GroundInn
Marta is currently building from the ground up a new start-up called GroundInn which provides community design and engagement strategy services to help companies grow without losing their essence.
The Need
Marta is currently building from the ground up a new start-up called GroundInn which provides community design and engagement strategy services to help companies grow without losing their essence.
With over 10 years of working experience, Marta understands the importance of having early on a solid system to build a company on. She believes that it is easier to create in the beginning, before the company gets more complex, so she contacted me (Daniel) to help her build a system that can allow her to:
- Check the status of all client projects
- Manage the workload of her employees
- Share status pages with the clients to keep them always on track and minimise the number of emails
- Manage invoices and finances
- Easily check who's owing money
- Track prospects and clients through the sales process to maximise revenue
- Create and share SOPs company-wide
- Automate and standarise the onboarding of new hires
The Proposed Solution
After our first discovery call I proposed Marta to meet for 8 sessions in order to tackle together each of her objectives.
This was the detailed plan I shared with her:
- External for clients (1 session).
- See and share each project's status
- Share deliverables with clients
- Internal:
- Documents Hub. (0,5 sessions)
- Legal, invoices, etc.
- Show the values of the company (0,5 sessions)
- Courses tracking (1 session)
- Onboarding for new employees (1 or 2 sessions)
- Employees and company's ecosystem (1 session)
- Internal and external CRM.
- Meeting notes, linked to CRM
- Task manager (1 or 2 sessions)
- Automations using Zapier (1 or 2 sessions)
The Process
The 8 calls were structured as follows:
- First 10 minutes checking on what went well and wrong with what we built on the previous call and solving general doubts.
- For the rest of the call we kept building.
- Last 5 minutes to set the homework to do for our next call
During these calls we built step by step all the systems that are going to help Marta achieve the objectives that she shared during the discovery call.
We started with a company-wide Task Manager, which was then related to a Projects database. This is the primary structure of basically any business system, that's why it's what we started building it first.
Once that was done, we moved on to creating accessory pages to that system, such as the Add New Task page, with the objective of standardising the data input to major databases and avoid incomplete data, or the scheduling page, to help each employee plan their tasks.
Then we started building their businesses (GroundInn's clients) and contacts databases.
We decided to separate those in two databases because we can have multiple contacts within the same business, and we also wanted to link the financials of every business to the business page, not the contact's.
The financials were quasi automated using an Invoices database, which was linked to the business that was invoiced.
That became the hub for all the payments Marta's company was making and receiving and allowed her to see all numbers related to each of the businesses (invoices paid, quantity owed...)
Additional to that, we wanted a way to save all conversations that they have with each client, so everything's easier to recall at a moments notice.
We did so by creating a Meeting Notes database that was linked to the contacts. This way, within the Business page we are able to retreive all conversations that we've had with the employees of that business.
As we built everything together, we always made sure that Marta and her team understood how everything is connected, and by asking Marta questions along the way we also made sure that the workflows and systems we were building were adapted to the way she wanted to run her business.
At the end of each call, an email was sent with the Zoom recording along with the next steps Marta and her team needed to take before our next call.
Here are some other screenshots of what we built:
All 8 calls we had, sped up and blurred (for confidentiality purposes)
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