As an early founder, I often got backed up on email. After I finished working on the business all day, I couldn’t consistently respond to all my emails. That came back to bite me a few times when I missed some that were important. I either saw them too late or didn’t see them at all.

Effective communication is important, and email is one of the main forms of business communication. As I matured as a founder, I learned the importance of good communication, including managing my email effectively. And I learned a few tricks. These two worked the best:  

• Inbox zero – This is the best but most difficult approach. You clear your email inbox out every day. You deal with every email, even those that don’t require a response. I checked emails once a day in the middle of the afternoon to accomplish this.
• VIP senders – This was effective when I was pressed for time. Most email clients allow you to designate certain contacts as VIPs and segregate emails from them. I called it my VIP inbox. If my day was busy and I couldn’t get through my entire inbox, I made sure to deal with every message in my VIP inbox.

Managing email remains one of my least favorite tasks. I still struggle with it at times. But I realize that it’s difficult to be a good communicator if you don’t have a good email strategy.

I spoke with a founder today who’s going after a consumer market after others have tried and failed. This founder is super excited and passionate and unconcerned about the competition. I eventually asked why he’s so confident he’ll succeed. He smiled and shared something he learned from his early customer interviews.

This founder has ferreted out a key insight. It’s something all the others missed and probably one of the causes of their failure. He’s using this insight as the foundation for his company. It informs what he’s building. He’s confident that if he stays true to it, he’ll be successful.

Key insights are an entrepreneurial competitive advantage. If you’re an early founder, consider asking yourself, What’s my key insight?

When I talk with early founders, I try to understand their business model from a high level. Some are operating marketplaces, while others are selling access to their software. Sometimes I encounter early founders who are trying to execute two business models under one roof.

To be sure, many companies have more than one business model and have enjoyed success. Usually, though, they focused on one core model in the early days. They solved the core problem well and scaled that solution with one business model. As they matured (and had more resources), they added another business model. Think Amazon selling goods to consumers via digital commerce and then, after more than a decade, expanding into selling cloud computing.

If you’re an early founder, avoid spreading yourself too thin. Consider mastering your core business model before expanding into a new one.

As founders build, they will regularly encounter unfamiliar situations. They won’t know how to deal with many of them, and that’s OK: it’s difficult to navigate circumstances you’ve never been exposed to. Founders can acquire the experience they need through trial and error or by leaning on others who already have it. I’m a fan of the latter approach—I found it invaluable during my founder days. Talking with people with experience in what I was trying to do helped me make better decisions.

As my company grew, I had to make more decisions that were complicated and had long-lasting implications. Think contracts and other legalities. The stakes were high. Some of these decisions, once made, couldn’t be undone. To navigate them, I hired professionals whom I thought of as my supporting cast. I was looking for them to fill my knowledge gap so I could make the best decision possible in a high-stakes situation. I wasn’t looking for someone to tell me what to do, but rather for someone who could help me understand the ramifications of all my options. I cycled through a few people and firms, which contributed to some bad decisions in the early days. Over time, I learned to look for service providers who had specific experience helping clients make the types of decisions I was faced with. I found that people who had lived it with other clients were able to easily explain the pros and cons of all the paths I was considering.

It took time, but I ended up building a great supporting cast of service providers. Their knowledge was invaluable; it helped me make the right decisions in critical areas.

If you’re a founder with some high-stakes calls in your future, consider building a supporting cast of service providers who’ve helped others navigate your exact situation. No need to learn the hard way or work with people who are learning on your dime.

Founders looking for capital will likely talk to a lot of investors and hear no repeatedly before they hear yes. It’s a frustrating process. Today I was talking with a founder friend about finding the right investor. We discussed the importance of fit.

Founders have an objective they’re trying to achieve. They need capital, start-up knowledge, and relationships to execute and turn their vision into reality. The investors that can help them achieve this objective are the best fit. Founders are (or should be) evaluating investors for fit, but what they often don’t realize is that this is happening on the other side of the table too.

Investors, like founders, have objectives. They’re looking for opportunities that are the best fit with their objectives. Investors’ objectives vary. They probably include potential financial return, but they may also include other variables. For instance, an investor may want to fund a start-up with a specific approach to solving a problem. Or invest in certain types of solutions (e.g., software) and not others. Or give back to the community as well as make money (do good while doing well). Whatever their objectives are will play into their decision-making process. This means you could be a great founder with a great idea, but the opportunity might not be a fit with a given investor’s objectives.

Good relationships are mutually beneficial. Founders should be mindful of this when evaluating investors (or any partner for that matter). Clearly articulate what your objectives are—but understand the objectives of the other party too. The goal is to find fit: alignment of the objectives of both parties, even if they differ. When there’s a fit, the relationship will be mutually beneficial.

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In the early days of a company, the team is small. One person leaving the company can be a big blow to the team. To an early founder not anticipating the departure, it’s frustrating. Usually, team members opt to leave when things aren’t going well, so the departure combined with challenges in the business can feel like a double whammy and cause founders to question themselves as leaders.

