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TB: Can you tell us a little about how Marketcircle got started?

AJ: Marketcircle is actually version 3.0 of the company and let me explain what I mean by that. Originally, when I started Marketcircle, I started it as a dotcom, where we built a web platform that allowed people to negotiate the price of an item, and we had built the system and had people transact and everything on the system, but by the time I got to the appropriate venture capitalists, the internet bubble burst.

And so we weren’t able to get the funding or anything like that, and I had to make a decision, whether I had to close the company down or whether I would return the money to friends and family that had invested in the company. And that was just a couple hundred thousand dollars, but it was strictly friends and family. So we decided, myself and my Chief of Engineering, Mike, that we would pay people back, rather than close the company down. It was a manner of honor, I guess. And so, we did consulting work, for awhile to be able to a.) keep the lights on and b.) actually pay some of those folks back. However, we didn’t like doing consulting work too much, we always kind of had a product idea in mind, and even though I started the company myself, Mike joined on, just a few months after I started, so the company kind of grew from both our ideas and so we were trying to figure out how we would do this.

But we still needed to get the consulting dollars in and what we did, was we built Daylite, one of our current products as a technology showcase, to show people, hey, look at our technical prowess, hire us to build applications for you-still part of the consulting gig. With that particular application, one thing led to another and we started selling the application, and finally in 2004, late 2004, it became our sole source of income. And then we added another product in 2005 and now we’re about 26 people and that’s where our company is at-and that’s the 3.0 version of our company.

TB: Since you’ve certainly been on a journey to take Marketcircle from that first start up to a business that did consulting to having products, did you have a business background before you got started?

AJ: No, not really. I was a programmer. My passion was always building things. And I was doing it in software. So my work prior to starting Marketcircle, I did consulting for about 9 months or so as a sole consultant, and then prior to that I was employed by various different companies, doing pretty heavy duty software. So I was always the technical guy. And so, no, I had no business background other than observation, and so that was a little bit of a learning curve for me. Still is.

TB: How did you start picking up that business knowledge? Did you use any specific resources or just on-the-job training?

AJ: Here are some of the things that I did. Number 1 is I observed people. I did this from very young actually. Just whenever there was a business or business-owner that I was exposed to, let’s say I was working at a coffee shop while going to school, and I knew the owner very well, family, I went and observed what they would do and I always had an interest in it but more from an observation point of view.

So that helped, in that I tried to observe other people and also read. A lot of reading. Read a lot of books, got tips from some books. I would read on the web. Whenever there was a success story or something like that I would try to read, to understand the business aspect of it, and I would get a feel as to what kind of decisions I should be making, things I should be spending my time on. And it’s been difficult, but that’s where I attribute where I’ve gotten to, to mostly that.

TB: So would you recommend that somebody interested in building a start-up; is it okay not to have a business background? Do you think that it’s…?

AJ: I think that there are a couple things that you have to be aware of. I think yes, do it. But, you gotta start somewhere. And the thing to do is to try to keep things simple, try to find good people in terms of accounting, and software so that they can help you with some of that stuff. You have to be careful in who you select as somebody who helps you on the accounting side, you know being a consultant or whatever, so that you don’t get in to trouble on that particular side. The other one, is that once you have that piece, everything else you can kind of read up on and learn on and so on and so forth. There are a lot of good resources out there, that really can help as long as you invest the time to learn that stuff.

TB: You’ve mention that you now have 26 people that work at Marketcircle. How did you decide when was the right time to bring in more people and how did you decide who were the right people to bring in?

AJ: I’ll answer the when of it after, but who, you know, this is, it’s a difficult and time consuming thing. You really have to make sure, especially at the beginning, that you’re getting in people who will really help. I don’t care so much about their degrees or their experience. What I care about is their desire and an honest aspect of their personality. There are a lot of shifters out there. And you hire the wrong person and you can really go down the tubes, especially in the beginning, when you are 2 or 3 or 4 people.

So you gotta look for honesty and a true person-somebody who isn’t out to screw people. And I would choose that over experience or college or academic knowledge any day. Because the person who has that desire and is an honest person, and a good person, yeah, you might stumble a little bit at the beginning, but if the desire is there, they’ll learn. If the honesty is there, you don’t have to worry so much about politics, backstabbing, and all that kind of stuff.

So, that’s really key with the first few people because once you have that base, then you can expand. And for example, hire somebody that is, shall we say, less than honest and you find out later on, they’re a bit shady or they don’t have the company’s best interest in mind, then it’s important that you try to get rid of them as soon as possible because that will haunt you and bite you. And so the next question is when, right? So, when is tricky. Tricky in the sense, do you have enough money to be able to sustain a salary? Will the work that they do bring it to sustain their own salary? That kind of thing. And then finally, it’s you realizing ‘I can’t do this by myself.’  I can’t focus on the right things if I’m always focused on the small things. I need to be focused on the big things for the company, so I need to get somebody.

When we sell to small businesses-our software is sold to small businesses-so we interact with a lot of small business owners, and a lot of them, they start out by themselves, but they have difficulty letting go so they have this apprehension of hiring somebody because they don’t want to let go. But then that holds them back because they can’t focus on the bigger picture, because that is dealing with the minutiae. So you have to realize that you have to be able to trust somebody, with some of the things at least. So that when is a combination of factors. Number 1: mentally, you decide that you need help. Number 2: Having a system to make sure that there is enough money there for at least a few months salary. Number 3 is when they come in, they better earn their keep. So bringing them in, let’s say that you just have a couple months worth of salary cash stored up, within that few months, they better get up to speed and be generating enough to cover themselves at least.

TB: Would you say that there is a learning curve that goes along with managing people, just like the rest of the business knowledge for a start up?

AJ: Absolutely there is. And in hindsight, I would say that that is a very important skill, in the sense of setting habits. You know if you bring people on board and you don’t set the expectations such as, you know, we need status updates, we need to be on the same page, we need to communicate, and instilling that later on when the habits have been formed is much more difficult. So, when you bring somebody on, communication is key, and set that expectation, and updates are key, and set that expectation.

