Follow Up! Please

##Surprise! You are the shoemaker’s elf.

As a young solo entrepreneur I worked long hours to cover all my bases. Many of you will be familiar with the strange discovery, when just starting out, that the world does not keep on spinning by itself at all.
It turns out that there are, in fact, millions of little elves (you and me) that wake up early and stay up late to keep pushing it around and around.

###Nothing happens unless you make it so. Nothing.

For the first 6 years of my business it was just me; inbox zero wasn’t some lofty, ridiculous goal. It was a necessity. Every email had to get read and dealt with: reply to it now, leave it unread for later in the day, or set a reminder for a specific date. After that, once the team grew, there was a lot that could be delegated but you simply can’t move forward unless you know that everything is, pretty much, in hand. And that means following up.

Yay me right? Well…

###I wasn’t born this way, I had to fuck up plenty before I learned to follow up.

##One of the Many Times when I Failed

When I was doing my articles (I used to be a lawyer) I had a near-fatal ability to put files to the bottom of a pile and then forget about them.

###Time-bombs. I was effectively placing time-bombs in my own office, in my own career.

When I left the firm to return to Dublin I went through every file to prepare transition notes for my colleague Brett. And there were some serious fuck-ups in there. Things that I had let fester, clients I had not served well at all.
It made me feel sick. Brett, being a far better person than me, told me not to worry about it, took over all of the files without a word of complaint and took care of it (he even still talks to me!) Just like all of those essays I left to the last minute at university, time had magnified the mental effort required to achieve a reasonable solution and I’d convinced myself it would be easier to just leave it rather than deal with it. (This is almost never true.)

##Hello Young Grasshopper

So it always amuses me somewhat when I’m talking to new entrepreneurs about tools and resources to help them leverage their way to success. These are generally highly motivated and inspirational people. They are dynamic, engaging, determined and full of optimism, creativity and purpose.

###The vast majority fail at this one basic task: the follow up.

They fail to do what they say will do, they fail to respond to people, they fail to follow through.

Like I said: I understand, I’ve been there. But don’t bother perfecting your elevator pitch or spend your time learning design thinking if you’re not even going to respond to the investor who gave you her business card or read through your user-interview notes and follow through.
First, learn to follow up. How do you do that?

###By following up. With everyone. Every. Single. Time.

Following up is the sine qua non of everything else you’re trying to achieve. (That’s my favourite bit of legal Latin, it literally translates as “without which not”. And I prefer that literal translation to “but-for conditionality” because it’s so blunt.)

If you want investors, a community, clients, product-market fit — then you have to follow up because: without which not!

##Practically Speaking

This means following up with everything. It does not mean hounding people to respond to you or sending 15 emails to your dream investor.

It does mean:

saying thank you to people that help you.
taking notes of things you say you’re going to do in a conversation or meeting.
diarizing tasks for weeks or months into the future.

Work, family, friends, clients, service providers, mentors, mentees, investors… everyone. They all deserve the follow up.

Some practical steps you can take that might help with this:

Say no.

Every time you say “yes” to something you’re effectively saying no to something that you’re already doing. Both Essentialism (http://www.amazon.com/Essentialism-Disciplined-Pursuit-Greg-McKeown/dp/0804137382) and In Pursuit of Elegance (http://www.amazon.com/Matthew-E-May-Elegance-Something/dp/B00854CBI2) are great books on this topic.

Keep track of your stuff.

I don’t care what system you use (my personal system is to change systems every 6–12 months, right now I’m transitioning from Wunderlist (https://www.wunderlist.com) to Trello (https://trello.com) plus a paper schedule and Pomodoro timer).

Eat the elephant first.

Do you have a time-bomb? Have you sabotaged yourself somehow? First of all, forgive yourself for it, and then, first thing, pull out that monster and just do it. Whatever it is. Get it done and then enjoy the sweet rush of anti-gravity that will fill your body as you fly through tasks for the rest of the day. Rinse and repeat.

Just do it.

It doesn’t need to be pretty, it’s not about systems to maximize productivity, it’s not about why you didn’t do it in the first place. Just do it already. (And please, don’t make excuses if you’re late: apologise and get on with it. We’re all human, everybody does it, life interrupts everyone and 99% of us will appreciate the candor and honesty, we will all forgive, forget and move on.)

##How Much of a Difference Can This Make?

Rachel Minard (http://www.minardcapital.com/) has raised about $10 billion in investments and the secret to her success, according to her, was simple: “80% of everything is following up.” Focus on getting that right and then worry about the last 20%. (For Rachel, most of the last 20% is about authenticity, I agree completely! She has a great TEDx talk (

on it.) In other words, it’s the sine qua non for success.

Why does she emphasise it so much (and why am I doing so here)? Because of how few people actually follow up.
Professionally, personally, everthing-ly — most people just don’t… so if you want to set yourself apart, just start with this one thing. Really.

And what about me — mr high and mighty on a soapbox over here? How am I doing? Not so well right now actually — I have about 59 items from StartingBloc (http://startingbloc.org/) in February that I still haven’t finished, another 32 from the Consensus2016 (http://www.coindesk.com/events/consensus-2016/) conference in NY in April that are overdue at this point, and two (!!) Big Monsters that need immediate attention. (Hi Mark, hi Kristine…) And these are just the overdue items.

I’d better get back to it.

[Note - originally published on Medium.]