We Made the Day Longer

This week a client asked me to make the day longer.

The scheduling grid in the event planning platform we're building for her started at 6 AM, and the system wouldn't let you add anything earlier. She wanted all 24 hours. Fair enough. Events don't keep office hours.

So the day is 24 hours long now. It still opens at 6 AM, so nobody has to scroll past midnight to find breakfast.

On to this week's newsletter.

1. A big round of updates on an event planning platform

We're a few weeks into building a planning platform for an event production company that runs multi-day corporate events. This week we pushed a long list of updates, almost all of them straight from the client's own testing notes.

My favorite is a small piece of automation. Every time you add a payment to a vendor's payment schedule, the platform creates a matching task to pay that vendor. Mark the payment as paid, and the task checks itself off. Check off the task, and the payment updates. It's one less thing to keep in sync by hand, and it means the task list and the payment schedule never disagree.

A few others worth mentioning:

• Payments can now have due dates, and anything due in the next 30 days shows up in an Upcoming Payments panel on the event dashboard. Payments without a due date sit at the top so nothing slips.
• Vendors and contacts now live on one page, organized by type, with a card view and a spreadsheet view.
• A new task template builder handles large checklists, and you can pick a template when you create an event to load the whole checklist automatically.
• A calendar and task list roll up tasks across every event, filterable by client, event, assignee and due date.

One thing I told the client, and I think it applies to any software project: some of these changes went out in stages on purpose. A few of them touch other parts of the app, so I'd rather roll them out gradually and watch for side effects than ship everything at once and spend the next week untangling it.

2. Software should use your words

On our Friday call, we agreed to rename two of the core terms in the platform so they match how the client actually talks about her work. What we'd been calling one thing, she calls another, and every time she used the app she had to translate in her head.

It sounds minor. It isn't. The words on the screen are the first thing your team sees every day. If they don't match the language your business already uses, the software always feels a little foreign, and people are slower to trust it.

If you're building or buying a tool, pay attention to the labels. Ask your team what they call things, and make the software say that.

3. Last week's switched-off reminders get a test run

Last week I wrote about automatic past-due payment reminders for a field services client, and why they ship switched off. This week we planned how they'll get switched on.

The first round won't go to customers at all. It'll go to the client's accounting team, so they can review exactly what each reminder says and who it would have gone to. Once they're comfortable with it, the reminders start going out for real.

We added a few other things on the same app this week:

• A daily job limit, so the schedule can't be booked past a set maximum for the day.
• Number fields on line items that backspace the way the old system did, which came up a couple of weeks ago when we watched someone use the app.
• A walkthrough video for the tool that rebuilds renewal history for older contracts, so the team can use it without a call.

Next up is editing invoices directly in the app, so the team spends less time jumping back and forth to the accounting software.

4. Two referrals, two good first calls

A real estate team we met through a referral a couple of weeks ago decided to move forward. Their first priority is a new website they've been planning, and we're getting the kickoff on the calendar now.

This week I also had a first call with an education consultant, another referral, who sells a curriculum to other businesses. She walked me through it, and you could tell how much thought and structure went into it. The idea we talked through: when someone buys, they enter their business name and a few other details once, and those fill in across the whole curriculum automatically. Technically, that part is very doable. The more interesting question is how it fits her business model, which is where we'd start.

Both of these came from the same person passing our name along. I don't take that lightly.

5. Tool worth knowing: Google Apps Script

If your business runs on Google Workspace, you already have Google Apps Script. It's a scripting tool built into Google Drive, Sheets, Docs and Gmail, and it's one of the most underrated automation tools out there for small businesses.

On that curriculum call, one example came up: Apps Script can copy an entire folder structure and share it with a customer the moment they purchase. No download and re-upload, no browser extension, no manual sharing.

Other things it's great at: sending emails from a spreadsheet, generating documents from a template, cleaning up data on a schedule, and connecting Google tools to other software.

You don't need to know how to code to benefit from it. You just need to know it exists, so you can ask whether something you're doing by hand could be a script.

How-to: send the recap the same day

Here's a habit that's helped me more than almost any tool. After any first call with a prospect or client, I send a recap within a few hours. It has three parts:

• What we heard. One or two lines that show you were listening, ideally in their words.
• Next steps. Numbered, specific, with who does what.
• A few quick thoughts. Early ideas, possible quick wins, and your biggest open question.

That last part matters. Naming your open question early shows you're thinking about their business, not just the build, and it gives them something to react to.

Both of my recent discovery calls got a recap the same afternoon. One is already a yes.

Try this: Next time you finish a call with a potential customer or partner, block 15 minutes right after and send the recap before you do anything else.

What's one process in your business you'd automate tomorrow if you could? Hit reply and tell me. Or if you'd like to talk it through, grab 30 minutes with me here: calendly.com/patrick-univium/30min

Talk soon,

Patrick