TB: So, how are you planning for the future at this point? Are you looking for more expansion, more product?

AJ: In terms of expanding for the future, we are always looking at growing our revenue base and that can mean a couple things. It could mean expanding our existing products to reach larger audiences. And it could also mean, adding additional products. We’re looking at both those things. But in terms of the management aspect of it, where I find the most difficulty is having a plan in place, letting go of more and more things so that I can focus on bigger and bigger things.

It’s the same problem as when to person-shop, but on a different scale. So you always encounter this problem up to a certain point, I guess, and then it becomes second nature. I’m not there yet. So I find there is a certain mentality when you’re one of three or four people and that is a slightly different mentality than when you’re 5-10, in terms of that, and after that gaps become bigger and bigger so it’s easier now for me than it was say, last year to let go of certain things, and that is something that I always have to work on. Did I answer your question? I’m not sure I answered your question.

TB: I think that’s good. How do you decide where to pursue? If you have an idea for a new piece of software, how do you decide whether it is best to focus your energy on that or focus your energy on your existing products?

AJ: This is very difficult actually. And I would say that I haven’t done too well there. There’s the continual argument that we got to make our existing product better so that we can a.) defend against competitors or b.) keep our customers happy, etc. And then there is when you are starting a new product, putting a new product out takes a lot of energy. It’s like a rocket–it expends the bulk of its energy on lift off.

And so adding a new product is similar. And once you add a new product, are you spreading yourself too thin? That inertia to launch a new product is daunting sometimes. And so that holds us back–the continual battle between improving the existing product vs spreading yourself too thin. Even when you do add a product, it has to be a product that makes sense, so when people come to you, you can cross-sell. For example, with us, we sell to the small business market on the Mac. It wouldn’t make sense for us to do a third product that is totally consumer based, because it’s a whole different audience, our marketing has to be different, our attention and focus has to be a little bit different versus if we brought on a third product that is in that space that we can sell to our existing clients because of integration, et cetera. That makes it a lot easier. You follow what I’m saying there?

TB: How do you differentiate your products from other software that’s available for Mac?

AJ: What I’m finding is that the concepts that you have, as long as they’re fleshed out, you will likely find an audience. And so, for example, with Daylight, when we compete, our concepts are a little bit different than what other’s might compare us to. In that case, these concepts differentiate us and how we’ve implemented those concepts. We can’t compare apples to apples per se in that particular situation. In the case of Billings, our second product, that is vertical so it is easier to compare because there are more competitors that do very similar things. In that case, it is excellence of the product. So, for example, Billings won design awards, we’ve added the iPhone companion, which we’re expanding all the time, we’ve gotten a Mac Word Eddy etc.

So we’ve put a lot of attention to detail, so we differentiated ourselves in terms of what the product can do and how well it can do it. And after all that, service also differentiates, people contact us, we have the appropriate staff to handle their questions, or what have you, so there is a comfort level there, that it’s not just a company that is a kind of fly-by night kind of thing. Those kind of things help us differentiate our product, but it is a.), the concepts can be different and can find an audience that likes those concepts and continue there and b.) in terms of our Daylight product and in terms of our Billings product, there are direct competitors, so in that case, we differentiate ourselves with excellence.

TB: Is there a moment when you know that a product is successful or when the company as a whole is successful?

AJ: That I think is a question of your own expectations. For some people, where we are right now, we’ve done well, for myself, I don’t think so. I keep moving on and I want to keep moving on. So I think that’s kind of a self-everybody kind of has to have their own criteria of what is successful or not. I, for example, I think we can do a whole lot better, other people, they hear our story, they get our details and they are impressed with what we have been able to achieve. So it is a personal thing.

TB: That’s all the questions I have, except for one last one. What advice would you give to somebody who is starting a start-up right now to really succeed with it?

AJ: I would say number 1, you have to balance, you have to be willing to be tenacious. At the beginning, like I mentioned earlier, launching a company or a product takes a lot of energy. It’s like a rocket in that it expends most of its energy at the beginning. So as an entrepreneur, as a person starting up, you need to be, first off, you need to just do it and once you’re doing it, you just have to keep going at it and just not let go. And whenever there is a challenge or a problem, go out there and try and find the solution. So that finding a solution could be through your friends, asking people, could be through Google, could be through Twitter, if you are decidedly tenacious, you want to be tenacious, you want this to succeed, you will find a way.

TB: Well, thank you very much for talking with us.

You can see a video of my 5 minutes on YouTube or embedded just below:

There are a lot of other great videos to watch, you can see lots on the main Ignite Show website. My personal favourite is Eugene Lin, speaking about his path to building a killer iPhone App in iPhoning My Way to Retirement $.70 at a Time:

As I sit and type this, it’s nearly three in the morning. Working late, once again.

Or am I? What IS working late? Is working late just working past 5:00 pm – or is it working for a certain amount of consecutive hours in a row? Or is “working late” just a term we often use when we think we should be elsewhere, i.e. with the family?

In today’s day, business happens 24/7. If you’re a startup company – or any company for that matter, you probably can’t get away with 9-to-5 hours.

Of course, you may have “office hours” of 9 to 5, but there is always work to be done outside these hours.

There are many reasons for working outside the “typical” (or as I like to say, “old-fashioned”) office hours.

Some of these include:

• Email: Email happens 24 hours a day. Unless your company reaches only your local community, you’ll probably have customers and business contacts in different time zones. I often e-mail or send instant messages to contacts outside of “office hours”, because these are the times most convenient for the people I’m trying to reach. It’s not efficient to email someone and wait an entire day, only to need to ask them another question. Time is money.

• Phone calls: If your business relies on phone communication, you’ll have to decide if it’s worth “taking the call”. Try sticking to particular hours – once your customers realize you’ll answer the phone at 3 am, it will become the norm.

