You have just started a new business and there is paperwork everywhere, from startup contracts to proposals for business, and already you feel a bit overwhelmed. Wait until the paperwork piles up to the point where you think it might tip over and drown you in a blizzard of white 8X10 copies.
While starting a business can be a very exciting time in a person’s life, it can also be among the most stressful. Every I has to be dotted, every T has to be crossed, before you can start to think about finding a place to work, people to hire, etc. Even then because you are a startup company, odds are you may be the sole employee or your staff may be skeletal and bare-bones.
The trick is to get the preliminary paperwork off your desk before the real work comes in. If the workload is big right off the bat, the odds are the smaller your office, the more overloaded things are going to be for you and your crew.
You should have taken care of all the paperwork necessary for starting up a business by now. Make sure that is off your desk by the time you start accepting clients. If you are juggling startup paperwork with the beginning e-mails and papers from your clients then you are going to be one confused business owner.
If you sense that there will be a lot of work off the bat for you in terms of contracts to sign and papers to keep track of daily, then it might not be a bad idea to hire someone to take care of this stuff for you. Contract Managers know all the ins and outs of taking care of paperwork related to vendors, clients and even your employees. They are the ones that check the fine print to make sure everything is all right. This is not a bad idea at all for you to hire someone in this profession. After all, this is what they do for a living, and anything you can do to make your business run smoother works out fine.
If manpower or resources prevent you from hiring new people on to take care of the work, then make sure you have a system to stay on top of things. Organize all paperwork for certain projects by folders if you are keeping hard copies. Do the same thing for files on the computer. Organizing the computer folders by project will make it easier to find those files when it comes time to talk about them.
Check your e-mail every day when you get in and stay on top of things. Organizing e-mail in terms of importance, to avoid so-called “data deluge”, is of utmost importance. E-mails relating to projects you are working on should get top billing, followed in order by what is next most important and so on. As you file paperwork through the day, make sure it is taken care of properly. Don’t leave anything loose lying around. Not only does that maintain a clutter-free work environment, it prevents a case of forgetting later on where a file is supposed to go.
Opening a new business or startup is an exhilarating task if you can stay on top of things. Otherwise it can be exhausting, and you may drown in the flood of papers. Don’t let this happen to you.
