Sathvik Tantry is the co-founder and CEO of FormSwift, a SaaS platform helping organizations go paperless. FormSwift’s tools allow businesses and individuals to create, edit, sign, and collaborate on documents and workflows in the cloud, eliminating unnecessary printing, faxing, and snail mail.
Who is your hero? (In business, life, or both.)
Richard Branson is my hero in both business and life. One of my core business values is providing great customer experiences, and the Virgin Group has scaled in commodity businesses by focusing on this value. Personally, Richard Branson has a wonderful family life with a stable marriage, great kids and a terrific work-life balance.
What’s the single best piece of business advice that helped shape who you are as an entrepreneur today, and why?
The best piece of business advice, from the CEO of my former employer, is “Don’t take big steps back.” The media like to promote growth stories; companies that have raised a lot of money or are adding users at an unprecedented rate. In chasing after that, entrepreneurs often forget to protect against the downside. At FormSwift, we have made many mistakes, but our executive team always ensures that we are protected on the downside from any catastrophe. As long as you don’t take any big steps back, consistent growth, compounded over a long period of time, will build a sustainable, profitable business.
What’s the biggest mistake you ever made in your business, and what did you learn from it that others can learn from too?
The biggest mistake I made was not having a clear strategy to scale our team. Every part of hiring — from defining the role to finding the right person — is extremely expensive, and you need to establish why you need the position before you go out and look for a person. Early on, we hired a Senior Executive without having a clear roadmap for his goals. Misaligned expectations eventually caused us to part ways. We spent a lot of time and money on a hire that ended up yielding us very little in return.
What do you do during the first hour of your business day and why?
The first thing I do is check all of our key statistics for the prior day: cash in the bank, revenue, margin and new customers. This helps me identify any immediate fires I need to put out. It also gives me a list of things to investigate further with my team.
What’s your best financial/cash-flow related tip for entrepreneurs just getting started?
Think about where your first paying customers are going to come from. Many entrepreneurs focus on building a product and assume that once it’s built, the “customers will come.” This is rarely the case. There is an excellent book called “Traction” by Gabriel Weinberg that outlines the different methods of customer acquisition and whether they make sense for your business.
Quick: What’s ONE thing you recommend ALL aspiring or current entrepreneurs do right now to take their biz to the next level?
Have a roadmap for growth. Taking your business to the next level is all about growth, and there isn’t any one path to getting there. Set a growth goal, milestones and action steps, and stick to it.
What’s your definition of success? How will you know when you’ve finally “succeeded” in your business?
To me, a great business consists of three things: building products that our customers love, having a clear business model that produces sustainable profits and growth for the shareholders, and having fun. Once we are there, I’ll know that we are successful.
