The 3 Tools of the Entrepreneur

November 2018. I was doing a routine check-in with one of our six-month-old startups. The founder had mentioned they were “talking to a lot of potential customers” and “getting really good feedback.” When I asked how many conversations they’d had, he said “maybe 30 or 40.”

“Great,” I said. “Show me your CRM.”

He looked confused. “My what?”

“Your CRM. Customer Relationship Management system. Where you’re tracking all these conversations.”

Long pause. “I don’t have one. I just remember who I talked to.”

I pulled up my laptop and opened their Google Drive. I found it in exactly the state I feared: a chaotic mess of random documents with names like “meeting notes,” “more notes,” and “final final version 3.” No structure. No consistency. No way to find anything.

“Okay,” I said. “Walk me through your last five conversations. What did they say? What were their pain points? What’s the follow-up plan?”

He couldn’t answer. He remembered vague impressions (“they seemed interested”) but none of the specifics that actually matter. Who exactly was interested? What specific feature did they want? When were you supposed to follow up? What budget did they mention?

All that critical business intelligence, gathered over dozens of hours of work, was gone. It existed nowhere except in his unreliable memory.

This is how startups waste their most precious resource: the insights they’ve earned from talking to real customers.

That conversation led me to establish what I now require from every entrepreneur in our portfolio: mastery of three essential tools. Not 10 tools. Not a sophisticated tech stack. Just three critical instruments that form the operational backbone of a scalable startup.

These tools aren’t sexy. Nobody celebrates their CRM the way they celebrate launching a product. But I’ve seen startups fail because they ignored these tools, and I’ve seen startups accelerate dramatically once they embraced them.

The Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

What a CRM Actually Does

A CRM is not a sales tool, though that’s how most people think of it. A CRM is your startup’s memory. It’s where you store every meaningful interaction with every person who might give you money, so you can find that information when you need it and spot patterns across hundreds of conversations.

Every time you talk to a potential customer, you learn something: what problems they have, which features matter, what they’re willing to pay, what objections they raise, when they’re ready to buy. That’s business intelligence. Losing it is like mining for gold and then throwing the gold in the ocean.

But here’s what actually happens without a CRM:

You have a great conversation on Monday. By Friday, you can’t remember the person’s company name.
Someone asks you “how many qualified leads are in your pipeline?” You have no idea.
You promise to follow up with someone in two weeks. Three weeks later, you remember.
You’re trying to decide on pricing. You’ve had pricing conversations with 20 people. You remember two of them.
Your co-founder asks “did we talk to anyone in the healthcare industry?” You think so? Maybe?

This isn’t hypothetical. I’ve watched this exact scenario play out dozens of times.

The $80,000 Lead We Almost Lost

One of our B2B startups had a conversation with a VP at a medium-sized company. Good conversation, genuine interest, but the VP said: “We’re not ready to buy now. Our budget process happens in Q4. Check back with me in September.”

The entrepreneur logged it in the CRM with a task: “Follow up in September.”

August rolled around. The CRM reminded him. He reached out to the VP in early September, right as their Q4 planning was starting. The timing was perfect. They closed an $80,000 annual contract in October.

Without the CRM reminder, would he have remembered to follow up? Maybe. Probably not. He was managing 40 other active conversations and building the product. That one follow-up would have slipped through the cracks.

The CRM made him $80,000.

How to Use a CRM Effectively

We don’t care which CRM you use. HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce, whatever. Pick one that doesn’t drive you crazy and stick with it.

Here’s the minimum discipline required:

1. Log every meaningful conversation within 24 hours

“Meaningful” means anyone who could be a customer, partner, or investor. After the conversation, spend five minutes recording:

Who they are (name, company, role)
What they care about (problems, priorities, urgency)
What they said about your solution (interest level, objections, specific feature requests)
What happens next (follow-up date, action items, decision timeline)
Any numbers mentioned (budget, current spend, team size, usage volumes)

2. Track the stage of every opportunity

Your CRM should show you where every potential customer is in your process:

First contact → Qualified lead → Demo scheduled → Proposal sent → Negotiating → Closed won/lost

This lets you answer the question: “What’s in the pipeline?” Without stages, your pipeline is just a random list of names.

3. Set follow-up tasks and actually do them

When someone says “check back in a month,” create a task for one month from now. When the reminder pops up, do the follow-up. The CRM’s job is to remember so you don’t have to.

