Managing Growth

Maybe it is too early to talk about managing growth for a young company. After all, we are barely starting up, and still in the process of getting things in order. We are still working from a room in my house and haven’t even got a proper office yet. But, it is something worth while talking about as it is something that can make or break your success as a start-up.

As a young web development company, which is barely turning profitable, we are lucky to get our hands on any projects. I mean you say yes to any work that comes your way. The phobia of not landing enough work, and the approach you take towards it, if successful, can leave you cornered against a pile of work and run the risk of not being able to deliver most of them on time! Guess what, we are already there.

It certainly is a good problem to have, a problem that you can should consider yourself lucky to have. But nevertheless it is still a problem. And the approach you take to solve the problem will play a key role in determining the success of the company.

As for us, we decided that it is the quality that matters over quantity. Therefore, we decided that it is time that we put a hold to new sales and concentrate on delivering the existing projects and do a proper job of delighting the customers and exceeding their expectations. This, for us, is far more important than blind growth. We want our customers to be happy with us. We want them to come back to us without hesitation. Once we win a customer, we want to be able to build a long term relationship with them.

We do build great relationships with our customers. We put is a great effort in understanding and identifying their requirements and where they are coming from. We then propose a solution that most of the time exceeds their expectations. We have a great start. Then we start the journey of execution.

This is where we make a few mistakes. To be honest, our QA function can improve heaps. Not having a dedicated QA is also one of the reason. But generally our team is overbooked. And this leaves very little time for testing. We have to make progress on many projects on any given day. And personally I am responsible to review each developers work prior to them going through to the customers and I have not been doing a proper job of it.

Sop now we have made a decision that all of that is going to change. We are going to make time to do a proper job. With the team growing in size this will result in a decrease for the workload for each developer.

Secondly, we are not going to take up any new projects for a couple of months. We are going to solely concentrate on the current projects. we are going to tie the loose ends and make them proper. Now that should make our customers happy.

What’s the Career Path for Ambitious Freelancers?

I read the above article on the freelanceswitch blog. This is a topic I had touched upon earlier. I figured I would link to that article and write my comment in this blog. It made sense to visit this topic again as I have made some significant progress on the path I had mentioned in my last post.

I have made progress in setting up my own company now. With two full time employees aboard and going up to four full time employees by the beginning of next month, it has been an amazing year for the business. Having a team naturally means the capacity of what we can do is now far greater than what I was able to do as a freelancer.

My initial thought was to staff the company with freelancers. But, unlike in the US, freelancers are a rare breed in Sri Lanka. And it seems that it is next to impossible to attract freelancers to a job here. Everyone wants a "job", not a "gig". But I can totally relate to that as I went through the same growing pains period.

Then, with the not so great experience of working with a bunch of freelancers from eastern Europe, trying to work though three timezones and dealing with people who claimed "excellent English Communication skills" but never ever came on Skype for a voice chat and instead insisted that all communication should be through text chat, I came to the realization, that if I wanted to be more than my individual capacity for the clients, there is no other way but to recruit people on a full time basis.

SO we bag our recruitment drive. It has not been easy finding the right candidates. I have recorded my thoughts here, here and here. Persistence paid off and now we are on the verge of becoming a 4 (5 including me) person team and have come to the point where we have out grown our original dig.

Pretty soon we will be moving to a office which will enable us more leg space and would allow us to get more people as the need arises. Personally for me, this would also mark a significant change as this would mean that I am moving back to an office environment and somewhat of standard hours from my current work from home arrangement. I plan on discussing this in detail in a future blog post.

So now even this blog will naturally change focus from the ranting of a freelancer to a ranting of a journey of running a company.