Quote:
Originally Posted by raymor
I appreciate the replies so far. The fact that we're still here after 15 years means we must be doing some things right, so I'm really curious what we're missing. I'm very curious which replies were posted by peple earning less than $150K and which from people making over $500K.
@Vrocks - good point about the size of the pond. I'm excited to get Clonebox out to the billion dollar market that is web sites in general. I just need to figure out how to market outside of adult. (Sales / marketing people and affiliates, this is an opportunity for you to make real money selling Clonebox.)
@ Harmon - by 3 1/2 people, I mean three full time more or less plus one who works with us only several hours per week.)
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To reference then including myself we are 15 people and some on / off freelancers, we are also actively recruiting. We got 2 offices that is commercially zoned.
It wasn't till about 2-3 years ago I started trying to move a lot of the day to day operations away from myself and focusing more on managing people, the direction and strategies.
I would recommend listening to leadership audio books, play them in the car when driving, as background noise when working and so on. I listened a lot to John C. Maxwell, he gave me a lot of input which helped me a lot. I realized I don't know what I don't know, when building a business it's hard to figure out what you need to know.
As a general rule, you do not spend time on your employees, you invest time. It's very hard to do so. Typically you hire someone because you are running short of time to do everything. Taking away time from your company to train someone when you are already behind with your work is a challange.
Look at your activities and look what areas you like, don't like. What is important and what is less important. Then look at what things can other people do. If you are currently doing something that someone else could be doing then stop doing it if you can afford having someone else doing it. You are the only one (and other owners) who have a real vision for the company, the more you get other people to do the more you can focus on your vision. You also get more feedback from your employees which may help you move into new directions or optimizing certain procedures.
Most important and if possible, whoever does your "client relations" should not be invoicing them, or even know if your client is late on a payment or whatnot. If you invoice someone and they are not happy with their service, they will tell accounting in 95% of the cases. Depending on how much time you spend accounting in your company it may be better to hire a full time or part time employee to do accounting or other back office paperwork, most CPA's also offer this service and charge either per hour or per invoice. They will ALWAYS be more expensive than if you do it yourself, because you spend time doing it yourself and spend $ having them doing it. You can't increase the time you have but you can increase the $ you have by working smarter.
If your client manager is doing the invoices and your client is having some financial problems the client will try and alienate himself so he doesn't need to deal with the conflict at that time. Also you would be less likely to help the client to the same extend like when he is up to date with billing as you may think he takes advantage of the situation "not paying you". Having 2 different people dealing with the issues will make sure you can chase the payments without alienating yourself from the client and continue to provide services until you are at the point where you have to decide if you can continue working with that client or not.
The more focus you have on the happy and "neutral" clients the more likely it is they will tell you about things they are not happy about.
Every scenario is different and you are obviously doing something right being in business 15 years. It sounds like you are stuck int he same situation as me a couple of years ago, my main concern was not the financial part, I was worried on the quality and trust side.
At the end of the day, most people will tell you something different, you gotta sort through what's useful for your business and go with that.