• Sales: If you operate an e-commerce website, or sell anything 24/7, it pays to have someone available as close to 24 hours a day as possible. If you have a large enough volume, you may require a sales team during all hours. You may want to watch your traffic and sales quite closely.

• Customer service: If you’re selling to customers around the world, you have to be proactive and reactive to situations outside of work hours. Your “office hours” will not do anything to prevent an outraged customer from tweeting about your product or service at 4:00 am. If you’re small, try to do this as much as possible (monitor from your phone, etc.) regardless of the hour.

• Competition: More likely than not, you have a competitor that is either operating 24-hours a day. Stay ahead of the game by providing flexible hours, or at least being aware of your competition.

It’s not viable for every small company to operate 24 hours a day. Not only is it expensive, but it’s hard to find good employees willing to work night shifts (outsourcing to another time zone may work well here).

Do what you can for now – just make sure it’s top of mind as you grow.

So, how exactly do I NOT become a workaholic?

While it may be true that you have to operate during hours outside of the old 9 to 5, it doesn’t mean you need to work more hours each day.

Try spreading things out and taking breaks. It’s not the end of the world if you don’t respond to every email within five minutes. If you have the option to, do some of this work from home. Delegate work to others.

Did I mention take breaks? Not just half hour breaks, but days/week(s) off. If you over-work yourself, you’ll be miserable. And if you over-work yourself to the point of sickness, who fills in to maintain responsiveness and productivity?

If you’re a creative person, you may find yourself constantly thinking of ideas outside of “work hours”. It’s hard just to sit yourself at a desk and say, “I’m going to think of the next great idea”.

Many of my creative ideas come while I’m in the shower. It’s important for me to think about work outside of the office – it allows me to think from a different perspective.

Some people just disconnect when they leave the office. Sometimes I’m jealous of this – however, having business on the mind at different times in different places often sparks creativity.

The bulk of the successful people I know do not work for an 8-hour period and then call it quits – they’re always thinking and working.

Just don’t overdo it.

Embrace the new “office hours” – I think they’re here to stay.

They may not be aliens, but they aren’t your next-door neighbor either.

So how do you go about contacting a new media contact for the first time? Do you follow them on Twitter and send them a DM? Do you email them? Make a cold call? Or do you simply just show up in person, and knock on their door?

Depending on the industry you’re in, the first medium of contact can differ. If you’re contacting someone in the web or tech industry, chances are an electronic form of contact will work best. Sometimes though, an old-fashioned handshake can work best.

Do your best to determine the most appropriate method of contact – after all, do you really think it makes sense to send a tweet to the 60-year-old contractor down the road? No.

Who can I contact?

Before you start contacting people, you need to figure out the appropriate people and companies to target.

For example, if you’re a small iPhone developer that has just released its first application – do you think it makes sense to contact CNN? How about Macworld, or TUAW?

I wouldn’t go as far as to say you should never contact any of these companies – you’ll need to use your judgment again. If your application has been picked up all over the place (i.e. featured in the App store or in an iPhone commercial, or already covered on some equally popular websites), you may have the leverage you need to contact some of the bigger names.

One way to leverage something like this would be to put it right in the subject of an email, i.e. The Netsetter App: Featured in Apple’s Latest iPhone Commercial. This will greatly improve your chance that the person on the other end of the line will even give you the time of day to open the email, let alone read it.

So what do you do if your application wasn’t in Apple’s latest TV ad?

You start small. Contact bloggers who run personal (often not-for-profit) blogs. Try to find one in your user niche of users, rather than one reviewing other iPhone applications (in this example).

For instance, if you were releasing an application similar to Photoshop Mobile, you’d want to go after designers, photographers, and other creative people – as opposed after a more general website like TUAW.

Individuals running smaller (but popular) blogs are often looking for new content to write about, and are always looking to meet new people. The same can’t always be said about the larger “company” websites – they may see your contacting them as purely a selfish request for traffic (even if it’s not the case).

So I’ve found a cool, independent blogger – now what do I do?

There are usually three ways to get hold of a blogger: a contact form on their website, Twitter, or by sending them a direct email. Some may list their contact phone number. Don’t use it.

I’ve personally networked with approximately two hundred bloggers/media folk in a period of 3 or 4 months – without picking up the phone once. Again, this isn’t the case for every industry, but in general, people don’t want interruptive phone calls.

Personally, I find it’s best to avoid using Twitter as your initial form of contact. It doesn’t hurt to follow the contact, but avoid sending them a “Hey, my name is _____ and I wanted to share _____” tweet, or DM.

Contact form or direct email?

Generally, I’ll opt. to send a direct email instead of submitting a contact form, because it offers more flexibility and the ability to store a record of the outgoing communication.

Below are a few important things to consider, when contacting by either method.

Drop-down options

Not all contact forms allow you to enter your own subject line. Oftentimes you’ll have to choose from a drop-down menu of some sort. If you’re choosing an option from a drop down menu, make sure you choose the most appropriate option – not the option that they’re likely to be most interested in (i.e. don’t choose the “Hire me” option just so they look at it first). If you do this, you’ll lose all credibility.

Communication history

Sending your target an email means you’ll have a copy of your outgoing message. You won’t always receive a copy of your original email if you get a response, so if possible, it’s best to send them an email.

As you start hearing back from people, you can keep track of what works – and when you don’t hear back, you’ll know what’s not working.

Subject line

As mentioned earlier, try to use something catchy here. By catchy, I don’t mean using exclamation marks, caps lock, or including X amount of lottery winnings in the subject line. You’ll want to mention something familiar or appealing to the recipient – this may require some research before sending your message (more on that later). Keep your subject line as short as possible, and capitalize the beginning of most words (except and, the, etc.).

I’ve applied some of what I’ve learned from Adwords optimization to subject lines, and it works. You’ll notice noticeably higher conversion rates when using initial caps for every word in your Adwords text ads. Since this is not advertising, and you’re emailing a writer, don’t get too crazy with this.

