Isaac Kohen leads Teramind, an employee productivity monitoring and insider threat prevention platform. Follow them @teramindco.
What’s the single best piece of business advice (unorthodox tips welcome!) that helped shape who you are as an entrepreneur today, and why?
Always be prepared to scale. Whether it relates to workforce or operations, success usually comes at a very quick pace. If you’re not fast enough to keep up, you’ll find that you’ll miss your chance to accelerate business growth. For example, there were times when a large client was ready to sign only if we could develop a certain feature in a particular time frame. If we hadn’t had the workforce ready to start right away after the call, we probably wouldn’t have been able to close the deal. The same applies to operations. I’m always thinking about growth. Can the infrastructure we work on now work for small and enterprise clients? Can the way we organize our team be scaled? If we compromise for a small client, would it be possible for a larger client? My focus is always set on the ability to scale as we grow.
What do you do during the first hour of your business day and why?
I start my day by reviewing tasks that were completed the day before and tasks that couldn’t be completed because they require my feedback or input. I like to sign into our software and check how productive I was working on particular tasks to help me understand what I spent my day on and what requires more attention. By looking back at the work I’ve completed, I’m able to pick the low hanging fruit and complete those tasks in order to get them out of the way for the rest of my day.
What’s your best financial/cash-flow related tip for entrepreneurs just getting started?
Measure ROI from the outset for as many activities as possible. By doing this, you can quickly focus on the items that bring back the most to your company and help you grow. The bigger you get, the easier it is to focus on more and more items. But in the beginning, it’s really important to focus on what investments will bring in the biggest ROI. Of course, ROI doesn’t only mean financial return. It applies to branding, customer feedback, development etc.
Quick: What’s ONE thing you recommend ALL aspiring or current entrepreneurs do right now to take their biz to the next level?
Start protecting your data!
