Given that we each only come in two days per week (everyone on Monday, one person each of the other four days), there was a big need for someone to “own” the growing warehouse responsibilities on a consistent day to day basis. We envision him being the person who trains and manages all of the other part-time (and maybe full-time) warehouse employees as we grow.

We’re super excited to have him on full-time.

Internally, what we had to get done to make the hire happen was very interesting. We had to bulk up our company policies documentation. We had to define his role. We had to decide on a benefits package – we’re covering the full cost of health insurance, something we plan to do for all of our employees. We had to get him a key to the building. We had to set up a laptop for him. We had to set him up on Google Apps and give him the appropriate access levels to various features. And that’s probably just the tip of the iceberg. It’s been an ongoing process for several months, one that will hopefully set us up to hire full-time employees for years to come.

We’ll begin to reap the benefits of having him around right away. Already today he was responsible for opening the warehouse before we got there, and shutting it down after we left. For now, we’ll be keeping our schedules, but long term this opens up the possibility for us to get together during business hours – say for a meeting, collaborative work, or even a meeting with our lawyer (something that we previously have had trouble scheduling) – while still knowing that the warehouse is being taken care of by someone we trust.

The other immediate benefit of having Charlie around will be to “cut the cord” on some of the communication between Greg and the rest of us. Greg handles customer service and inventory ordering, both of which require him to be in constant contact with the warehouse. Sometimes it can get tricky when he needs to talk to me on Tuesday, George on Wednesday, and Mike on Thursday. Now he can communicate directly with Charlie all of the time. This should really help simplify things and eliminate some communication mishaps.

In the big picture, it just feels good to create a job, hopefully a good job that can provide a good life to Charlie for a long time. And given that we bootstrapped our way to profitability, this isn’t a job where we’re spending our angel investment to hire a bunch of people in hopes that we’ll eventually make enough money to be able to justify keeping them on. It’s a real live job that isn’t going anywhere. It’s one of the most important roles that small business owners play in helping the local region that they do business in, and the economy as a whole.

Last night I finally went on to the CBS website and watched the first episode of Undercover Boss. The premise of the show is pretty interesting – presidents/CEOs of large companies go “undercover” and work as front-line employees for their own organizations. The assumption being that they’ll see things completely differently if they work in the positions that directly interact with their customers.

And of course that’s what happened in the first episode. It featured president and COO of Waste Management Larry O’Donnell. WM is a great first company because 1) they are huge 2) Larry was really really excited to learn from the experience, and 3) they have the shittiest possible jobs to do…literally. The episode can be watched in full online. Unlike 99.99% of the shows on television, this may actually make be worth watching on a regular basis.

In this instance, O’Donnell made it a point to correct some of the injustices that his employees encountered. Which was awesome. It was nice to see him take action. But it was even better to see him connect this to the big picture. Several times he said how his cost cutting initiatives to make the company more efficient were backfiring in ways that he couldn’t have imagined.

In a large organization like WM, this is a huge problem. The people making the policies are often several levels away from those enacting them. It seems like total common sense, but even in a large company like WM, you have to have some connection to your front line employees that are actually doing the day to day work and interacting directly with your customer base. Larry and his board really didn’t understand their own business.

The answer for most businesses isn’t going on a reality show. But that doesn’t mean that whomever is putting a new process in place shouldn’t actually do it themselves for a day or two. You can learn so much more than any amount of data can give you by just doing it and talking to those who do it on a daily basis. It seems like a waste of time but – as this show is probably going to prove every single week – it’s often the best use of an executive’s time.

There absolutely has to be a regular feedback loop where management solicits information from the people who are doing the actual work. If you empower them at their own job they’ll be much happier and more productive, and you’ll develop more efficient processes as a result of it (and in the end make more money and be more profitable). Again, seems like common sense, but how many businesses actually do it?

Now, in a small business like ours this is much easier but still not impossible to screw up. We’re at the point where the owners are all trying to remove ourselves from the day to day operations of our warehouse. By the end of the year it’s a pretty safe assumption to say that we’ll have a full time warehouse manager and 1-3 part time employees reporting to him.

