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Applicom's Blog
Product updates, news & miscellanea from your fellow Apollo developers.
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Avoid paper. At all costs. Even if it means scanning everything
Get some scales. Now, measure how much 700 sheets of paper weigh. That's quite a bit. Now put a lighter next to them. Let the flame touch the paper. Once the fire brigades are finished with your house, come back here and read the rest of this long chapter. Get some scales. Now, measure how much 500Mb weigh. That's hardly anything, especially if they are on a USB key. Now, put a lighter next to those 500Mb. It probably won't catch fire. The good news is that your house is safe.
Make invoicing automatic. Always.
If you like Zen meditation, manual invoicing is for you. You need to first write an invoice manually. That's by pen, or with Microsoft Word -- whatever. Well, three copies of it: one for the customer, one for yourself (to be stacked in the "unpaid invoices" folder), and one for the archive. Then you need to do your double-entry bookkeeping of this invoice, in the receivable account. Every day, you can go even deeper into your meditation while to go through the stack of unpaid invoices, and call customers to remind them.
Never have a 50% business partner. Ever.
This is possibly the most important rule for a reason: break it, and you will fail. A 50% partner will give you a 98.8% failure rate. Having two bosses running a company together is like having two heterosexual pilots in one Formula 1 racing car: at the beginning they might enjoy the mad ride, but eventually they will hate each other's smell, sweat and breath. There is a reason why big companies, when the current CEO resigns, hire one new CEO and not two. There is a reason why there is one commander in an army.