman facilitates something I’m a big fan of- the ‘once across the desk’ policy. An approach where you reply to emails that take less than ten minutes right away, and you leave longer tasks for a later scheduled time. This helps you deal with urgent, quick fire emails, but stops email admin from eating into your time. What’s more, because Superhuman is able to detect your most important messages using AI, you can relax in the knowledge that everything in your inbox is under control.
Handling your admin is a learning curve, but by outsourcing, you’ll soon learn to manage your time rather than allowing your time to manage you.
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