Do You Really Need a CRM in Your First Year of Business?

CRMs (Customer Relationship Management systems) are often marketed as essential, but are they really necessary in your very first year of business?

In this episode, we explore whether new founders should invest in a CRM early on, or whether a simple spreadsheet is enough until you reach the next stage of growth. We talk about the benefits, the risks, and how to know when it’s time to upgrade.

We cover:

• Why most small businesses don’t use a CRM in year one and still manage just fine
• When a spreadsheet works perfectly well vs. when it becomes a liability
• How CRMs can streamline lead management, customer tracking, and communication
• Why starting early can save you headaches later (if you choose wisely)
• Affordable CRM options for small businesses like Zoho, Pipedrive, Monday, and Go High Level
• Why scalability matters when choosing a tool for your future growth

If you’ve been debating whether to invest in a CRM right now, this conversation will help you make a smart, stage-appropriate decision for your business.

Want help choosing the right tools and systems for your stage of business? Join our free Visionary Founders Club, a community of entrepreneurs sharing lessons, resources, and strategies to grow smarter.

“A spreadsheet can take you surprisingly far, but it won’t take you forever.” – Jores Minasvand

Transcript for “Do You Really Need a CRM in Year One of Your Business?”

The transcript below was automatically generated. Please ignore any errors or inconsistencies in the text.

Anna Angelova   0:18
Hello and welcome to today’s episode of More Than Just Task Management. My name is Anna Angelova, business coach and consultant, a co-host of this Daily Business podcast where we help you build a thriving business. And I have Joris Minosfand here with me, my fellow co-host and business consultant.
Hey, Joris, how is Vienna today?

Jores Minasvand   0:41
Hannah Vienna is still beautiful and sunny and but it’s not very warm though. It’s still wow. It’s already 26 degrees. It wasn’t colder this morning. Yeah, it was colder this morning. It’s reached 26 degrees. I need to get out.

Anna Angelova   0:51
It’s not very warm.
Yeah.

Jores Minasvand   0:57
After this I will get out and go for dinner in the the beautiful city centre. How is Canada?

Anna Angelova   1:06
Oh, it’s also very nice actually. I think it will also be like in here in the Toronto area to also go to 26 degrees or something like this right now. Almost noon as we are recording this. No, it’s not noon. But anyway, it’s already 1920 degrees, so very, very beautiful September weather.
But anyway, we’re not here to discuss the weather. We’re here to discuss CRMS today. So if you listen to our Sunday episode, you already know that the topic for today is whether you need a CRM in year one as you’re starting your business. And if yes, which one?

Jores Minasvand   1:24
Mm.
Yes.

Anna Angelova   1:43
And CRM ultimately stands for Customer Relationship Management and this is like systems that allow you to keep track of your customers, help you, help you actually.
Follow the whole journey from someone being just a prospect to a lead to becoming a customer and even as a customer how things go. So these systems can be very, very comprehensive. They can be very useful.
The question is like do we need it when we’re starting and um.
Joris, do you want to start or do you want me to to share my thoughts first?

Jores Minasvand   2:28
Well, I can. I can start. Everything can be done using Excel or paper and pen, but as we always discuss as a business owner, one of your goals is to.

Anna Angelova   2:30
Go ahead.

Jores Minasvand   2:45
Build your business and grow your revenue.
With that which equals to more customers. Now in the first six months or three months or nine months of your business, you may not have had a lot of customers, but eventually you’re going to get to a turning point where you really need the system to manage your customers.
And it’s, as you mentioned, it’s a customer journey. It’s not just a database where you’re putting your customer, tag them to a specific thing. There is document management, there is signature invoicing, tracking. You can have a CRM can give you. We often talk about we’ve had a few.
Well sessions where we talked about dashboarding and understand what what’s your top 20 money making customers, what how much invoice outstanding invoices do you have. There are CRM systems that will give you all of that so.
Do you need it? No. It all depends on how much time you want to spend and do you really want to 10X your business not being ready for it? And all of a sudden in the 11th hours you have to jump in and start adding this and then you have to import that.
That it’s gonna turn into a mess. So and the good thing is that some of the products that we have seen with the SAS model is you can start with the smallest tier that has the fewer features. Keep it simple, just keep it as a database and then feature.
Nature of feature just keep adding like invoicing and you can even some of them are sophisticated enough that you can actually bring your sales people in. They can manage your pipeline and the system will actually calculate their Commission based on the the revenue.
So yeah, you need to know, but should you have it? Yes.

