Smart Start-ups
Starting a business with little to no experience, we’ve grown quite quickly and have learnt a few lessons along the way, like choosing clients carefully and being a good employer.
In the last year I’ve seen Morgan grow from a simple ‘garage startup’ to a fully fledged development house, with projects ranging from a budget of $500 to well over $150,000—amounts of money that frighten and hyptontise me.
In my years of working for both startups and much larger established places, I’ve noticed a few constants that I have strived to avoid in the pubescent phase of Morgan’s presence.
The sage advice I’ve discovered through trial, error, headaches and many late nights is that:
You can never over plan
One of the most important things I’ve noticed in the projects that we’ve been working on, is that we would often skip over certain aspects of the life-cycle of a project—like IA(Information Architecture) or wireframing—for those that had a lower budget.
The result would be that the project would often blow out of scope pretty quickly because the client thought the site would have more bells, and way more whistles.
Providing wireframes and general IA(Information Architecture) to even the smallest budget clients is that a small budget can remain that way, with the client knowing exactly what they’re paying for from the get go.
Be a good employer
Ever since my first boss I’ve taken mental notes of things that I’d never do, and things that I would always do to ensure that I’m a good employer. We like to build staff motivation and mentality by providing random gifts, staff outings and snacks in the office.
We also allow for plenty of leniency when dealing with time off for staff, and if you work back we’ll buy you dinner.
These simple things let your employees know that you actually care about their wellbeing, and it will encourage them to treat the company as if it is their own—which will provide an infinite amount of motivation.
Take a breather
Even though it seems like there isn’t enough time in the day to get things done, it is a good idea to stop every now and then to take a breather. Even if it is taking a long lunch to read a book, or even a whole day off to spend time with friends.
It is incredibly salubrious to just forget about work for a small period of time and forget about clients, employees and most everything associated with the business. A short amount of time to reboot will energize and compel you into not throwing in the towel.
Comments
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Great post. Really interesting read. (hence being one of your employee's)
Great post. I see no reason why large companies can't adopt this mentality - teams should be run like small start ups.
Keep up the good work.