The Golden Rule

We all receive junk mail and shady business propositions everyday – if you don’t, consider yourself lucky!

If you receive junk mail daily, you can use it as a learning tool. I can’t count how many 800-word emails I’ve received that I delete before reading; emails starting with “Dear Sir or Madam”, or messages containing wallpaper-sized graphics go to my trash almost immediately. Whatever bothers you probably bothers other people – don’t send people the type of mail you yourself mark as “junk”!

Signatures

If you’re sending a direct email, make sure you’ve thought about your signature.

For a long time, I had a signature explaining the company I worked for and the products we sell. This transitioned into a hybrid of the aforementioned along with my email address, Twitter name, and AIM account. Then it dawned on me – why would I need to include my email address when I’m sending them an email FROM THE SAME ADDRESS? This isn’t 1995. In addition, if the person wants to find you on Twitter, I’m sure he or she will have no problem doing so (if your name is John Smith, maybe it doesn’t hurt to include your unique Twitter ID). And AIM? If they haven’t ever spoken to you, why would they want to chat with you on an instantaneous level?

I now have a simple signature that includes my name, and a happy face. I don’t always include the face, but sometimes I find it helps to make the email seem more personable. You definitely don’t want to include a .JPG or .PNG of an actual happy face, or your face for that matter – I once received a no-less-than-1024×768 headshot in the signature of a woman who had contacted me. If there is some sort of super urgency involved in your line of work, you could consider adding a phone number, otherwise I’d stay away from it – they’ll ask for one if they need to call you.

Do your homework

It’s extremely important to do your research before contacting someone. If you’re emailing a blogger in hopes of a review or giveaway, make sure they’ve written posts like that in the past. Read at least two or three pages of their blog, and scope out their Twitter account before sending them anything. Even better, watch/follow them for a little while before making contact – the better you know somebody, the easier it will be for them to relate to you in your first contact with them.

PR is all about forming meaningful relationships. Go beyond the product or service you’re trying to get them to talk about. Social networking makes this easier than ever – poke around their Twitter account, browse their Flickr photos, and read their “about” page.

Find something in common and don’t take without giving.

You probably wouldn’t invite an alien into your home right away – but with a little background information and a shared hobby or two, you may consider it.

Dealing with fast growth can be tricky, just ask Bruce Banner. One moment he’s a regular comic book uber scientist, then someone has the bad judgment to make him angry and next thing you know he’s a 10 foot green monster who uses guns for toothpicks and likes smashing things. That sort of growth always comes with consequences. In Bruce’s case, it’s his clothes that suffer. Inevitably we see the Hulk burst out of his shirt as he transforms, all the while counting ourselves lucky that his pants managed to hold on for dear life.

Startup growth is not altogether unlike the Hulk’s growth – it can happen really quickly, and it can be hard to predict ahead of time. Sometimes I think about companies like Facebook and how fast they grow and it boggles my mind. In just a few short years Facebook has grown from a few guys in a dorm room with not an ounce of business experience between them, to a company with over a thousand staff! Can you imagine what that sort of growth must be like? I can’t. How do you make sure you don’t go off the rails? How do you keep delivering product excellence? How do you keep the right culture in the company? How do you hire the right people and so many of them?

Happily, Facebook makes my own startup Envato look like an insignificant pea in comparison, so we have not had to deal with anything so epic in scale. Nonetheless we’ve had our own growth these last few years and it’s been interesting, particularly this year watching, shaping and managing how it’s taken place. In the last two years we’ve grown about fifteen times larger in people, audience, revenue, and traffic. It’s not Facebook sized growth, but it’s a lot, and like any growth it brings some challenges.

The Demands of Growth

As our young company has grown, we’ve had to adapt to the change in circumstances. In some cases it’s been clear what was needed, in others we’ve had to use trial and error, advice from our more experienced team members, and intuition and instinct. Here are some of the demand of growth that we’ve experienced:

Hiring and Training the Right People

Unless you have Craigslist’s knack for running an enormous site with a skeleton crew, you are probably going to be hiring lots of people. There are enormous challenges in making sure you find the right people and then give them enough training and resources. I once read an article interviewing ten successful Australian entrepreneurs who’d run fast growing companies. About half of them cited hiring people too quickly with not enough thought and background checks as one of their greatest mistakes.

Aside from the possibility of hiring someone who isn’t right for a particular job, you also have the distinct possibility of hiring a person who isn’t the right fit for your company. Keeping the right culture in a business is critical because it determines how your company behaves, how it is perceived and who wants to work there.

Organizational Structure

If you’ve ever worked in a disorganized group or committee where it wasn’t clear who was in charge of what and whom, then you will know first hand the perils of bad organizational structure. Throwing lots of new hires into the mix without assigning clear roles, responsibilities and reporting structures is a recipe for trouble. It makes people less efficient, effective and ultimately less happy.

My father once told me there is no perfect organizational structure, there is only what works for a particular team. So what works in one company may be completely wrong for another. The important thing then is to figure out what structure suits a particular work style, ethic and attitude.

Accounting and Cash Flow

Growing fast means you need to have excellent accounts so you can quickly react to changes in the business. Cash flow is one of the biggest killers of new businesses and it’s particularly dangerous when your business is changing so fast you have trouble predicting what is going to happen next. Having solid accounts means knowing where your money is going, what’s in the bank, what your costs are and what a change in growth speed or revenue would mean in terms of your costs.

The greatest danger of inaccurate accounting is overshooting what is sustainable and finding yourself hanging off the edge with expenses and liabilities that outstrip both your current income and growth rate. If you don’t have up to date and accurate accounts, you may never know this is happening.

Not Getting Bloated

During a recent hiring process I had a chance to speak to a number of candidates who’d recently worked at large corporates. Every one of them recounted stories of red tape and unwieldy organizations that despite their success were slow and cumbersome. When you grow fast it’s easy to get bloated. Easy, but not pretty.

These are just some of the demands that fast growth makes on a company. Each has its own complications and is worthy of an article all on its own. What has become clear to me during the last two years however is that it’s important to manage the growth overall. The question is, how do you do that while maintaining momentum?

Growth and Consolidation

Unless you’re the Incredible Hulk, building muscle is usually a slightly different process to the anger induced mutation that Bruce Banner undergoes. In fact it’s a process that offers insight into how a company might manage growth.

Building muscle generally involves two phases. In the first you exert your muscles, pushing them as hard as possible, to the point where the muscle fibers begin to burst. Then you recover, letting your muscles adjust to this new level of required strength. In business you can manage growth by taking a similar two phase approach.

In the first phase you focus entirely on growth. Whether it’s increasing staff size, pushing heavily on marketing, or using money to buy you time in infrastructure; this period is the time for increasing the size of your company as fast as possible. It’s characterized by spending to solve problems, taking the view that some solution is better than none, and that you want to push out product and development as quickly as possible. In essence this phase is geared towards looking outwards.

In the second phase you switch modes to consolidate the growth. Here you focus on tidying up organizational structure. You make your infrastructure more efficient. You build up cash by pulling back on marketing. You take time to focus on the direction and strategy and to look at where your business is going. This phase is characterized by finding optimal solutions and looking to ensure they are going to stand up to the next phase of growth focus. It’s a time for prioritizing and organizing. In essence this phase is geared towards looking inwards.

Exertion and recovery. Growth and consolidation. This two phased approach allows you to focus on each phase without ignoring the equally important other half of fast growth.

Concurrency

During each phase you take an active approach to one aspect of fast growth and a passive approach to the other. So you continue growing during the consolidation phase, but it’s for the most part passive on the growth front. A few months later, you switch to growth mode and though you are still consolidating in the background, your main focus is growth.

So it’s not that you ever completely stop growing or consolidating. I think completely ignoring one part of growth wouldn’t be a great idea. Rather the focus switches. And having focus means you can get better results in that area.

I suspect that the larger you get the more concurrency is needed and possible. So a larger organization might have different focuses in different parts of the organization. For us here at Envato, we’re still pretty small — my head particularly so, so it’s nice to be able to have only one major focus going at a time!

‘Hulk, Smash!’

The great thing about fast growth of course is that it’s very exciting. Watching things change and move as fast as you can keep up is exhilarating! And you often suddenly realize that you are capable of doing a lot more than you used to be able to, a little bit like ol’ Bruce and his sudden ability to throw trucks and leap out of helicopters!

And so do you.

Whether you’re the CEO of a Fortune 500 company or Joe Schmo starting your first business, you’ll need the right tools to do your job effectively. This is obvious, right? Well, not so much. Oftentimes a business owner will only buy what they need – not what they should have.

A mechanic could work this way as well – instead of buying a (more expensive) ratchet set, they COULD get by with just an open wrench. If mechanics worked this way, they’d take twice as long to get the job done. And no, this doesn’t mean they’d make twice as much money – soon the customer will realize they can go elsewhere, and pay half as much for labor costs. Does an oil change shop really need that fancy (expensive) drive-in setup to change your oil? No. Do they make more money because of it? Yes.

So let’s start with hardware.

Without getting into a lengthy Mac vs. PC discussion, let’s just talk basics. Macs are actually cheaper when it comes to the overall cost of ownership. If your employees are all using Macs, you don’t have to worry as much about viruses, crashing, etc., meaning your employees are spending more time being productive, and less time troubleshooting their computers. They’re also very environmentally friendly – something to consider as a good citizen, but something to also consider if you are operating in an environment where your customers and business partners will tour your workplace. Let’s face it – Macs look better to onlookers. If you are going to go the PC route, do some good research.

iPhone or Blackberry? Again, don’t want to get into a lengthy discussion (and everyone has their own preference), but consider alone the amount of third party application support for the iPhone. There is a plethora of business applications for the iPhone that are simply not possible (and don’t exist) on the Blackberry. Check out Apple’s iPhone in Business page – especially the case studies.

Aside from choosing the right brand, also consider the efficiency and output quality when making certain hardware decisions. Let’s pretend we’re starting a small design agency and need to pick out some hardware for the designers. Consider the following:

• Monitor quality: if your designer uses an inexpensive monitor that can’t accurately display colour, the designers output will be jaded
• Mouse: if your designer wants an expensive mouse (or tablet), it’s probably for a good reason. They’re probably accustomed to using certain devices, and getting them something new will just add a learning curve to their already busy day, and may skew their performance.
• Computer: brand aside, make sure their computer can open large Photoshop files in under 25 minutes
• Chair: a graphic designer is likely going to be sitting for most of their day – why not make them comfortable?

Alright, on to software.

So of course this imaginary design studio would have Adobe’s Creative Suite – but what else would they have? Going back to the mechanic metaphor, they COULD get away with only using Photoshop. But what about scheduling meetings with your designers? Tracking new clients? Managing their projects? Would it be nice to have them record the time they spend on particular projects so that you can report back on it later? How are you updating your company blog? A lot of these things can be done with paper and pen, instant messaging, and sign language – but how efficiently? Just because something can be done without additional software, doesn’t mean it makes sense to.

Software can be tricky – there are so many options out there. Where should I look for advice? Here are a few places to consider:

• AppStorm: Mac.AppStorm and Web.AppStorm offer great reviews on software for both Mac and web apps
• Twitter: try using Twitter’s Search mechanism, using keywords relating to the type, brand, or product name, to hear what other people are saying – in real time
• Business & Finance Downloads: if you go the Mac route (hopefully you’re convinced by now), Apple’s Business & Finance downloads page is a good place to start (many software demos to try for free)
• Forums: depending on what industry you’re in, you may want to poke around on a niche-specific forum and ask others what they’re using

Fun stuff too.

People need to have fun once in a while, right? Find something that fits your budget, whether it’s a Nintendo Wii or an artificial wave pool for surfing – your employees need something to unwind with. Work hard, play harder.

Can’t I just get by for now? You can, and of course everyone has a budget. The important thing is to make effective purchasing decisions, and not “cheap out” where it counts the most. If you’re an accounting firm, you probably don’t NEED a 30 inch Apple Cinema display – but if you’re a designer, it will probably help you make more money.

Just remember, mechanics need tools, and so do you.

There may only be one of you in the world, but there are plenty of other people. So to overcome the speed bump of your own personal capacities, you’re going to need to get other people to do your work. This can be quite a daunting prospect, after all how do you find people? How can you trust them to do a good job? How do you pay them? What if they don’t work out?

In fact taking this step is so formidable that in many instances it can appear easier just to continue doing the work yourself. Personally I often disguise my worries with excuses that sound very legitimate, like “only I have the extra, special, super skills to do this task” or “by the time I teach someone else how to do it, I may as well have done it myself!”

But what I have found is that if you want to grow and expand and get to do all the things you want to do, you’re going to need to let go. And in fact there IS someone else who can do one or many of the tasks you do, sometimes they’ll even do them better. Yes, it takes some training and uptake time, but for almost every task there will be repeats or similar work and then you’ll reap the rewards.

Over the years I’ve gotten some practice hiring new staff, taking on regular contractors and commissioning one-off freelancers. So I’ve put together some thoughts on how to go about replacing yourself.

1. Recognize your core skills and try to delegate everything else (first)

For most entrepreneurs, the course of a workday involves a wide variety of tasks, some of which play to your strengths and some of which you do because, well, you have no choice. Make a list of all the different types of things you do, then prioritize them according to what you’re actually good at. Think to yourself: if I was going to hire someone to do this job, would I pick me out of a set of candidates? Chances are you’re doing a lot of things that someone else could do a lot better.

It’s important when doing this exercise not to focus on any particular knowledge of your own business you may have. That’s a trap. Yes, you might be the only person who has been there since the first day of your business and only you know what’s inside your head, but forget about all that. Just think in terms of actual suitability. What tasks suit you? What do you enjoy?

The things which you are most suited to you should try to delegate last. The rest you can now try to group into similar job types. Sometimes it takes a bit of mental agility to group jobs together, especially if they aren’t a natural job role. I’ve found that in the early days of our startup I needed much more general, smart people who could just help out with a variety of things. Often these people were my cofounders who were willing to do everything from manning support and moderating forums, to setting up bank accounts and putting together financial reports. Over time as our budget and needs have warranted, we’ve been able to bring in more specialized people for these roles.

For example recently I’ve noticed the number of jobs which have a legal component to them have been mounting. Whether it’s reading through agreements, dealing with our law firm for trademarking, deciding what sorts of usage terms we should specify, or simply giving a quick opinion on a copyright question. Right now a lot of this work is done by myself, or other management staff. While we don’t have enough work for an actual general counsel (thank goodness, because they are expensive!) we do have enough for a part-time person with a legal background. And importantly such a person would undoubtedly do a better, quicker and more effective job!

2. Beware of false economies

One common reason for not delegating is simply that you can’t afford to pay someone else. Often startups and small businesses are on tight resources, so of course the obvious thing to do is to do everything yourself. In general I applaud this strategy, and it’s certainly something that I have done throughout my business. But you must remember that doing things yourself holds its own pitfalls.

My favorite television show is an English one called Property Ladder where they follow would-be property developers on a big development project. Oftentimes these are people just starting out and with correspondingly limited budgets. One of the ways they often decide to save money is to take on project managing the development themselves. But in half the cases they in fact end up losing money because they don’t actually know what they are doing. Even with the best intentions and hard work sometimes it simply means things take longer, or they accidentally do things in the wrong order. When the recap rolls at the end of the show you realize that they would have been better off just hiring a professional.

Another false economy can arise from the misuse of your own time. Ask yourself: What could I achieve if I freed up some hours? What tasks are there that I would be most effective at? At many stages of Envato’s growth I’ve found myself doing jobs that I could find someone else to do, and in the meantime leaving tasks that no-one else could do languishing on the side. This is a bit like using a tank to ferry soldiers around the battlefield instead of what it’s actually good at – blowing stuff up on the front lines!

The key is to make the most effective use of all your resources, including both time AND money. Sometimes that will mean doing things yourself, but in quite a few cases it will mean delegating.

3. Get a replace-yourself mentality

When you’re up to your ears in work it is extremely difficult to be thinking about finding and bringing in someone else. This is doubly difficult when you have accumulated a lot of experience with your particular set of circumstances that you’d need to train someone else in. To get past this you need a replace-yourself mentality.

To begin with, don’t let yourself be attached to specific jobs. It sounds crazy, but many people want to be *the* person to do the job. President Harry S. Truman once said “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit”. Letting go of important and fun jobs can be hard, but ultimately will help you to do more overall.

Secondly it’s important to prepare yourself for the extra workload the delegating brings in the initial stages. Finding and training people can be very time consuming, but it’s only for a short while. Then afterward, all of a sudden you’ll have more time as the workload suddenly drops off your shoulders. You just have to be prepared for the short burst of work and hunker down until it’s past.

4. Find people … anywhere!

I’ve been asked a number of times where we find the great people who work at Envato. The answer is pretty much anywhere and everywhere. Here are the four main sources:

• Freelance Sites – Many of the times that I have delegated work, it has been to freelancers and contractors. There are lots of sites where you can post job ads for a freelancer, but the best is FreelanceSwitch’s Job Board where you can post for free – and which coincidentally happens to be run by Envato. I’m very proud to say that a large number of our freelancers have been found there! Of course you can also try sites like Elance and oDesk.
• From your userbase – This might not suit every start-up or business, but for Envato we find tons of people out of our own community. Many of the Tuts+ editors were readers and/or writers for the sites, all of our marketplace reviewers are sellers first, similarly with moderators, site managers, and plenty of other positions. In fact being a user of our sites is a huge plus whenever we hire because it means the person doesn’t need to learn the culture, product and company from scratch.
• Job Sites – Lately we’ve been hiring quite a few full-time local staff for our Melbourne office. For that we post job ads on Seek, which here in Australia is the largest job site. Every country will have their own job sites, and it’s important to advertise where your market looks. We once advertised for a programmer on the 37Signals job board and got absolutely no candidates. It turns out Australian developers don’t pay that much attention to that particular job board.
• People you know – All through Envato’s life we’ve been hiring people we know. On many occasions it’s been friends or family, and as we’ve grown it’s started including people who worked with our employees at previous jobs. Knowing someone or having a personal recommendation can go a long way to establishing how well a person might fit in. But always keep in mind that you should be choosing the right person for the job, not just whoever happens to be available.

At the end of the day you can find people from pretty much anywhere. Just keep your eyes open, and make sure people know you are looking – whether that’s by posting job ads or telling friends.

5. Briefing and training are crucial

Unfortunately just hiring someone is not enough. Your contractor, employee or partner must be fully briefed or trained on what they need to do. This is a crucial step that it’s very easy to skimp out on, running instead on the vain hope that they’ll just ‘figure it out’.

While it’s not a bad idea to throw people into sink-or-swim situations, you do need to make sure they have what they need to get the job done. This will mean a time cost while you properly brief or train the person. But the perils of trying to save on that cost are high and in general it never works out very well. On a number of occasions I’ve sent over half-briefs or not fully trained someone about a job and one way or the other I have always paid the price.

Whether briefing or training make sure you take a very detailed approach. Imagine yourself in their situation but with zero knowledge of the job. Think through every piece of information they are going to need and make sure you document it all. A thorough, specific and well documented brief will save buckets of time later on, will empower your freelancer or employee to get the job done and will make for a smooth transition as you delegate the work out.

6. Don’t micromanage!

You should not in any circumstances be micromanaging every detail of another person’s work. It is very disempowering for the other person and highly redundant because you have two people effectively doing the work.

There are two reasons you may find yourself micromanaging a person. First you can’t let go of the work, so you’ve decided to check in all the time, give direction and oversee it all. There is only one solution to this scenario – let go. There are no two ways about it, you absolutely, must let go of the job. Give yourself periodic check ins at sufficiently long intervals for the person to actually do the work and produce results.This means you will still have some oversight, but it will be at a measured distance. When you do check in, look solely at the results, not the manner in which they have done the job. If the results are there, then you can relax. If they aren’t there, then that brings me to the second scenario …

You’ve got the wrong person. Sometimes you will have simply botched the hiring or contracting and brought in someone incapable of effectively doing the job that needs doing. You know it, and you’ve started micromanaging to try to compensate. Sorry, it won’t work. You have to bite the bullet, get rid of the person and start again. The good news is the process is so painful that next time you’ll be more careful about choosing people!

But remember there is no good situation that involves micromanaging. If you are going to delegate your workload, you need to do so and then stand back so you can reap the benefits. If you don’t want to delegate, that’s completely understandable, just don’t pretend to delegate and then micromanage as it will simply cost you money and not save you any time.

7. You must set expectations, demand accountability and provide feedback

Whether it is a freelancer you have hired or an employee, it’s critical that you set parameters for the job and then hold the recruit to those parameters. This encompasses the briefing and training I mentioned earlier and also includes specifying how you will judge performance, what is a good result, what is a bad result and how often you will give feedback. It also means that you need to follow up and evaluate how the person is doing.

Without expectations and feedback, you are leaving things to chance. Nobody likes working in a vacuum and for good reason. Without expectations and feedback, your contractors and employees won’t be able to tell what they are meant to do, whether they are doing it, and whether they are performing well.

I hope these 7 tips will help in your own quest to delegate and offload some of your workload. Even after all the people I’ve hired, I’m still learning about the process. Luckily it’s pretty fun and when you look back and see what is getting accomplished without you actually doing the work, it’s a really, really awesome feeling.

After writing this long article on how and why you should replace yourself, I will finish with a cautionary tale. In her book ‘The Stories of Facebook, YouTube and MySpace’, author Sarah Lacy recounts the story of Jay Adelson who founded the company Equinix during the dot-com boom. As Lacy writes:

“Like so many first-time entrepreneurs in the bubble, Jay made the mistake of losing control. By 2000, he was still one of the largest stockholders in Equinix, but he had given up his board seat to make room for the company’s new “grown-up” chief executive, Peter Van Camp. Although Jay retained his titles of co-founder and chief technology officer, his influence had waned considerably – he didn’t even report directly to Van Camp.”

Later when things went pear shaped Adelson found himself unable to influence direction and was increasingly shut out from the company he started. While the company still exists today and is worth some $2 billion, Adelson through a series of events outside his control, lost everything.

So while it’s important to delegate and offload, you also don’t want to delegate yourself right out of your own startup! Still the story has a happy ending because it was while at Equinix that Adelson was to meet a young, enthusiastic tech reporter named Kevin Rose. Rose and Adelson were to go on to become fast friends and co-founders of a little site called Digg. Yay!

Plan your destination (plan for the unplanned) - Before you even start the journey of finding the perfect name for your startup you need to know where your coming from and where you plan for your business to end up. This attempt at plotting your final destination seems easy, but focus on more than where you hope your business to go, take into consideration where the business COULD go. Southwest Airlines, originally the small airlines from Dallas Texas has become the affordable flight of choice, their slogan “You are free to move about the country” says just that. However, their name no longer matches with what they do and what their slogan says. Planning for your business to go places you never expected helps ensure that your name will fit with whatever your business becomes.