Departures happen at start-ups. The first leaver likely won’t be the last. You want to do all you can to build a great environment and have everyone aligned on the mission, but however hard you try, people will leave. It’s a setback—but also an opportunity to get candid feedback on the business, how leaders are perceived, and the mood of the rest of the team.

I’m a big fan of doing exit interviews when team members choose to depart. Along with thanking them for their service and letting them know they’re always welcome to come back (if they were a good team member), it’s important to ask them for candid feedback. When someone is departing, they’ll usually give more direct feedback because they don’t have anything to lose.

Listening to feedback from someone leaving a hole in your team is hard to do. But it’s super important to look past how you feel about the situation and the extra workload caused by the departure. Listen to understand the why behind the person’s decision to depart, what’s going well, and what can be improved. You may not agree with everything they say, but this opportunity to learn and improve in various areas doesn’t come often. It often leads to valuable golden nuggets.

If you’re an early founder and a team member exits, don’t dwell on the fact that they quit. Instead, focus on what you can learn from the situation to minimize the chances of it happening again and to make your business better.

I spent time talking with a founder friend and with family this weekend about the current labor market for front-line workers. I already knew about businesses having to reduce their hours of operation or capacity due to labor issues. I’ve read about the Great Resignation. But I was still surprised when I listened to firsthand accounts from the customer’s perspective this weekend. It’s anecdotal evidence, but it still got me thinking. I was talking to unrelated parties in different states, yet they were having similar experiences.

I really want to understand this phenomenon better. I’ll be spending some time over the next few weeks learning more from people on the front lines of this issue. My gut tells me that something bigger is happening here that we haven’t fully grasped.  

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I’ve shared my views on the entrepreneurial opportunity to take laggard industries from physical to digital. I’ve been thinking more about what the ideal company will look like in the future in laggard industries and what the result of that will be. A few thoughts:

• Automation - Manual and inefficient processes are common in old-school industries. The result can be inconsistent and slow execution of critical tasks, which leads to a poor customer experience. Automation will be a big part of the ideal company in these industries. Efficiency, timeliness, and visibility of execution will not only improve the customer experience but also reduce costs.
• Centralized data - Manual processes and a lack of systems mean that data is often unavailable to team members and leadership. Decisions are made with subjective or anecdotal evidence. Digitization will allow ideal companies to store data centrally and use it to improve decision-making.

These are just two of many ways digitization can improve laggard (and other) industries. Overall, I believe digitization will allow companies to create more value for customers and reduce costs.

My parents raised me with a certain set of values and morals, which I stuck to. As an early founder, I always assumed others operated similarly. But as my entrepreneurial journey progressed, I learned that wasn’t always the case.

A few of our customers took advantage of us. We sold automotive parts to consumers and had customer-friendly policies around returns and other service situations. They were great for most of our customers, but they also attracted fraudsters. We got hit with a rash of fraudulent transactions in the early days. Caught off guard, we didn’t know what to do to fight them. In the end, they cost us a significant amount of money I didn’t have. We learned we had to be more aware of what was going on with our orders. We implemented systems and processes to identify suspicious orders. I also had our team take an aggressive stance vis-à-vis orders that we deemed fraudulent after they were shipped. Fraudulent transactions dropped sharply, to the point we rarely saw them. Fraudsters knew we’d fight back and weren’t an easy target.

And a supplier walked all over us. This company was orders of magnitude larger than my company and our main supplier at the time. Knowing this, they used their scale to push us around. They’d change our payment terms on the fly, which affected our cash flow. They’d change our pricing on a whim, which made us less competitive and reduced our revenue. They’d limit our ability to sell certain products, too. All these moves were made to optimize the relationship for the supplier at my company’s expense. Once I realized this company was looking out for itself—and only itself—I changed our strategy. I instructed our team to take an aggressive stance with them. We pushed back strongly on one-sided changes and even cut them off as a supplier. That company began to reverse their decisions and operate with more of a partnership mentality. They learned we weren’t a customer they could push around.

From these situations and others, I learned how important it is for a founder to be situationally aware. You can’t count on everyone to be honest and fair all the time. Your business, your people, and your money are on the line. You have to pay attention. You must understand when you’re in a situation where bad actors could prey on you or parties you’re involved with could do harm if given the opportunity. And you have to figure out how to protect yourself.

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I listened to an investor talk about an investment he made in an early-stage company. Smart founder, painful problem, growing market. Even so, the investor is concerned about the investment. The founder wants to grow the business but isn’t growing the team. He’s personally in the middle of everything, so nothing gets completed and growth isn’t what it should be.

It takes a team to build a big company. As a founder, it’s hard to let go. There’s always the feeling that no one can do it as well as you. I experienced this, as did several of my founder friends. In the end, we all had the same experience. When we found the right people and empowered them (i.e., got out of their way!), they did a better job than we could have ever done. We wish we had done it much earlier in our journey.

If you’re a founder aiming to build something big, remember: teamwork is dream work.