According to CEO of GrowthAssistant, Adriane Schwager, 17 months ago, she co-founded her first business. Today, the business has crossed $5,000,000 in revenue with only five full-time employees. As a mom, wife, and now a first-time founder and CEO, she shares her top learnings on leadership, entrepreneurship, and startups as reposted below:

Hire an assistant

Hire an executive assistant before you think you need one – and offshore. When we can’t release control, we operate from a place of fear. Fear is not how you want to run your business. By hiring an executive assistant you’ll free up so much of your time, which is truly a most valuable asset.

Keep clients happy

Focus on keeping people happy. The main driver for success is keeping people happy. It’s a key part of a company’s culture and you need to personally get involved to make sure everyone’s happy with the services offered. Happy people accelerate growth.

Build community

Focus on community, even with remote teams. Screen for people with a community mindset from the first interview. Working remotely doesn’t mean they want to work quietly in a dark room. Your clients and employees must be able to coach each other, offer advice, share tips and tricks, and cheer on one another.

Automation is key

Build time for communication in your calendar. Email and Slack need to be built into your calendar. When they aren’t, you may find yourself in back-to-back meetings and by close of day you will have a lot of emails to review. That is not sustainable. Time-blocking is essential when you manage big teams.

Choose digital marketing

You do not have to spend huge sums of money on advertising. Twitter, referrals, and networking drive 100% of our growth. Twitter is great for marketing. Use social media to grow your business without spending a ton on ads (and use a GrowthAssistant to do it!).