All of a sudden we’ll be a step removed from our part time employees. It’s not too hard to see how we could lose touch with them while we “focus on more important things”. But the most important thing is always how your existing business operates on a day to day basis. If customers aren’t being taken care of in a way that meets our standards, nothing else really matters.

One of the reasons that our systems have worked so well is that we’ve designed them for us to use. We build it, we try it, and we tweak it, based upon our own feedback (and now the feedback of Charlie and John). We won’t always be the ones pulling the orders or stocking the shelves on a daily basis (in fact, we rarely do that stuff now), but we have to make a commitment to do it somewhat regularly…especially when we make a change to our processes. And we need to make sure our employees feel empowered to tell us what works, what doesn’t, and their ideas for improvement.

I think for the most part we’ve done that so far. Each of our employees has made several suggestions that have been implemented and made the system as a whole better, which I think is a good measuring stick for this kind of stuff – their willingness to speak up, and our willingness to implement. But as we grow it will take more of a concerned effort to achieve.

Today I was in the warehouse by myself (Mike was sick, the other guys all had stuff going on). It was the first time since the holidays that I pulled orders. It was a good thing. It reminded me what the job was like. It got my mind off of some of the other projects I was on and for one day got me thinking about the things that our employees think about. It was a very good use of my time, which is something I’ll hopefully always keep in the back of my mind.

If I don’t, I’m sure I’d end up like the millions of other business owners who make decisions based upon numbers on a screen without being able to consider the true impact that it will have on their employees, their customers, and inevitably their bottom line.

I think we’re now pretty confident that any hard working, smart person can be up and running at full speed in our warehouse in less than a week.  That’s great for us to know.  It gives us the flexibility to know that if we need to staff up for a busy few months (like the spring time or the holidays) we don’t need a month lead time to train someone.  It’s also kind of a requirement for this type of position that will likely be filled by part-time students that need flexible schedules.

Now that we’re confident in the systems, the real problem is finding the right people.  How do you go about finding the right employees?

How Most Businesses Hire

First, let’s take a look at how I think most organizations hire.

They have a HR department that’s isolated from the rest of the company.  A manager who has an opening creates a job description and notifies HR of the open position.  HR posts the job internally, either physically or on a company intranet, or both.  People who check those postings regularly see the job open and apply if they think it’s something they’re interested in.  The company might also offer a bonus for anyone who refers a new employee, so some people check the postings in hopes of getting some extra cash.

If anyone on the internal side applies, they are doing so for primarily their own benefit – either for the job itself or for the bonus.  In most cases though, the HR department is also working hard to post the job in the newspaper, on Monster.com, on Craigslist, and maybe going to some job fairs.

HR collects resumes, the manager reviews them, invites a few in for interviews, and then hires someone based upon a few interviews, previous experience (as listed on the resume), and maybe the recommendations of some references picked by the applicant.

Not exactly my recipe for picking a good hire.  It leaves a lot open to interpretation.  What are you really trying to find out when you interview someone:

• Does the person work hard? You really have no idea.
• Does the person have the technical skills to do the job? Hopefully their job experience and education give you an idea, but without actually seeing them work you’ll never know.
• Does the person have the morals and ethics to fit into your company culture? References probably won’t tell the truth, plus your company is different than other companies anyway.

At best you barely answer those questions, but in most cases you’re probably still left guessing.  And if that’s the case, why not try to hire differently?

How I Think Businesses Should Hire

I know this is a really, really simple idea, but I believe that following these two rules highly minimize the risks listed above:

1. Hire from within your network. This means that someone within your organization knows the person well enough to say that they will be a good fit.
2. Hire skill positions on a trial basis first. If someone is going to be a designer or programmer or web marketer, hire them first as a contractor to do a small project.  Be clear that it’s a test and that if they do well they will get the permanent position.

Now let’s revisit those things we’re trying to find out when you interview someone.

• Does the person work hard? You’ve seen exactly how hard they work on a crucial project under stress.
• Does the person have the technical skills to do the job? If you’ve given them a good trial project and they have the proper education & experience, you should have a pretty good idea.
• Does the person have the morals and ethics to fit into your company culture? This is where you really rely on your current employee.  If you make referrals important from the start and preach the idea that new hires are there to help everybody and make the team better, current employees should have a sense of pride when they refer someone.  No one wants to refer someone that pulls the team down.  They put their reputation on the line.  There’s no reason to offer bonuses.  In fact, bonuses change the focus from helping your team to helping your wallet.

Instead of a manager and HR rep working to find a hire, you enlist the entire team.  Have a meeting and ask everyone on the team if they know anyone good for the job.  If not, have them work their networks – close friends, family, send a message out to their networks on Facebook or LinkedIn.  I’d think in most cases, particularly in our current economy, you’ll find someone this way.  In theory, the more employees you have, the larger the network, so I have every reason to think that this process can scale.  With some refinement it should work whether your organization is five or five thousand.

As always, there is a downside.  When you work with people you know, there’s always an additional risk for the lines to be blurred between work and personal.  Now, I honestly don’t think this is an issue if you follow the process and hire the best person for the job.  People generally meet friends through school, work, and other friends.  No sense in pretending that friendships and relationships don’t exist within every workforce.

Also, if you have a culture of being upfront and honest with everyone on your team, and everyone on your team treats everyone else with respect, you should never have an issue where there’s a nasty termination (short of theft…which is less likely if you’re hiring this way).  This means that if someone leaves for a better opportunity, you have to be respectful of their decision.  You have to make an extra effort to treat people well in all situations or this won’t work…which is how I expect myself and my partners to be anyway so for us this is a non issue.

Charlie has known both George and Greg all his life.  They all grew up in the same neighborhood.  When we were hiring for this position, we decided to tap within our network as opposed to throwing an ad on Craigslist.  We skipped over the trial project because of the simplicity of the job, but if he ever becomes a full time employee and takes on harder tasks we’ll approach the transition by first giving him some small projects as a test.

I’m not sure who the next hire will be for us.  Maybe a warehouse manager.  Maybe a web marketer.  Maybe a programmer.  Maybe something else.  Whomever it is, I think this approach will minimize the risk and give us the best chance for success.

Now, a good portion of that is because he’s a very hard working, intelligent kid.  I think we realize that not every employee is going to pick things up quite as fast as he has.

But the other portion of that, the part that we have more control over, is how well I think we set him up for success.  All of the efficiency improvements over the past year that we’ve made have not only helped save us time and increased our accuracy, they’ve also made it so that our employees naturally have less room for error.

Consider the process of pulling an order, now vs last year:

• Invoices used to print out sorted by date, but FedEx labels will only print out in ABC order.  Previously, we had to alphabetize the invoices to match the two before pulling orders.  Now they both come out in ABC order and the two piles match exactly.  When you go to pull an order, you simply take the top slip off of each pile and get to it.
• With a few recent improvements to our algorithm, we’ve got our box size system accurately picking boxes well over 90% of the time.  The box prints on the bottom of the invoice so all you need to do is pick up a pre-made box of your choice and you’re off.
• The recent layout revamp makes pulling the products a piece of cake.  They are ordered on the invoice in the order in which they are organized in the warehouse, with the most popular products on the easiest shelves to reach.
• Our packing area used to just be a cluster of tables where people checked and packed orders.  With the current assembly-line-like setup (expanded a bit since that post) packages flow smoothly from puller to checker to packer to the door where they wait for FedEx.

The cumulative impact of all of these improvements has enabled him to learn way faster and work way faster than any of us thought.  And remember, he’s only worked around 30 hours total in the two weeks he’s been with us.  Now we’re thinking we may be able to triple or quadruple in size by just adding one full time employee and keeping one part time one.  Previously, we could speculate, but now I think we have a pretty good understanding of how simple it is to train an employee within our system.

I think the grander lesson is how important it is to put your employees in positions where they can succeed.  The more foolproof you make your systems, the easier it will be for them to hit the ground running.  Not only that, they won’t need to spend time worrying about all of the same problems that you did because you’ve eliminated them.  All of which leads to exponentially increasing the chance that they do their job effectively and efficiently.  And at the end of the day, you need that from your employees.  If they can’t do it at least as fast as you can, you’ve failed – either in hiring someone with the wrong skillset or in putting them in a position that makes it difficult for them to succeed.

Who?

His name is John. He’s our accountant’s son. He just graduated from High School and will be attending college locally at Siena. Both he and his father are into detailing. His father actually came in on Christmas Eve last year and did some last second shopping for John for the holiday.

Side note: it’s a pretty good endorsement when your accountant wants his son to work for you. I mean, he gets to see our numbers. More than anyone, he knows how good of a company we are and has a pretty good idea of the company we’ll become.

Anyway, I think working for us is a pretty good gig.  I would have loved his job when I was 18.  It pays more than a job like Target, you have flexible hours, you can wear mesh shorts and a t-shirt to work, you can listen to your iPod while you work, and the labor isn’t all that intensive since the majority of our products are small and light.

Why?

The most obvious answer is because we can.  We’ve had a great year, which has afforded us the luxury of hiring someone without worrying that a few bad weeks could cause us to miss a payroll.

Plus, it was time.  We’re a few years into this now and we need to start learning about employees:

• How good are we at managing them?
• How much productivity can we realistically expect from them?
• How long does it take for them to pick up on things?
• How can we improve at training them?
• How much time do they really save us?
• How do they fit into our company culture, which is very strong and somewhat unique (being that we’ve all known each other almost our entire lives)?

We’ve talked about all of those things at length and discussed so many scenarios that it makes my head spin.  At the end of the day, the only way to know is to try.

Benefits

Greg has been training him this week.  He’ll be the primary person that John reports to.  I was there on Monday and Tuesday, and both days I personally already benefited from having John there. His main tasks are to help pack orders, stock shelves, make boxes for orders, and break down boxes from deliveries. Those tasks can be time consuming, tiring, and unpredictable on top of an already busy day.  There’s nothing worse than getting in “the zone” only to have a delivery show up that takes an hour to unbox. Now we can just leave it for John and get back to work.  That’s so valuable.

Greg is probably the only one who hasn’t seen the benefit because he’s shadowing him and teaching him. It’ll probably take a few weeks of that for John to be totally up to speed, which is obviously to be expected.  But Greg is the perfect person to be doing this. He’s done quite a bit of soccer coaching (he played D1 soccer in college) and in general has a personality that lends himself towards being a good teacher. He explains things well, he’s got a very positive attitude all the time, and he’s very patient (something I don’t think you can say about the rest of us).

What’s Next?

Right now he’s working 3 days/week from 9:30 AM to 2 PM (his choice), giving us 13.5 hours per week. That 13.5 hours will help us a lot and cost us very little. Assuming this goes well, I think we’ll try to shoot for having 1-2 workers from the hours of 9 AM – 3 PM every day. With that, we could probably quadruple our size before having to reassess things.

The problem is how you fill those hours. Is it a combination of part time employees? Or is it one full time employee? Both have pros and cons. I think for the time being we’re content to just see how this plays out over the summer and then move from there.

Fun and exciting stuff though.  It’s new territory for us, with a new opportunity to learn about and improve upon our business.

We’ve managed to go much further than I anticipated without hiring a full-time employee, mostly because we’ve managed to “lean-out” our processes to the point where we can offset our growth with our efficiencies.  Of course, that won’t last.  If we continue our growth at anywhere close to the current pace, by the end of 2010 I don’t see how we don’t have 1 – 3 full-time employees.

At times, the thought of this has stressed me out.  Finding good employees is a lot of work.  Managing employees is a lot of work.  There is a lot that we have to put in place prior to bringing someone in if we want them to have a decent chance at succeeding at their job.  But now, like I said above, I see this as a great opportunity and a privilege, and in turn am now very much looking forward to it.

We will be able to provide a living for someone who otherwise may not have had a job.  They will be able to take care of their family because of the job we created.  We will have the opportunity to continue to grow our culture in a way that makes everyone feel good about coming to work.  I’m looking forward to paying for their health insurance and providing them with a fair salary.  I’m looking forward to listening to their ideas.  I’m looking forward to making sure that that they know that I/we value their work and that we couldn’t succeed without them.

So many companies get it wrong and treat their people as if they are just “things” that can be tossed around.  They do it solely in the name of profit.  That’s how they justify it.  I don’t ever want to do that.  A person is a person, just like you or I.  They should be treated like the equal that they are.

It might be this year or it might be next year, but whenever it is I can’t wait to take on this challenge.  Even if it is just one employee at a time.

ROWE stands for Results-Only Work Environment. In a ROWE, each person is free to do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as the work gets done. Currently, there are two authentic ROWEs—Fortune 100 retailer Best Buy Co, Inc. and J. A. Counter & Associates, a small brokerage firm in New Richmond, WI. At both organizations, the old rules that govern a traditional work environment—core hours, “face time,” pointless meetings, etc.—have been replaced by one rule: focus only on results.

In the 4-Hour Workweek, you helped people understand that because of technology, people don’t have to defer living until retirement. They can design their own lifestyle. Now imagine what would happen if the entire culture of a workplace went through the same transformation. That’s what a ROWE is. A ROWE is a work culture that gives people the power to take control of their lives. As long as they get their job done, they’re free.

One of the points I made in my last post about lifestyle was about the difficulty in transitioning from college to a “typical” corporate job:

I think it’s one of the hardest adjustments students have to make when going into the corporate world. All of a sudden you’re not able to decide what you do and when you do it. It’s like you regress back to being in high school.

The more I think about it, college is the ultimate ROWE.  I’m sure it was slightly different for everyone, but here’s how it pretty much worked for me:  you get a syllabus the first day of class that has all of your assignments, projects, and tests in it and it’s your responsibility to get all of it done.  You don’t have to go to class.  If you do, you don’t have to participate.  You don’t have to turn in homework (unless it counts towards your grade).  Your only responsibility is to meet the requirements of the syllabus, which usually entails turning in a few key papers/projects and taking a few important tests.  That’s it.  No one tells you how to do it or when to do it.  You can work an hour each morning a month in advance or do it all the night before.  Whatever works for you so long as you get it done.

Now why the hell aren’t more companies like this?  I know, I know, academia and business are two different things.  But the mentality of the results being what matters, that’s what should translate.  Clearly some companies are starting to make the push.  It just blows my mind that this isn’t more common.  It seems like such common sense.  I mean, at my job, everyone told me to come early and stay late because it “looked good”.  So I’d get all my work done in like 5 hours and then bone around on ESPN.com until 5:30 so I’d look like a hard worker.  Why on earth I couldn’t just take off at 3 was beyond me.  All of my work on all of my projects was up to date.  There’s just no motivation to work fast or efficiently.  You have to be there for 8-9 hours regardless.  It’s such garbage.

Conversely, if you build a company around accomplishing meaningful things, you’ll have employees who are willing to work longer, harder, and smarter because they care.  If they know that they can take advantage of downtime to run errands, spend time with their family, or relax, they’ll be happier and more satisfied with their job.

Seems like common sense…doesn’t it?

At one point in the discussion I started talking about our hiring situation.  He mentioned he’d keep an eye out for exceptional talent, which I said would be awesome. That got me to really thinking: I haven’t been in the corporate world since 2005 and I haven’t been in acadamia since 2004.  My opinions of each are still – to a large extent – stuck back in those years.  I haven’t seen a corporate environment from the inside since then.  I haven’t been part of an interviewing/hiring process since then…both from the side of a new hire coming in and from the side of recruiting new talent for the company.  I haven’t been in a classroom environment since then.  I really have no clue what today’s student faces.  Hell, when I left RPI they were just getting campus-wide wi-fi.  In my days, we had to plug into ethernet jacks at our desk and teachers could regulate us by just telling us to unplug our ethernet cables!  How much different is today’s student?  How much different is today’s corporate environment?

I don’t really know if there is much of a solution to this.  I’m active in the small business and young professionals communities, both online and off.  I stay up to date with all of the news that I need to live my life and run my business.  But when it comes time to hire, being years removed from the corporate and academic environments could hurt us.  We need to have a full understanding of the company we’re competing against for potential hires.  We also need to have a full understanding of the academic experience that the students are encountering.

I’m hoping this speaking engagement will be the start of an effort by myself to have a little more contact with academia and the life of a student in this generation.  I hope that the books and blogs I read, and the people I associate with, keep me up to date on the corporate world.  However, you can’t truly understand what it’s like to be a student unless you are a student.  You can’t truly understand what it’s like to be in the corporate environment unless you’re in it.  So maybe I’m just experiencing something that every business owner goes through?

Thus far, features like the shopping cart are how we’ve gotten our competitive advantage, how we’ve gotten as far as we have as guys just out of college with no outside funding.  Anytime something takes up a lot of time we’ve either automated it or eliminated it.  However, we’re rapidly approaching the time when four people just can’t handle it all.   Today Mike, George, and I spent from 9 AM – 3PM packing our orders from the weekend.  That’s 18 man hours doing warehouse work!  Don’t get me wrong, we shipped close to 60 orders – many of which were very large – but no owner in their right mind thinks that 3/4 of their resources should be poured into $10/hr work while the high level stuff (mostly marketing) gets ignored and pushed back.

So why not just hire right now?  A couple of things add to the difficulties:

• 18 man hours is not the norm.  The norm is probably 4/day, but it’s not uncommon to have a few slow days a week that only take 2 man hours.  Mondays are always larger because you have an extra 2 days of orders being shipped.   In short, the pure warehouse work is sporadic.
• We don’t really have a lot of other work for “warehouse workers”.  Shelves need to be stocked for maybe 30 minutes to an hour a day.  Inventory needs to be updated (15 minutes a day maybe).  That’s about it unless we want to cross train them in other areas, which I personally do not think is a good business move.
• We recently instituted a new check/balance system where one person pulls orders and another packs.  Both check the invoice against the products before passing it on (either to the packer or to the outgoing packages area).  This prevents errors due to pulling the wrong item, and highly reduces errors from missing an item all together.   We’re pretty serious about it:  if you take the product off the shelves, you are absolutely not allowed to pack and ship it.  If this is the case, do we hire 2 employees?  Or do we still have an owner paired with the full-timer?
• Our salaries aren’t as high as we want them to be right now.  We are all getting by, but still underpaying ourselves.  Everyone is living tight and that is stressful.  An employee will increase revenue long-term, but we’d like to get one more raise in there for us before hiring someone.

My gut tells me that in a few months we won’t have a choice:  we’ll need to hire.  IF our threshold is where I think it is (fingers crossed), we’ll already have our raises and it’ll be a question of:  do we hire one full timer or two part timers?  I’m leaning towards two part time college age students with flexible schedules.  This eliminates the need for us to provide benefits, meets our check/balance requirement (if one isn’t working that day, one of us will chip in), and enables us to have them only come in 3-6 hrs a day.  I realize that there are downsides to these types of employees, but I think the pros outweigh the cons.  Who knows, maybe we’ll have 3 or 4 at some pt to ensure that we get 2/day.

The good news in all of this is we’re growing.  Nonetheless, every “hump” is stressful.  The “getting into a warehouse without going under” hump is passed and this is the next logical part of our growth.  The warehouse stuff was only February, so things are happening fast, even though a lot of days it feels like growth is happening at the speed of molasses.

On a somewhat related topic:  we’re considering getting an intern or hiring a virtual assistant (usually based in India) to do a lot of the more monotonous marketing and customer service tasks.  One example would be to create a list of sites for us to contact to participate in our wholesale or affiliate programs.  There are many many more, but those illustrate the point that there are long tedious tasks that us, as owners, shouldn’t be spending our time on.

On a completely unrelated topic:  this heatwave is ridiculous.   I was sweating balls all day long doing manual labor in the warehouse.  Average high temps this year:  ~70 degrees.  Beautiful weather right?  This week:  close to freaking 100 degrees with humidity that makes it feel like you’re in a steam bath all day long.  Our boxes – despite being “dry” – felt mushy when we were trying to pack orders.  The packing slips and invoices were curled up like you took them in the bathroom with you while showering.  Last time I checked I lived in Upstate NY…not the swamps of Florida.

• Charge what you’re worth.  What are you worth?  Do some math:  if you want to make $100k you need to make around $2k/week, which means you need to make around$50/hr for 40 hours/week.  That $50/hr has to cover every second you’re working – including answering phones and emails, time spent researching and preparing quotes, time required to market your business, and that 5-10 hours/week when random unexpected stuff gets in the way of getting work done.  The best way to do this is to charge by the hour and inflate the price a bit (say $100/hour in our example).  Unfortunately most people – us included – charge by the project and don’t account for the extra 50% of time we spend doing support for the project, which of course drives down our hourly rate and makes the work not worthwhile.  I’d lean towards charging hourly if I did it again, but if not it becomes even more important to….
• Have clearly outlined terms.  Our lawyer drew up arbitration and indemnification clauses for us, which covered our ass legally.  But that’s not what I’m talking about here.  I’m referring to:  exactly what the client will get, exactly how many revisions they get, and exactly how frequently they can contact you.  Yup – I’d do the unheard of and place limits on how often they could contact me.  This saves me time, and forces them to coherently convey their thoughts. Ten rambling emails a day turn into one well-thought email.    This goes hand in hand with….
• Have set hours.  I have gotten phone calls on Christmas, Easter, on Sunday mornings at 6 AM, at midnight on a Saturday night….and those are just ones that come to mind.  If you let them, clients will call you 24 x 7 x 365.  Don’t let them.  In your terms, make sure you say “I answer emails and phone calls M-F 10 AM – 4 PM and Saturday from 9 AM – 11 AM”.  Or whatever hours work for you, but you get the idea.  We never committed to doing this, and it hurt us.  Some people will abuse your terms, so you have to be willing to….
• Fire bad clients.  When you make the decision to do so, don’t let them talk you out of it.  If they have caused you so much stress that you would rather NOT make their money just so you don’t have to deal with them, then you absolutely need to let them go.   As you get better at quoting out clients, you’ll learn to….
• Turn down clients.  If they don’t meet your standards, or if something doesn’t feel right, don’t go ahead with the job.  Just tell them you don’t think you’re a good fit for each other.  In my experiences, this makes them want to work with you more and they ‘beg’ for you to work with them.  Don’t give in.  If you’re turning down imperfect clients, you better…..
• Have a way of generating a ton of leads.  When we applied ourselves, we were actually pretty good at this.  Things that worked for us:
  • Have a website with a lot of information about all of your services.  The more content, the better you’ll get indexed and the better you’ll convert readers into clients.
  • Start a blog, preferably about your industry.  This very blog has accounted for probably 40% of the clients I had.  If people get to know you personally before they contact you, there’s no ‘sale’ – they just contact you with a desire to work with you.
  • Buy local business leads.  We paid ~$200 for 13 weeks of leads.  They email a CSV file of every new business registered in your area.  We then sent each lead a post card…and then a follow-up post card.  These are people that NEED websites, so it’s a no-brainer.  Including postage we spent about $1 per lead.  For less than $1k/year you’ll easily make your money back.  The best part is that it’s easily scalable to the ENTIRE country by just buying more leads!
  • Work Craigslist.  At a minimum, post in your area.  We tried paying a posting service to post throughout the country for us.  They did an OK job and brought in some OK leads, but we didn’t commit to it long enough to do it correctly.  One thing is for sure:  lots of people every day who need sites are looking on CL.
  • Incentivize current clients to give you referrals.  You can’t MAKE them give you referrals, and if you’re doing a good job they’ll probably do it anyway, but a little push can make a huge difference.  Send them newsletters frequently updating them on your business, and every single time make them an offer if they refer you a new client:  a year of free hosting, 2 free hours of consulting, $300 off of a redesign, etc.
  • Participate in your local Chamber of Commerce.  Go where the successful business are, and all successful businesses are members of their local CoC.

  This is all a lot of work, so make sure you….

• Hire contractors.  Your local college is FILLED with computer science students who need part-time jobs and don’t want to work at the local TGI Friday’s.  Albany is filled with colleges, and I’m sure your city or metro area is as well.  Using Craigslist you can usually find a handful of sub-contractors to try out.  Even if they spend the majority of their time generating leads or doing basic maintenance work, the $15/hr you pay them allows you to spend your time on the $100/hr work we mentioned earlier.  And finally, to do all of this right you should….
• Avoid being a hybrid company like Pure Adapt.  I’m not saying don’t work on some side projects, but if you decide to try to make a run at making serious money off of one of your sites then you might as well ditch clients.  You’ll NEVER want to work on your clients projects ever again.  Your projects are always better, more important, and of course more fun.   You’ll begin to resent your clients, and everything will fall apart.