There’s a lot of discussion about the open office and whether it really helps you be more productive in a work environment. In a collaborative situation, it’s easy to see that having easier access to your colleagues could lead to better project collaboration and communication with the team. At the same time, if you need a lot of quiet concentration to get the job done, the open office plan may not be your first choice for an office environment. Continue reading
Category: Small Business
Digsy CEO, Andrew Bermudez, sits down with Nimble Founder & CEO, Jon Ferrara, who shares how he has grown both Nimble and former startup, Goldmine CRM without employing salespeople. This interview is packed with insight and great ideas. Watch the full video interview below.
Key Takeaways:
- Jon is a trained engineer, turned sales genius
- How he successfully bootstrapped his first startup, Goldmine CRM
- How Goldmine CRM was acquired by Frontrange Solutions
- How Nimble leverages social data and social signals to grow sales
“Fail Fast, Fail Often” and “Fail Better” are phrases that startups always hear from their mentors, and many live by (especially after reading The Lean Startup). Here at Digsy, failing fast gets mentioned at least once a day. Even though we’ve fully embraced the “fail fast” mantra to help our business succeed, the fear of complete failure is still there. Any startup has fears of failure. At Digsy we have gone through our set of failures, but it’s how we push through to the other side of our failures that keeps us going. Failing fast and quickly learning from our failures helped us get closer to product-market-fit before we went down in flames.
This is going to sound crazy, but one of our biggest failures occurred when we listened to our customers.
We’re a startup in the commercial real estate industry so we built our product based on many, many conversations with our potential customers: commercial real estate brokers. In every conversation, we would ask them about their pain points, business processes and how technology could help them accomplish their goals more easily. We would hear the same things over and over, so we decided to build a product that solved these pain points and addressed their wants and needs. We did this twice, and we crashed and burned. Twice.
It was ugly.
This is a guest post by Bridget Willard at Riggins Construction & Management, Inc.
You’re the next big thing. You have an idea. You’ve formed a team, built the app, and started your Indiegogo campaign. Seriously, you’re the next desktop 3-D printer. But you need an office. Your parents need their garage back.
Finding a turnkey office space is always an option and there are tons of spaces out there that are set up and waiting for you to move in and collect your rent. But what if you want some place that reflects you? Your brand? Your Style? Your charisma? Can you redesign the space to make it more collaborative?
Selecting the right paint for your office walls can be just as important as selecting the right employees. The effect paint has on the environment of your office is huge and this also tends to influence how productive your workers are. According to research by the University of Hawaii at Hilo, visual elements which include colors in an office building can affect employee’s behavior, levels of productivity and attitudes in the work place. The ambiance in an office is by far one of the most influential factors in employee’s productivity. Colors can be very crucial in setting the right atmosphere for workers to feel comfortable and relaxed. After all, the main strategy in developing employee’s motivation is creating a good atmosphere.
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Time is the critical factor in growing a business, and most entrepreneurs don’t have much of it. Time works for you or against you, so it’s critical to know how to free-up time to focus on tasks that will have a long-term impact on growing your business and sales revenue. As a busy entrepreneur, everything you do should always add long-term value to your business, while at the same time ensuring that your business runs smoothly within reasonable operational costs. Here are some tricks we’ve learned from successful entrepreneurs we know about saving-time and scaling the growth of their company: