4 ms·

I've been struggling with this one myself. My current company will have grown from 50 people in January '07 to 300+ in January '09. And the larger we get, the l

I've been struggling with this one myself. My current company will have grown from 50 people in January '07 to 300+ in January '09. And the larger we get, the longer it seems to take to get anything done. I'm very interested in hearing strategies for keeping a company aggressively small without having to give up the ability to chase increasing revenue.

SwellJoe 18y ago
I'm very interested in hearing strategies for keeping a company aggressively small without having to give up the ability to chase increasing revenue. I don't have any real good answers for you there. We're still pretty much a two man shop, though we've just hired a part-time support and documentation person (five hours per week--extremely part-time, but enough to free me and Jamie up a bit from support roles so we can focus on other revenue-generating tasks). I may have gone in an abnormal direction by hiring someone really experienced for the support role, rather than hiring someone really cheap and training them. He costs more, but we don't have to train him and I've got great confidence in the support he provides. He's a technology jack of all trades that happens to fit our business very well, and I believe he'll provide far more value to our customers than he costs us to keep him working. We're torn on the "stay small" vs. "go big" question, as well. We know we're going after huge revenues...we're just trying to figure out how to maximize those opportunities without bogging down the company with a lot of unnecessary head count. I think the key is to boil it down to your core business. Our thinking is: "Why do people pay us?" And the answers are: Powerful software that gets better all the time, great personal support via our website, less painful licensing processes than our competitors. So, those are the things we need to spend money on (plus marketing and advertising in order to let people know those are the things we provide). Everything else is not our job--we'll outsource it. In the next week or two I'm planning to hire a part-time bookkeeper to come in once per week to clean out my inbox, pay bills, and enter our accounting data into the accounting system, etc. But, then again, that still doesn't answer your question, and doesn't solve the problem--at some point, if you have success, you have to hire more people. Full time legal, accounting, sales, support, etc. It just happens...but I do think it's worth fighting a few aspects of that. Hierarchy can be a problem, and should be fought against pretty strongly...I've seen an organization that brought in a new CEO, and she looked around at the general messiness and inefficiency of the organization (a ~60 person non-profit with a few tens of millions in managed money), and decided that what the company needed was more C-levels. Last I heard they had seven C-levels. That's less than ten employees per C-level, for those keeping count at home. I'm pretty confident this did not improve the efficiency of the organization. I get the distinct impression from people I know who work at Google that they have a similar problem. MBAs look at the organization and think, "What this company needs is a little more management." And they hire more MBA-wielding managers, who look around the organization and think, "What this company needs is a little more management." And they hire more MBA-wielding managers, who look around...

SwellJoe 18y ago

I'm very interested in hearing strategies for keeping a company aggressively small without having to give up the ability to chase increasing revenue. I don't have any real good answers for you there. We're still pretty much a two man shop, though we've just hired a part-time support and documentation person (five hours per week--extremely part-time, but enough to free me and Jamie up a bit from support roles so we can focus on other revenue-generating tasks). I may have gone in an abnormal direction by hiring someone really experienced for the support role, rather than hiring someone really cheap and training them. He costs more, but we don't have to train him and I've got great confidence in the support he provides. He's a technology jack of all trades that happens to fit our business very well, and I believe he'll provide far more value to our customers than he costs us to keep him working. We're torn on the "stay small" vs. "go big" question, as well. We know we're going after huge revenues...we're just trying to figure out how to maximize those opportunities without bogging down the company with a lot of unnecessary head count. I think the key is to boil it down to your core business. Our thinking is: "Why do people pay us?" And the answers are: Powerful software that gets better all the time, great personal support via our website, less painful licensing processes than our competitors. So, those are the things we need to spend money on (plus marketing and advertising in order to let people know those are the things we provide). Everything else is not our job--we'll outsource it. In the next week or two I'm planning to hire a part-time bookkeeper to come in once per week to clean out my inbox, pay bills, and enter our accounting data into the accounting system, etc. But, then again, that still doesn't answer your question, and doesn't solve the problem--at some point, if you have success, you have to hire more people. Full time legal, accounting, sales, support, etc. It just happens...but I do think it's worth fighting a few aspects of that. Hierarchy can be a problem, and should be fought against pretty strongly...I've seen an organization that brought in a new CEO, and she looked around at the general messiness and inefficiency of the organization (a ~60 person non-profit with a few tens of millions in managed money), and decided that what the company needed was more C-levels. Last I heard they had seven C-levels. That's less than ten employees per C-level, for those keeping count at home. I'm pretty confident this did not improve the efficiency of the organization. I get the distinct impression from people I know who work at Google that they have a similar problem. MBAs look at the organization and think, "What this company needs is a little more management." And they hire more MBA-wielding managers, who look around the organization and think, "What this company needs is a little more management." And they hire more MBA-wielding managers, who look around...