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What’s the best CRM to start my company?

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TL;DR: The best CRM for a startup is one that is easy to use, affordable, and scalable. Some of the top CRMs for startups include Selling Lane, HubSpot, and Zoho CRM.

What are the top features of a CRM?

“A CRM system can help you to improve your customer service, increase sales, and make better business decisions.” 

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon

CRMs come with a variety of features, but some of the most important ones for startups include:

  • Contact management: A CRM should help you to store and manage all of your customer contact information, including their name, email address, phone number, and social media profiles.
  • Lead management: A CRM should help you to track and manage your leads through the sales pipeline. This includes tracking their progress through the different stages of the pipeline, such as qualified lead, opportunity, and closed deal.
  • Task management: A CRM should help you to manage your tasks and to-dos. This can help you to stay organized and to ensure that important tasks are not forgotten.
  • Reporting: A CRM should generate a variety of reports that can be used to track your sales performance, customer satisfaction, and other important metrics. This information can be used to make informed decisions about your business.

Why is a CRM important for startups?

“A CRM system is the backbone of any sales organization.” 

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce

A CRM is an important tool for startups because it can help you to:

  • Increase sales: A CRM can help you to increase sales by providing you with the tools you need to track your leads, manage your sales pipeline, and close more deals.
  • Improve customer service: A CRM can help you to improve your customer service by providing you with the tools you need to track customer interactions, provide customer support, and resolve customer issues quickly and efficiently.
  • Make better business decisions: A CRM can help you to make better business decisions by providing you with valuable insights into your customers, sales performance, and other important metrics.

What are the top CRMs for startups?

Some of the top CRMs for startups include:

  • Selling Lane: Selling Lane is an affordable and easy-to-use CRM that is specifically designed for small businesses. It offers all of the essential CRM features, such as contact management, lead management, task management, and reporting.
  • HubSpot: HubSpot is a popular CRM that offers a variety of features, including contact management, lead management, task management, reporting, and marketing automation. It offers a free plan for small businesses with up to 1,000 contacts.
  • Zoho CRM: Zoho CRM is another popular CRM that offers a variety of features, including contact management, lead management, task management, reporting, and sales forecasting. It offers a free plan for businesses with up to 10 users.

Why is Selling Lane a good CRM for startups?

“A CRM system is essential for any business that wants to grow its customer base.” 

Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft

Selling Lane is a good CRM for startups because it is affordable, easy to use, and scalable. It offers all of the essential CRM features that startups need to track their leads, manage their sales pipeline, and close more deals. Selling Lane also offers a free business website builder as a feature. This can be a valuable tool for startups that are looking to create a professional online presence without having to spend a lot of money.

Conclusion

A CRM is an important tool for startups because it can help you to increase sales, improve customer service, and make better business decisions. Selling Lane is a good CRM for startups because it is affordable, easy to use, and scalable. It also offers a free business website builder as a feature.

If you are a startup owner, I encourage you to consider using Selling Lane CRM. It is a powerful and affordable CRM system that can help you to streamline your operations, improve your efficiency, and grow your business.

Why I Choose to Bootstrap our Company

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We’re very outspoken about running a profitable company in an industry (software and apps) that so often mistakes potential and speculation for actual profit. Where investors seeking to buy these companies, look for “added shareholder value” over profitability. Profit can be a dirty word when you are seeking investors, where the value is often based on the hope that one day the company will achieve a profit rather than actual results.

Bootstrap vs Dilution:

People ask us all the time, why did we choose to bootstrap our business and only launch profitable divisions, in profitable markets, and only hire people who produce or support our profit? The answer is simple; when a company is profitable, you can pay well, provide epic support and have reduced turnover of both employees and customers. Above all, a profitable company with happy employees, produce raving fans of your products, staff, and company.
Each division of your company should stand alone as a profit center. Because, in my humble opinion, the only true metric of success is profit. How will you know my product is successful? Because it’s profitable. How will I know my product works? Because it takes a small staff to support it.

