Small Biz Watch: Lessons learned from a start-up small business
By James Pethokoukis
Posted 12/13/05
James Archer runs a one-year-old interactive marketing firm, Forty Media, in Phoenix and writes one of the better small-business blogs around. In a recent post to Strange Brand, he tells readers what he has learned about running a small business during the past year. A few of his insights:
- Don't be afraid to spend money. "You can't just wait until you have enough money to hire another person, because by then you've probably wasted some great potential. If the time is right, you begin hiring, and let the additional income permitted from the company's growth pay their salaries. Growth takes work. It's not just a side effect of success."
- Too much customer service can be a bad thing. "I want our clients to adore us. That's a good customer service philosophy. We believe in it so much that we've taken significant losses on some projects, just to ensure that the client isn't displeased. However, our obsession with good customer service has in many ways prevented us from achieving great customer service . . . . So, in one of the hardest business decisions I've ever made, I contacted several of our clients and let them know that we wouldn't be able to serve them anymore . . . . Each of the conversations was painful . . . but they all needed to be done, both for their benefit―because we were overwhelmed and couldn't properly serve them―and for our own."
- Long hours are not a badge of honor. "It's easy to associate a huge workload with the idea that 'business is booming,' but in reality, it's usually a sign of some (or all) of the following: You're disorganized. You're estimating inaccurately. You're not managing your staff effectively. You're giving 'nice' deadlines to clients, instead of taking the time to explain and justify more realistic deadlines. A well-managed project should fit very nicely into 40-hour weeks, and that's the baseline that we're shooting for. It may take us a while to get there, but we certainly will."