Anna Angelova   4:54
This is a very good answer and I’m also thinking along these lines, especially when you’re starting like actually when you think about CRMS only according to to some like market metrics like only 2025% of.
Small businesses actually have a CRM and we’re not talking about a year one, we’re talking about like in general. So can you operate a business without a CRM? Absolutely. People are doing this. Is it an optimal way for run a business to to for running a business?
Maybe not. And I do want to mention again that CRM like the CRM is ultimately system technology or two and we have mentioned it before and we’ll keep on saying this that people process this technology when it comes to the.
Levers that help you build your business. This is what it is. And in your first year in your business, chances are that you don’t even have that many clients to warrant having the CRM.
And in your first year, what you want to really focus on is dialing on the business fundamentals, like the business model. Who is your ideal client? What problem are you solving? How are you positioning? Getting some of that traction with your first client, some of that feedback from your first client.
And ultimately having that process in place before you go and shop for a CRM. And I I really like what you said, Joris, that do you need it? No. Is it a good thing to have? Yeah, absolutely. Because ultimately, like, think about it.
We mentioned Excel, but you can easily keep track of people in an Excel spreadsheet. So having a CRM, even even a basic one, even a free version can be really helpful when it comes to saying ultimately goodbye to the Excel spreadsheets and this manual tracking things manual. If you can have this in in one place.
And it also allows you to automate some of the correspondence you have with people. Yes, you still want, especially in the beginning of your business, you might still want to have that high touch and even send personalized emails, but for some things you might actually want to have automated responses.
Automated correspondence based on what stage of the customer journey people are on so you can help them move to the next step. And you did mentioned already dashboards and having the data where you can see things where especially again in year one maybe not.

Jores Minasvand   7:32
Mm.

Anna Angelova   7:44
Much.
Later on seeing that a certain demographic, a certain type of customer is actually very high value. They’re the ones who give you like we’ve talked about the 8020 that like 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your customers. So you’ll be able to identify these, you’ll be able to identify you talked about sales.
Sales opportunities and things like this and ultimately make smarter decisions when things are not spread across. Oh, you keep something in an Excel, something is written maybe in your notebook, and another thing is probably somewhere in an e-mail.
So it really helps you.
Serve your customers from the moment that they come into your world to the moment that like you deliver things and they even become ambassadors. Like some of them might become ambassadors or just just leave your world like because there are people I have been part of communities and part of.
Like purchased for example, like coaching programs where I was part of it and then I’m not part of it anymore. So it’s natural that some people will be your customers and then they’ll stop. So anyway, I know I talked quite a bit and this is where my thinking is in terms of do you need it in year one?
Completely echo what you said that no, you don’t need it. Is it good to have it? Yeah, because it allows you to actually start things the right way, like with already things in place. But I would say don’t make it your focus. Don’t focus on the technology and the systems before you actually have a proven business model and.
Dales coming in, so thinking about the aspect of when do you need it? Well, I guess this is a different conversation and I see you’re muted yourself, Joris, so go ahead.

Jores Minasvand   9:26
OK.
No, absolutely. I just wanted to add your to what you’re saying is.
It will give you structure.
It’s what you need. Excel will give you maybe 2 dimensional structure, but the CRM will give you multidimensional structure like we talked about, right? The other thing is that when you start while you don’t have, it’s not an start it before it becomes essential.
Because that will give you the chance to try at least a couple of products, right? You don’t have a lot of data to import, maybe none, and you try one one week, two weeks. I think they most of them have one month, three or 14 days free.
Doesn’t have the right features. Drop it, go move the next one until you find. I think by the second one you should be able to to find what you’re looking for and then use the structure. Use it to give your business a proper structure.
I think that would be an amazing thing to do.

Anna Angelova   10:40
Yeah, absolutely. And like when it comes to like looking into like the different CRM options, of course doing your own research and seeing like results like you said, testing and seeing like a lot of them have a free trial, so testing and seeing how how you like them.
And just to mention, so we personally right now are using Go High Level, which is an amazing, amazing CRM and it’s actually even more than CRM. It has so many other features and we love it, the other ones that.
And for small businesses, and especially when it comes to pricing, there are ones that are generally recommended begin by Zoho. This is like for small companies. It can be very, very affordable and very good. Less annoying CRM also like for small business efficiency. Monday has a CRM as well.
HubSpot. I tried HubSpot, even paid for it, find it, found it too expensive. But this is like our own experience, right? Find it too expensive and too. I I I feel like it’s more for an enterprise rather than a small business, but even small businesses are using it.
And HubSpot has a free version as well, so absolutely go try it. It might be yours, your CRM. Salesforce is also another that the enterprises use Salesforce. You can test it like they do have.

Jores Minasvand   12:10
I mean, Salesforce is too big for small businesses, way overkill.

