Our very own Anna Tsyupko spoke to Authority Magazine's Parveen Panwar on five things she wish someone had told her before becoming a c-suite executive.
Here is an excerpt of the five things Anna learnt along the way throughout her founder journey.
Lesson one: How important work/life balance is; doing less is more. I was working crazy hours at my previous role and suffered from burnout, and anxiety attacks. The cost to get out of that negative, mental hole was not worth the extra hours of work. Rather, I should have filled my life with more excitement and non-work elements to give me the energy to bring back to the workplace and prioritise myself.
Lesson two: You are not your business: you shouldn’t equate your success with the success of your business, do not base your self worth on how well things are going in the business, when someone criticises the business or doesn’t want to invest, ultimately you are not your business, so do not take the criticism so personally and let it affect you mentally.
Lesson three: Ask for help: ask your team for help, you don’t need to have it all figured out, you’re there to support your team, and it goes the other way around too. In terms of a personal example, every single time I’ve opened up to teammates, I have always been met with kindness and openness so the result was much better. We shouldn’t put that pressure on ourselves just because we’re leading a team, we should be vulnerable and open for help.
Lesson four: To be conscious about where and when to cut corners: it’s easy to go all out perfectionist and hope for everything to be ideal, but one of the advantages of working in a startup/small business is that you can be lean and that you can experiment and put out a quick and dirty prototype. There are certain elements of the business where you don’t want to cut corners — you need to get these elements right straight from the beginning like your legal agreement — but you might want to put in the effort and cost into a better place like the initial website. Always put your effort into something that can support your business model, and don’t get caught up in the detail with certain things.
Lesson five: Don’t get caught up with the wrong metrics. We realised in my previous role, that our Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) were going through the roof, and it gave us a lot of confidence, but in reality, the ratio in live clients and SQL was far from ideal, the really important metric would have been live paying clients. A vanity metric lulled us into false security. Really consider what the true metrics are that really correlate with the business’s success.
You can see the full blog here.
About tomato pay
Community has never been as important as it is today, and watching the business and sole trader community struggle throughout the past year has spurred us on to take a more community-led approach to our business.
tomato pay is a simple, QR-code based payments and invoice app powered by Open Banking and built on our tomato pay API platform which offers both AIS and PIS capabilities.
Businesses and sole traders can benefit from our low-cost QR-code payments solution with no hidden fees, which saves them money compared to their current payment systems, gives them instant access to their money as cash settlement happens almost immediately, and access to all of their bank accounts in one place.
Businesses and sole traders can benefit from our quick and easy invoice solution. Invoices can be created within the app, with the option to give discounts and late penalties (pre-built into the app using gamification and behavioural science) and send nudges to remind customers and clients to pay. Plus, as you connect your bank account, payments are embedded within the app - so no need to give your bank details, and receive money owed instantly into your account.
Everyone can support their local communities thrive by paying their neighbourhood businesses in a cashless, hassle-free way. Join the waitlist.