4. Use it to spot patterns

After 20-30 customer conversations, review your CRM data. You’ll start seeing patterns:

Which features get mentioned most often?
What objections keep coming up?
How long does the sales cycle actually take?
What’s the common profile of interested vs. uninterested leads?

This is how you refine your product and sales approach based on data, not guesses.

The Biggest CRM Mistake

The mistake isn’t using the wrong CRM platform. It’s treating the CRM as optional.

“I’ll just log the important stuff.” Everything feels important until you need to remember it later.

“I’ll do it once I have more time.” You will never have more time. You’ll have more conversations, which makes the problem worse.

“I have a good memory.” No, you don’t. Nobody does. You can’t accurately recall details from 50 conversations.

The rule is simple: If you talked to them about your business, they go in the CRM. No exceptions. Make it automatic, like brushing your teeth.

The Business Requirements Document (BRD)

The Translation Problem

Most entrepreneurs are not developers. Most developers are not entrepreneurs. This creates a fundamental communication problem.

The entrepreneur talks to customers and knows what the product needs to do: “The customer wants to be able to export their data as a PDF with a custom header.”

The developer asks: “What format should the data be in? What’s in the custom header? What happens if the data is too large for one page? Which fonts are we using? How do they select which data to export?”

Without a structured way to communicate requirements, you get two failure modes:

Mode 1: Constant interruptions. The developer stops working every 20 minutes to ask clarifying questions. Building a simple feature takes three times longer than it should because half the time is spent in back-and-forth communication.

Mode 2: Wrong implementation. The developer makes assumptions about what you meant. They build it, you see it, and it’s not what you wanted. Now they have to rebuild it. You’ve wasted a week or more.

I’ve seen both modes destroy startup velocity.

What a BRD Does

A Business Requirements Document is a structured description of what you want built and why. It’s the translation layer between the business need (what customers want) and the technical implementation (how developers build it).

A good BRD includes:

User story: Who is this for and what are they trying to do?
Current state: How does this work now (or why doesn’t it work)?
Desired state: How should it work when we’re done?
Acceptance criteria: Specifically, what defines “done”?
Edge cases: What happens in unusual scenarios?
Priority: Is this a must-have or nice-to-have?

The Feature That Took Three Days Instead of Three Weeks

One of our startups needed to build an email notification system. The entrepreneur’s first attempt at a requirement: “Users should get emails when something important happens.”

The developer’s response: “That’s not specific enough for me to build anything.”

Fair point.

So the entrepreneur wrote a proper BRD:

User story: As a user, I want to be notified by email when someone comments on my post, so I can respond quickly.

Current state: Users have to manually check the app to see new comments. They’re missing conversations.

Desired state: Within 5 minutes of someone commenting on a user’s post, that user receives an email with the commenter’s name, comment text, and a link to reply.

Acceptance criteria:

Email arrives within 5 minutes of comment being posted
Email includes commenter’s name and avatar
Email includes first 200 characters of comment with a “read more” link
Link goes directly to the comment thread
If user has turned off email notifications in settings, don’t send email
If multiple comments happen in 5 minutes, batch them into one email

Edge cases:

If user comments on their own post, don’t send them an email
If the comment is deleted before the email goes out, don’t send the email
If user’s email is invalid, log the error but don’t crash

Priority: High - customers have requested this three times

With this BRD, the developer built the feature in three days. No interruptions, no clarifying questions, no rebuilds. He knew exactly what to build.

How to Write a BRD

You don’t need to be a technical writer. You need to be specific.

Think through the feature from the user’s perspective. What are they trying to do? What should happen when they click the button? What should they see? What happens if something goes wrong?

Write it down as clearly as you can. Then add the edge cases: all the “what if” scenarios you can think of.

The time you spend writing a good BRD saves multiples of that time in development. An hour writing a BRD can save a week of confused development and rework.

And here’s the bonus: the act of writing a detailed BRD forces you to think through whether the feature actually makes sense. I’ve had entrepreneurs start writing a BRD and realize halfway through that the feature they wanted was actually solving the wrong problem. They saved days or weeks of development on something that wouldn’t have worked.

The Treasury Sheet

The Nightmare Scenario

February 2019. One of our startups ran out of money.

This shouldn’t have happened. We’d invested $45,000. They had revenue. Their burn rate wasn’t crazy. But one month, they went to pay their developer and realized they didn’t have enough in the bank.

How did this happen?

They didn’t know how much money they had, how much they were spending, or how long they could survive. They weren’t tracking it. The CEO thought they had “a few months of runway.” They had three weeks.

