Archive for July, 2007

July was an intense month. I was gone to Spain on business for 2 weeks (pictures soon). While I was gone, Peter was holding down the fort with a lot of new work, new clients and new team members. Some great successes and some unpleasant lessons.

The question at hand: how to manage quick growth? It’s a bit of a balancing act. Our recent conclusion (not an answer because we don’t actually know yet): you can’t grow constantly. Sometimes you need to purposefully create a short plateau so that you can regroup and organize the team to handle the next round of challenges. If you don’t, the odds are that some important things will fall through the cracks. I thought I would share a conversation with a very close friend of mine, who is also a CEO running an exploding company.

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per.ma.beta [pûr'mə-bā'tə]
adjective

1. An indefinite state of incompleteness. Often symptomatic of highly humble or insecure engineers or agile development and web 2.0.
2. A state of endless anticipation for advance to a higher level. Usage: “Johny wanted to get to third base with Suzy for years. Realizing his relationship was permabeta, he dumped her for Sally 3.0″

Do you know a good project when you see it? I find that choosing a project is much like dating. You are looking for a project you will enjoy spending time on, that won’t drain all your resources, and will leave you feeling better after the date than you did before it started. When I’m out mixing it up and have my sales hat on though, I tend to chase everything and have to fight the scarcity thinking that often plagues all contractors from time to time. So, as a result, Peter & I put together a new project score card we use to quickly measure whether or not we should pursue an opportunity.
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The All Night’er is something that all of us have dated at one point or another in our lives. Staying up til’ 3am running on nothing but coffee and the knowledge that any sane person would be sleeping certainly isn’t a rarity in any case. And heck, it’s a little romantic the first time you do it… like the first time you try to stay up all night when you’re a kid. Whimsical, sure, but for the design professional who gets his or her work from freelance contracts, the all nighter is more than an occasional date, it’s a long-term partner, and understanding it is key to conquering it and unleashing your true productive power.

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I was given some very precious advice from a billionaire the final time we spoke. “Building a business is incredibly simple with the right people. Building a business with the wrong people is the hardest thing in the world.” In “Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t”, Jim Collins explains that the companies he studied spent very little time motivating their people once they had the right people on the bus. So how do we determine the right people? How do you keep them once you’ve got them? Can you develop someone into the right person?

Peter & I are firmly committed to the idea that you create long term satisfaction by providing people the opportunity to win. You provide them challenge and all the support they need for a series of consistent successes. The key here is setting your team up for success.
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I am in Spain on business and launched Google to quickly look up some conference details. Staring back at me was ‘La Web‘. So there you have it, folks. That willey, brilliant collaboration we call the web is in fact a woman. Considering the fact that anything so complicated could function that well, the choice is no surprise. Which makes me wonder, when a new word appears in a language that assigns gender to everything, how does it get selected and who makes the final call?

When trying to figure this out, Wikipedia was my savior.

Internet causes speakers to hesitate between making it masculine like other loanwords from English, or making it feminine to agree with “red”, the Spanish word for “net”.

So it looks like Google just took a stand. How does Spanish deal with gender when incorporating foreign words? According to Wikipedia:

• Take the gender they have in that language, with neuter taken to be the same as masculine (so English nouns are made masculine)
• Take the gender it seems to be (e.g. la Coca-Cola because it ends in -a)
• Take the gender of the closest-related Spanish word (e.g. la Guinness because of la cerveza)

The government is amazingly succinct in their vaguery. And of course, make sure you guess right because nothing is more expensive than paying someone as a contractor that the government declares an employee (you get to pay all their back taxes + a fine). The key: if you can control exactly what will be done, when and how it will be done, then the IRS categorizes them as an employee.

Our accountant provided us with a list of 20 questions to help measure the proper placement of an individual. We also have an independent contractor agreement which requires the person to submit proof of contractor status. As our lawyer told me: definitely not a get-out-of-jail-free-card but certainly shows good will on our part. I am going to list both the questions and the proof of contractor status (and link to our ICA agreement) below for those of you who are working through the same issues.
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And Why It Will Happen to You (Maybe) and You Won’t Be Surprised – Part I of II

A colleague gave me a stat yesterday, one that we’ve all heard before in one permutation or another and one that (much like the divorce rate) we’ve all pretty much just came to take for granted. Something like, “80% of Small Businesses fail inside of two years.” Now this is a very meaningful (and potentially frightful) stat for him as he, of course, is running a small business in its first couple of months.

His expression relayed that he obviously did not expect my reaction - I laughed out loud.

Now unexpected laughter is one of the biggest instigators of curiosity there is. And I love it – I’m a BIG fan of curiosity. Never enough of it in the world, if you ask me.

Hence this article.

Here I’m going to address the two most interesting (to me) reasons that Small Businesses fail. The first is easy to understand (but hard for most people to really get through their heads), so we’ll get through it quickly. The second we’re going to spend some time on, ’cause I fully believe it’s the secret to ultimately succeeding. And we all love a secret, don’t we?
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It seems like all the great books I have read in the last month are saying the same things. That probably annoys those executives looking for the magic bullet, that one thing they have never heard before that could turn everything around. I personally find it both delightful and reassuring.

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This is off the business topic, but it certainly is a major issue for all of us who work from home, especially Macbook Pro users. You see, I love my new laptop but it has a few particularities. It runs 3x hotter than my PC – so hot, in fact, that I have a hard time working with it on my lap. Normally, it would not be that big a deal. That is until Julie & I decided to start trying to have children (I’m told this is definitely the best part).

On the drive to San Francisco today, Peter & I began to wonder if the radiation or heat from my laptop could roast my nads cause me to have three headed children fertility troubles. A little research online and it appears that, yes, this might just be an issue. So all you guys who work like we do and who want to have kids some day, pay attention.
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