Having fun doubling profit:

We designed Dealer Simplified, our company and Auction Simplified, our core software, to be profitable as quickly and consistently as possible. Keeping payroll, overhead, and staff low at first, and only ramping up as profit happened. 4.5 years into it, we’ve been profitable for 4 years straight. Being profitable is now a feature of our company (because companies are products too).

To set some perspective, since we launched the company in 2014, our revenues have doubled every year (2018 being our best year yet). And our quality of life is wonderful because we are not worrying about the market or debt, we are having fun, enjoying what we do. We consider our team our personal friends and my partners are families. With profit, there are fewer arguments over money and more agreement in development and plans for the future. It’s a simple formula. We choose happiness over debt.

”Its Hard to Go Broke Earning a Profit.”

Unlike some software companies that take huge rounds cash with the hope that one day they will expand enough to catch the eye of a bigger fish, whether they are profitable or not; we earn our growth with profitable endeavors, without giving up quality, diluting our brand or losing ownership. I am not criticizing these companies who seek VC, because in many cases they will yield a large payout in the end. I just think they are short selling their inventors if they are not producing a profit. It’s just not for me at this point. I am not saying that we would not take on an investor, under the right circumstances, I am just saying I would not offer shares of our company unless the value of those shares are based on profit, not pie in the blue sky. As one of my friends says “Hope is not a strategy.” I think “profit is a strategy for growth” and when you are profitable you have the RIGHT to seek investors if you choose.

What is wrong with creating a product that works right out of the box and producing a financial statement to match?

Profit Buys You Time, Control and Flexibility.

Profit provides the ultimate flexibility because it buys you the ultimate luxury: Time. As long as you remain profitable, you can go in any direction you want and take as much time as you need.

All too often companies that cannot generate enough cash, choose to go outside to borrow or sell off pieces of their company to generate the cash they need to continue, then the people they owe are the ones who own their time. If someone else owns your time, you can’t be flexible.
The thing about profit, or liquid cash is you can take it and used it any time you want. You can give it all to your employees. You can put it back into the business. You can experiment with new product ideas with it since it’s your money.

Valuation vs Profit:

We try not to care about our company valuation, simply because generating revenue can hurt technically hurt our valuation. Strange, isn’t it? Making a profit can turn investors off for some reason. But we couldn’t care less because we like owning our company. Not to say we wouldn’t look at an offer with interest and respect, it’s simply not what drives our day to day thinking. Profit is.
We don’t check our valuation every couple of days like an office worker watches the clock. It’s not a priority for us. Don’t get me wrong, we know our company is extremely valuable it just not our driving force, profit is.

I mean, why worry about things don’t affect your day to day, especially your customer service. In some way, valuation feels hokey anyway, sort of fake-number nonsense. We’ve all seen founders spend countless hours pitching for money, marking up term sheets with lawyers, fixating on cap tables and projecting blue sky like guessing the future is real profit. What a colossal waste of time. Time that could be used to make a profit. My point here, is to be careful what you spend your time on, ask yourself “will this generate profit?”

##Profit is the ultimate shield against bullshit.
When you’re profitable you don’t have to play games, succumb to substitutional metrics, cross your fingers, or grovel for other people’s money, validation, or acceptance.
You simply make more money than you spend — and run a fundamentally sound, economics 101 business. When profit’s a requirement, it becomes a lot harder to step in the bullshit.

Profit is just simpler.

We’re still an LLC at Auction Simplified. The simplest pass-through structure you can have at our size. That means fewer lawyers, fewer accountants, less paperwork, less hoop-jumping. Our books are so silly simple, our operating agreement hasn’t changed in almost 5 years. Keeping your corporate structure this lean means making time for much more interesting things, like building a better product. Having all of the company focused on either making a better product or supporting a better product.
There’s no CFO at Auction Simplified. There’s no accounting department. Our amazing customer service manager Anthony can handle all that in concert with Mariele, our accountant since we founded the company.
Profit help us focus on software that simply works requiring fewer support calls from our customers, which improves profit because we need fewer support reps to manage buggy software.
In this world of Silicon Valley and NYC VC, profits have gotten a bad rep. The word profit has been replaced in some companies with, “improving shareholder value”. I don’t know how shareholder value would ever inspire customers to buy our products or employees to sell and service it.

