Well we are growing at a good pace now, and I can see that there are some things you have to really make sure you keep a control of as a company before they get out of hand.
I guess you have to decide how large you want to get as a company and where your 5 year plan will take you.
Do you want an office with permanent employees?
Do you want to spend all your time on the golf course making the deals?
Do you want to remain a code monkey?
It started off that we, like most other small companies didn’t want to refuse any work, because why would you turn down business if it is coming in?
It then gets to the stage where you find out you are spending a good 50% of your time on the phone and in meetings procuring new work, and a lot of the remaining time project leading teams to carry out the work on jobs you have mapped out.
It then dawns on you that you are now spending less and less time doing the thing you love, using tools to solve problems. I love sitting down at a machine, and I have a language/technology to use to get a PC to do something by the end of the day. I treat it like a puzzle every day, and that is a love of my work and the reason that I can spend my working life sitting in front of a monitor. I am not a person that wants to be spending my time running an office and getting the deals.
There are some people who are brilliant at schmoozing, and I am happy to leave procurement to them. As long as we don’t get to the company situation where we have a salesman who doesn’t have a clue about the technology and undersells something that they blagged.
So now where do we go from here? We have to be careful in that me and my Business partner Dave both keep control of the work that comes in, and that we are the ones that sets up the skeleton structures, and plan and runs the teams to solve the systems. This means that we keep the control over how problems are being solved. I guess we now have to look at our company size and say we now have the opportunity to grow very quickly, and a very important part of that growth is keeping control and not letting everything spiral.
We now have a very nice bank of repeat customers, and the word of mouth reputation is spreading exponentially. That is allowing us the freedom to pick and choose the type of extra work that we go for, and we are even getting to the stage now where we may be able to think about writing some of our own products to launch out to the mass market place and see how our ideas fair. That is where I think our BIG money lies.
As one fine philosopher once said:
This time next year Rodney, we'll be millionaires.
Aaah well, back to work. I have a doozy of a problem to solve and a smile on my face.
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