Know whats happening under the hood – You need to know what your name is riding on to become a brand name – it helps with preparing for the road ahead. What you put into a word will add some serious content and memorability to the name, when a name is based around an expression or a real word (or word part) it makes it easier for clients to remember the name. A name like worldwideopen.com is memorable because its based around the phrase world wide web, but this real word name is anything but limiting – it does not state a specific industry, it can be used for an internet technology company or a travel agency for example. The name noctiva.com uses the word part ‘noct’ to insinuate ‘night’ — you can see this prefix being used in words like ‘nocturnal’, and it gives the name a definite connotation of night time. This could be used for anything from a security company to a blog about night life. Knowing what your name is made of helps you understand how it will be seen by your clients.

Don’t forget the details, pack snacks and games - The most memorable part of any road trip are the morsels of delight you ate and the road trip games you played. The little details are what give the tone and memory that sticks with you. The same is true for business names. The little morsels like having a natural spelling, length of a name, and pronunciation contributes to the tone of the name and aids in making it unique. The spelling isn’t so much about being correct as it is about being natural. Google came up with their name by a common misspelling of the word googol. The length of a name really comes down to the domain – the shorter the domain the less likely it is to be forgotten, if you call yourself Apaxo Advertising as a startup, use apaxo.com as the domain so that when your business expands to advertising, consulting, and marketing Apaxo remains a consistent brand and you can drop the limiting industry keyword.

Look out for potholes – If you’re not careful you could hit a pot hole, pop a tire, and never make it to your final brand name destination. A good way to avoid such disasters like not having a domain to match your business name is to search for a .com domain and business name at the same time. You always hear in the real estate industry that it’s all about location, location, location. In the domain industry, you will hear that its all about .com, .com, .com. Yes, .net and .org are great top level domains, but when saying “Go to the BrandBucket website” it will automatically be assumed that it is .com.

Ask for directions – After developing a product or business you may find yourself a bit to close to it and struggle with the perfect name. That is why people like us at BrandBucket are here! Inventing memorable brand worthy names is what we do. It helps to have an outside source give feedback and a new perspective on a name for your startup. We offer a more in depth look at brand strategy and choosing a name, you can search and evaluate domain names. It is a true test of creativity to choose a name for your start up that has the potential to be the big name brand. Remember, grab a map, do your best, and don’t be afraid to ask for directions.

There is no set time within which this must happen. Some companies go through longer startup phases than others, while a few actually mature very fast. Still, there is one thing that you can carry on with you even after your company has become a well established business: The Startup Spirit.

It isn’t really about working from your garage, as many people seem to think. It is about your ability to question what you are doing, where you are going and most important, your desire to be always looking for something new. Companies that embrace this spirit become leaders as they continually innovate, leaving it to their competitors to try and follow them.

How do you create or revive this spirit in your business? The first thing you should ask yourself is if you believe in what you are doing. It is essential that you really believe in your work, in your potential, for you to be able to question if you are doing it in the best way possible and question if there is something else that you could be doing as well. Too many people, without even thinking about it, decide that where they are and what they’ve already achieved is enough. But people who are passionate about their work will always be looking to get it a little bit better.

There are several companies which have embraced innovation and which seem to show a passion for addressing the challenge of reinventing themselves. One such company is Amazon which was a startup back in the 1990s, before the dotcom bubble burst. Now, over a decade later, Amazon has started several new lines of business, taking a leadership position in such new markets as cloud computing with its Amazon Web Services division and electronic books with the Kindle. Amazon was already an established leader in the online retail market but it didn’t just stop there. They have continuously sought new ways to optimize their business and looked for business opportunities which could be derived from those new ways and techniques.

Another great example is Apple, which has repeatedly replaced market leading products with new ones. Apple realizes that if it doesn’t release a product that can replace their previous products in the mind and hearts of the public, someone else will. At least twice Apple replaced the top selling iPod model for a new one, innovating in design, size and usability.

Once you have settled down and gotten used to being an established business, it isn’t easy to go back to thinking about what you can bring to the market. That is essentially the kind of thinking that is present in startup companies and which is important to recapture if you feel you are starting to settled on a business as usual rhythm.

At that time the Dotcom Bubble had recently burst and though there were some ragged survivors like Amazon, the majority of the high flying, aeron buying, dotcom elite had come and gone. I used to sit in my internet cafe waiting for the nonexistent customers and think, “If only I had gotten into this web stuff five years ago, then I could have been part of all that excitement!”

In my youthful naivete, I was convinced that the time for web startups had passed and I’d missed the boat. Sure it was a boat that eventually crashed at full speed right into the docks, but what a ride it must have been!

Fast forward five years, and after two jobs as a web designer and a stint as a freelancer I found myself at the dawn of that second great web era – Web 2.0. This time around I discovered I was suddenly at the right place at the right time with the right skills. Yes, it’s missing the crazy hype and some of the premature enthusiasm and energy of the Dotcom bubble, but ultimately it has turned out to be a better time for little startups like mine.

In his fantastically readable book “Outliers – the Story of Success“, Malcolm Gladwell illustrates how there have been ideal times to be working in particular industries. He shows that programmers like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were not just brilliant entrepreneurs, but that importantly they took advantage of being around at a particular time with a particular set of skills and opportunities.

Now I’m no Gates or Jobs, but I do know that this is a golden period for the web. These are the years that our future selves will look back at and say “Boy that was an exciting time online!” There are simply so many opportunities for people with the skills to create great products. The barriers to entry are exceedingly low allowing developers, designers, bloggers, and all manner of people with particular enthusiasm, skill and drive to build successful businesses online.

But it won’t last. Over time the more obvious opportunities slowly dry up and the barriers rise. To get in on the action you have to be increasingly advanced, well funded and creative.

I would argue that the web right now however is still wide open. Just look at how Twitter has come out of left field to become a massive internet phenomena in just three short years. There are still many, many untapped opportunities.

So I’ll end this post to say that if you’ve wondered whether you should make a go of a particular idea you have, I say yes! If you’re going to go for it, go for it now! Sure we won’t all be Twitters or Facebooks, but that doesn’t mean we can’t build some neat little startups, grow sustainable businesses and live to tell the tale of how we helped build the internet in the heady days of 2009!