Anna Angelova   12:12
Uh.
Well, The thing is that depending on what your goal is, right, what kind of business you want to build, it might be that some of this can grow with you into enterprise. It can like Salesforce can grow with you into an enterprise. So that’s why we’re saying that year one you don’t need it like it’s not, it’s not requirement but as you start thinking about it.

Jores Minasvand   12:18
Mm.
Yeah.
Definitely.

Anna Angelova   12:33
As you get your processes in place, as you get your business model validated, as you get the sales and the revenue, exploring this and thinking about where am I going? Am I staying in the small business world or do I want to build a big corporation enterprise level?
Some of this can grow with you. So and we’ve talked about this before as well, not just for your CRM thinking of how you choose a tool like you might like you do want to think about where you’re going. So will the tool grow with you or like you don’t want to use something right now and then suddenly when you reach a corporate.
Level, enterprise level. It turns out that you actually need to get a completely different tool and transfer everything. It’s a nightmare and there are a lot of others. I think Salesmate is another CRM Pipedrive like there are solutions out there.

Jores Minasvand   13:23
Mhm.

Anna Angelova   13:32
As I said.
Go ahead, Joris, you said it as well. Go ahead, test them and when the time comes, test them and see which one fit with where you are, who who you are, how you work and of course where your business is going.

Jores Minasvand   13:38
Hey.
Built.
Just to add one more note, there are industry specific CRMS as well. For example, one of our clients, she’s a lawyer and she uses a specific law law firm specific CRM. I think she’s using Clio.

Anna Angelova   13:59
Oh, yes, yeah.

Jores Minasvand   14:08
And she loves it. You know it’s it’s an amazing tool for her. It’s document management, document submission. She can. She doesn’t have to drive an hour and a half to the court and still waiting the line up or see a court clerk for submitting a document. She can do it online.
Automatically. So send it to our customer, client, client signs it, submit it to the court. Amazing, amazing. Saves so much time. She’s like when she saw it, she was like, Oh my goodness, this is like having an electronic online assistant, so.

Anna Angelova   14:40
Yes, yeah, that was good.

Jores Minasvand   14:40
Look at your look at your industry. There are specifics. So do some research or contact us. We can do the research for you. We can find a tool that that that you know as soon as is suited for your industry and yeah, get get organized. It’ll free up some time for you.

Anna Angelova   14:57
Absolutely. It really, when we talked with her for for the lawyer you mentioned, when we talked with her, she was saying that she can actually get rid of some of the things that she has right now and she’s paying it. These small fees, they actually compile right, $10 here, $15 there and suddenly.
You you are paying at 500 for for all these different tools and there are solutions that like you said are industry specific that it’s not just a CRM, it goes beyond this and CRM’s are a topic that we can probably talk about all day long. There’s so much in there for today.
This is if you are just starting your business, focus on.
The business model, the foundations, the building the process 1st and then add the technology on top of this. And like you said, Joris, when you’re ready, if you need help, we are here for you. I’ll add the link to our services how we can help you grow your business.
Business, build your business and uh.
Regardless of what state of your business you’re in, come join the Visionary Founders Club, the community where we grow together, we learn together and we continue this kind of conversations there. So if you are actually at the stage where you’re looking for a CRM.

Jores Minasvand   16:23
Mhm.

Anna Angelova   16:26
We have like specific actually one of the areas in the community specific about technology because technology is such an important part of what we do and how we do business right now. And we have a specific area there where you can ask and you can hear what different business owners are using and it’s always nice when you have.
Like not just go and read from from people out there and reviews from different websites and things like this because you never know they they get affiliate links and things like this. It’s always nice when you actually get out there and hear from.
People just like you, for people who are starting their businesses, they get small business owners and get learn from their experience. So a lot of a lot of benefits from joining that virtual community that we are building. The link is in the.
Description of the episode as well. If you haven’t joined it yet, we would love to see you there and support you in whatever you’re doing right now for your business. So yeah, this is, this is it for today. I think Joris, do you have anything else to add?

Jores Minasvand   17:33
No, we’re all good.

Anna Angelova   17:36
Awesome, awesome. Thank you so much for another wonderful conversation. And tomorrow we are switching gears, but at the same time kind of going to the other extreme from what we talked yesterday. So yesterday we were talking about quiet quitting.
And tomorrow we are talking about retaining your high performers. How can you do this, especially when you’re not able to afford big pay raises? So join us tomorrow if you have a team.
If you are leading people, join us tomorrow for the next episode of More Than Just Task Management, your favorite daily podcast where we help you build a thriving business. Keep on being awesome, keep on building that business of yours and we will be back tomorrow.
To help you on that fantastic journey you are on.

Jores Minasvand   18:33
Thank you, Emma. Bye, bye.

Anna Angelova   18:33
By juries.