We had to do an emergency bridge financing to keep them alive while they figured out their cash situation. It was a mess. It was avoidable. It was entirely due to not managing their treasury.

You cannot manage what you do not measure. If you don’t know how much money you have and how fast you’re spending it, you’re flying blind. And eventually, you’ll crash.

What a Treasury Sheet Is

A treasury sheet is a simple spreadsheet that tracks:

How much money you have right now
How much money is coming in (and when)
How much money is going out (and when)
How long you can survive at your current burn rate

It’s not complicated. It’s just discipline.

The Components

1. Current cash balance: How much is in your bank account right now? This should match your actual bank balance to the dollar.

2. Expected income: What money is coming in this month? Next month? Include:

Confirmed revenue from customers
Investment tranches that are committed
Grants or subsidies that are approved

Don’t include wishful thinking. Only count money that’s basically guaranteed.

3. Fixed expenses: What money is going out every month, no matter what? Include:

Salaries (including founder salaries)
Software subscriptions
Office rent
Insurance
Tax obligations
Loan payments

4. Variable expenses: What else are you spending on?

Development costs
Marketing spend
Travel
Legal fees
Other operational costs

5. Burn rate: Total expenses minus total income = how much cash you’re consuming per month.

6. Runway: Current cash balance divided by monthly burn rate = how many months you can survive.

That last number is the most important one. If your runway is less than three months, you’re in danger. Less than six months, you should be fundraising or cutting costs.

The Discipline

Update your treasury sheet every week. Every Friday, spend 15 minutes:

Checking actual bank balance
Recording expenses from the week
Recording any income received
Updating projections for the month

This 15-minute habit can save your startup’s life.

One of our founders credits the treasury sheet with saving his company. He was burning $8,000/month with $60,000 in the bank. His runway looked fine: 7.5 months. But when he actually built the treasury sheet and projected forward, he realized he had three large expenses coming up: a $5,000 legal fee, a $3,000 annual software renewal, and a $7,000 tax payment.

His runway wasn’t 7.5 months. It was 5 months. And he had no confirmed revenue for the next quarter.

This realization made him immediately shift focus to sales and cut two unnecessary subscriptions. He closed a $12,000 deal in month six and secured his runway for another nine months.

Without the treasury sheet, he would have drifted comfortably until month five, then panicked in month six when he realized he was about to run out of money. By then, it would have been too late to recover.

The Transparency Benefit

I require all our portfolio companies to share their treasury sheet with us monthly. This isn’t about control: it’s about help.

When I see a startup’s runway dropping below six months, we can proactively discuss options: cut costs, shift to revenue focus, raise a bridge round, secure a grant. We can solve the problem while there’s still time.

The founders who hide their financial situation (or worse, don’t even know their financial situation) are the ones who end up in crisis. The founders who transparently share their numbers get help before the crisis hits.

How the Three Tools Work Together

These tools aren’t independent. They’re a system.

The CRM feeds the BRD: When multiple customers request the same feature, that insight from your CRM becomes a prioritized requirement in your BRD.

The BRD affects the Treasury: When you decide to build a feature, you can estimate the development cost and update your treasury projections. You know how the product roadmap impacts your burn rate.

The Treasury influences the CRM: When runway gets tight, you can filter your CRM for the highest-value opportunities and focus sales efforts there. You’re prioritizing based on financial need.

I’ve watched startups transform when they finally embrace all three tools simultaneously. The CEO knows which customers to prioritize (CRM), communicates product needs clearly (BRD), and makes decisions based on financial reality (Treasury). Everything clicks.

The startup that didn’t have a CRM in November 2018? I made them set up HubSpot that week. I sat with them and we logged every conversation they could remember. We set up a BRD template for all their features. We built a treasury sheet showing they had 11 months of runway.

Six months later, they closed their first enterprise deal (tracked in CRM from first conversation to close), shipped the exact product the customer wanted (built from clear BRDs), and extended their runway to 18 months (visible in their treasury sheet).

They didn’t become a different team. They just became an organized team. And organization, at the early stage, is often the difference between success and failure.

If you’re a builder entrepreneur reading this and you don’t have these three tools set up and actively maintained, stop whatever else you’re doing and set them up today. Pick a CRM (HubSpot has a free tier), create a BRD template (I can send you ours), and build a treasury sheet in Google Sheets.

This isn’t optional infrastructure. This is survival equipment.

The startups that master these three tools think clearly, move quickly, and make smart decisions. The startups that skip them stumble in the dark, waste time, and run out of money.

Which one do you want to be?