It’s EASIER to be generous when you’re doing well.

It’s EASIER to be fair when there’s enough. It’s easier to be kind when it’s not tipping you over the edge. It’s easier to build great products when your team enjoys their work life not worrying if the company will exist or be bought outright from under their feet.

One final word, this article was inspired by Jason Fried of Basecamp and his wonderful book ReWork, which I highly recommend. As the person who coined the phrase “Web 2.0”, Jason and his team, simplified business model, inspired our business name Dealer Simplified, and ultimately our core product Auction Simplified. Thanks, Jason, I hope to meet you someday.

I told my son this after he asked his mom what she does.

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To prevent my son from being murdered by his mom after he asked her “what do you do around here”

The Invisible Superhero: Understanding a Mother’s Role

It started with a simple question from my son to his mother: “What do you do around here?” The question wasn’t meant to hurt, but it revealed a common blindspot many of us have about the incredible role mothers play in our lives. Like many of life’s most important jobs, a mother’s work often goes unnoticed precisely because of how seamlessly she keeps everything running.

Imagine, for a moment, a job posting for the position of “Mom.” The requirements would be nothing short of superhuman: Must be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. No vacation days, no sick leave, and you’re always on call. The successful candidate must excel at crisis management, conflict resolution, and maintaining peace negotiations between warring siblings. Advanced degrees in culinary arts, home economics, psychology, and emergency medicine preferred but not required – you’ll learn on the job, ready or not.

The job responsibilities? They’re endless. A mother is the invisible force that transforms a house into a home. She’s the master chef who knows everyone’s favorite meals and food allergies by heart. She’s the logistics coordinator who ensures clean clothes appear magically in drawers and dirty socks don’t become permanent carpet fixtures. She’s the emotional support system who can detect when something’s wrong just by the tone of your voice.

But perhaps most remarkably, mothers are the ultimate selfless leaders. They’re the cheerleaders who push us to achieve our dreams while quietly stepping back to let us take all the credit. They celebrate our smallest victories as if they were Olympic gold medals and comfort us through our deepest disappointments. They’re the first to arrive and the last to leave, the ones who ensure everyone else’s needs are met before even considering their own.

When my son asked that question, it became clear that we often take for granted the intricate dance of dedication, love, and sacrifice that mothers perform daily. It’s the hardest job in the world precisely because it doesn’t look like a job at all. It’s a role that requires giving everything while expecting nothing in return, facing the most demanding audience (yes, that’s us), and doing it all with grace and unconditional love.

To all the mothers out there: Your work may sometimes feel invisible, but its impact is profound and eternal. You’re not just doing a job – you’re shaping the future, one small act of love at a time. And to my son, and anyone else who’s wondered what mom does: Look closer. The evidence of her work is everywhere, in every comfortable, caring detail of your daily life.

Leadership message I delivered in a meeting recently

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The very essence of leadership is, knowing your people as you would a family member.

Be excited to see them, every day.

Start and end your day at the back of the building or in the obscure office where the people that are not outspoken or pushy reside and make time to ask family style questions.

Every level of employee should feel the same level of importance in the job they do. If the person that sweeps the floor need tile cleaner, it is as important to your business as the General Manager that needs his facility updated.

Know what motivates them individually, then customize the way you pay attention to them.

Kevin Leigh

Leadership is not so much about technique and methods as it is about opening the heart. Leadership is about inspiration—of oneself and of others.

Great leadership is about human experiences, not processes.

Leadership is not a formula or a program, it is a human activity that comes from the heart and considers the hearts of others.

It is an attitude, not a routine.

More than anything else today, followers believe they are part of a system, a process that lacks heart. – If there is one thing a leader can do to connect with followers at a human, or better still a spiritual level, it is to become engaged with them fully, to share experiences and emotions, and to set aside the processes of leadership we have learned by rote.

Lance Secretan