◐For sole traders

Yes — but for a different reason than for a team.

For a team, it is about everyone seeing the same thing. For you, it is about your memory:

• What did I discuss with this customer eight months ago?
• Whom did I want to get back to?
• Who said “again in the autumn”?

That is the point at which slips of paper and your head fail — not with ten customers, but with two hundred.

When it pays off: when you have more contacts than you can remember, and when more than a few days pass between first contact and order.

When it rather does not: when you have five major customers you talk to every day. Then a CRM is administrative effort without benefit.

Three things — it needs no more, and less does not hold up:

1. Create a contact when someone new comes along. Immediately, do not collect them.
2. Note two sentences after every conversation that was more than arranging an appointment.
3. Set a follow-up when something remains open.

Together: about one minute per matter.

Everything else — categories, campaigns, evaluations — is optional extra. You can do only these three things for a year and then have something that holds up.

What you should not aim for: perfect data maintenance. A database with patchy categories and good notes is worth more than one with perfect categories and no notes.

Realistically:

• One minute per matter for a note and follow-up.
• Five minutes in the morning for a look at what is due today.
• One hour a quarter for tidying up and reviewing.

Together about two to three hours a month — for a business with daily customer contact.

Set against that is what you save: searching for notes, asking twice, the forgotten call back, the customer you have not approached for two years.

What eats time and achieves nothing: reorganising categories again and again, evaluations nobody reads, and campaigns whose replies you cannot follow up.

Only plan for what you can manage even in your worst month.

The question nobody likes to ask and the most important one for sole traders.

What you should prepare — it takes half a day:

• A second account for a trusted person. Do not pass on your password, but have an account of their own ready.
• Access data in a password manager, with emergency access. Domain, mailbox, bank, tax adviser.
• One sheet of paper: who needs to be informed, where things are, which appointments are critical.
• Where this sheet is kept — and who knows about it.

The practical side effect: the same preparation also helps with a longer holiday, a stay in hospital and eventually when handing over the business.

Anyone who works alone has no team to step in. That is one more reason to write it down, not one less.

Then a well-maintained database is a considerable part of what you hand over — and often the part that makes up its value.

What makes a database ready for handover:

• Notes that a stranger understands. No abbreviations, no allusions.
• Origin and history, so that a successor knows why someone is a customer.
• Follow-ups with a reason, not just with a date.
• Clean legal bases. A database whose origin is unclear is a risk in a takeover, not an asset.

One more question that comes before any handover: may the database be transferred at all? When the business is sold, this is usually possible; for certain professions and for consents given to you personally, not without further ado.

Anyone who thinks about this while maintaining it will have no work with it later.

Building: happy to have it done for you. Maintaining: yourself.

That is the division that has proven itself, and it has a practical reason: an opening time for which you have to write an email and wait three days will not get changed. After two years, half the page is no longer correct.

What you should be able to do yourself:

• Change texts.
• Adjust opening hours and availability.
• Update prices.
• Swap a photo.

That is exactly what the editor directly on the page is intended for — it requires nothing.

If you want to do everything yourself: that works, and the wizard takes the structure off your hands. Allow one working day, spread over two weeks.

In small, fixed portions — not in blocks there is never time for.

What works for sole traders:

• A fixed slot every two weeks, two hours, in the calendar. Like a customer appointment.
• Small campaigns, 50 to 100 recipients. You cannot follow up more.
• Follow-ups as the engine. Whoever works through them is doing acquisition without it feeling like it.
• Capture on the move. Note two sentences in the car after an appointment — that works on a phone.

What does not work: acquisition when there is time. There never is.

And the most important thing: do not stop when things are going well. The mistake that throws every one-person business into waves is acquisition that is stopped as soon as the order books are full.

Everything that is short, and that is a surprising amount:

• Look at the contact file before an appointment. Those two minutes in the car are the best use of time there is.
• A note after the appointment. Immediately, before the next one comes.
• Set a follow-up.
• Tick off follow-ups.
• Call — the number can be tapped.

What you should save for the desk:

• Switching campaigns live.
• Writing templates.
• Importing data.
• Everything that is a decision with consequences.

Put an icon on your home screen — then it is one tap away, and exactly that decides whether the note gets written or not.

Almost everything except contacts, notes and follow-ups. Specifically:

• Fine-grained categories. Three are enough.
• Evaluations and reports. At your size, you can see with the naked eye how things are going.
• Multi-stage campaigns, as long as you write to people individually.
• Task lists, if follow-ups are enough.
• All add-on modules that you do not need for a specific reason.

And hide what you do not use. A sidebar with twenty entries, of which you need four, costs attention every day.

The principle: a system that you use 20% of and open every day is better than one that you set up 100% and avoid after four weeks.

Six things, and all of them can be done in one morning:

1. Legal notice (Impressum) on the website, complete.
2. Privacy notice that matches what your site does.
3. Data processing agreement (AVV) with the operator of your system.
4. Record of processing activities — a table with a few lines.
5. Clarify the legal basis before you send advertising.
6. Respect objections and answer requests within one month.

What you do not need if you work alone: a data protection officer. The threshold is twenty people constantly involved in data processing — unless you process specially protected data on a large scale.

What surprises many: point 4 also applies to sole traders as soon as the processing is not just occasional.

Three things, and you should know them beforehand:

1. Habit becomes agreement. What you had in your head has to be written down — what belongs in a note, what a category means, who approaches whom.
2. Roles become necessary. Not everyone needs everything. Someone who makes calls and takes notes does not need to be allowed to switch a campaign live.
3. Data quality becomes visible. What you have pieced together so far now has to be written down.

The practical advice: start two months beforehand. Write notes so that a stranger understands them. Assign categories so that they can be explained.

And set up an account of their own from the start instead of sharing yours. That is the habit that is hard to get rid of later.

Five, and they all have the same core — too much at once:

1. Starting too big. All modules, all categories, the whole address list. After three weeks, nobody touches it any more.
2. No notes. The mistake that only hurts after months and then cannot be made up.
3. Acquisition in waves. When the order books are full, it is stopped — and three months later the pipeline is empty.
4. Everything in your head. Access data, agreements, appointments. Until something happens.
5. Starting too late. A database builds up over years. Anyone who only starts when they need it does not have it.

What helps against all five is the same: start small, keep at it daily, plan little.