7 choices we made when starting our business that made us successful later on

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When we started Voys, we set up a lot of things right away. From day one, we made sure we were reachable and easy to find for our ideal customer group. We are still reaping the benefits of this. I wish you a good start of your company, or of scaling up your business, too. In this article, I’ll therefore share the seven choices we made at the start of our business, which made us scalable and successful.

Plus a bonus tip, which I would also give to myself retroactively if I were to do it all over again.

1. Get your customers to find you

“You shouldn’t look for customers, you should make sure your customers find you.” That was the sacred belief of Joris, my office mate. Joris knew a lot about the Web and Web marketing. Together we created the first version of the Voys website. Being found on the Internet was easy back then. Today, the bulk of online attention is what we call “bought attention,” but a good website is still very important.

Focus on a niche where your perfect customer base is: people who have a problem that you solve. Make sure you figure out which digital places those customers are in, and make sure you’re there, too. This doesn’t mean you never have to make cold calls or have conversations to perfect your product. But if the right customer group knows how to find you, you’ve come a long way.

2. Be incredibly accessible

We started Voys at a time when “we’ll get back to you within 14 days” was still common if you sent an email to a company. From the beginning, we went for “within 24 hours.” By phone, we went much further: we were always available by phone anywhere. We didn’t have opening hours back then. This led to the fact that even during my vacation, while hiking at the top of a French mountain, I was still calling customers to set a voicemail message. I didn’t mind that: this focus on the customer is still the core of our business.

These days, you can’t help but be very reachable. However, it is still the case that four out of ten phone calls to an SME organization are not answered within twenty seconds. Know that your customer does not want to wait that long, and that there are ten others before you who do answer the phone quickly.

So make sure you can be reached. If you can’t – or won’t – answer the phone yourself, switch to an answering service. There’s no way the cost outweighs the satisfaction of customers who are answered. And what about the four-in-ten leads you no longer miss out on?

We notice that our customers also comply with this principle of being easily accessible. Of course, this is partly due to the technology provided by Voys: they choose it consciously. They have thought about how they want to be reachable and are looking for the right supplier to match. To come back to the first point – making sure the right customer group knows how to find you: even with our customers, the customer comes first. In fact, it goes so far that we would be growing by now if we didn’t connect new customers, because our existing customers are also growing.

3. Document your process

Documenting how you work may sound a bit special, but this is something you really want to start doing right away if you’re not already doing it. Document the best way to do certain things. These days I would do that in a tool like Notion. When we started with Voys, those tools weren’t there yet: we worked in a wiki, similar to what you know from Wikipedia.

In our wiki there was not only documentation on how to configure a modem/router to work as well as possible, but also the “VAT return roadmap.” That way I didn’t have to figure out how that worked every month. This saved me a lot of time, but got a lot more value when we started hiring colleagues. Indeed, onboarding new colleagues went very quickly because of this documentation. Work became much easier to transfer. Both aspects make your organization scalable.

Whenever a question was asked, we would routinely say to each other, “That’s in the wiki! And if it’s not in there, you have to put it in.” Make no mistake: even when you work alone, you want to document how you work. There are always things you do from time to time that you don’t want to keep figuring out. Your brain is also not at all designed to hold this kind of information. Make an encyclopedia for yourself and your own head as soon as possible.

4. Document all communications (automatically) in a CRM package

A CRM package is indispensable: it keeps track of your current, closed and potential contacts and the way you communicate with those people. A good CRM package gives you insight into your target group and helps you serve them better. If you are an ‘hours’  organization, choose Simplicate or Teamleader. If you’re a service organization, look at tools like Zendesk and Hubspot. Link your e-mail and, especially as your business grows, your telephony to this package right away. That way, you’ll capture a complete contact history and automatically build a database of your contacts. Not only will you be able to periodically update this with a newsletter, you can also set reminders to call or email certain customers and monitor your deals and service flow.

It means you never forget to follow up on that one lead or finish that problem with that client before the weekend. It makes you a better partner for your clients. In addition, with templates you can handle your mail faster and your communication with clients becomes clear to your colleagues as well. Especially the latter has a lot of value; it makes work transferable, because the agreements made are easy to find. An absolute must when growing!

5. Give colleagues transparent access to all information

Opening your mailbox to your colleagues sounds very exciting, but it’s not. In fact, it’s something you want to start doing as soon as possible! You naturally hire people you trust, otherwise you can’t work together. If you want to get the most out of yourself and the people around you, they need to be able to work autonomously.

The Internet has flattened information, communication and publishing. Make sure you maximize this within your organization as well. You do this by making all your documents, communications and figures public and ensuring that everyone in the organization can access them. This way everyone has the most recent data and information, making decisions easier to make. This creates an open organization that can optimally shine together. 

6. Automate everything

Remove all possible friction. Continuously. Do that for your customers, but also do that especially within the organization. Technology helps you tremendously with that; you can now automate almost everything. Invoicing? Automate it. VAT return? Automate it. Debtor management? Automate it. Write quotations? Use a smart system for it that automatically and quickly rolls out great quotes for your customers.

If you’re smart, you go one step further and link all your systems together. You have handy cloud tools for that, such as Zapier and Integromat.

Automating and integrating as many standard things as possible leaves the fun work for you and your colleagues. It also makes your organization scalable in technology rather than people.

7. Standardize as much as possible

To automate, you have to standardize. An example from our old box: in the beginning, Voys provided three types of phones. We had a simple desk phone, an extended version and a walkie-talkie (DECT phone). We did that despite the fact that our platform could handle any type of device. We knew: everything you sell you have to support, and that takes time.

Only when you start standardizing does it become simple, supportable and scalable. This also applies, for example, to our quotations. The blocks that are in the quotation still vary from customer to customer. But the selection of building blocks we have are standardized. This allows you to write quotations – something not everyone enjoys – quickly and well. Nowadays that can be a nice piece of text about our smartphone app or webphone instead of a deskphone. 😉

8. Make sure your numbers are in order

This is retroactively a tip to myself. After all, in the first five years of my business, I did not do this at all well. Fortunately, software has gotten much better since then: with tools like Moneybird, you not only scan your receipts, but also book them automatically, do your VAT return and send simple quotes yourself. Trust me, these are the kinds of tools you want to use.

Also important: make sure you know the basics of your business case. Often business plans are still written with extensive financial sections. Your financial plan should work on a beer mat. You need to know that beer mat and keep it accurate – because that way you can quickly see where things stand.

I hope these tips get you off to a flying start with your new venture or help you make your current venture scalable and successful. Best of luck and above all, enjoy the adventure!