Tweet

Advice for Web Startups: Web Startup Kings Do It Thus

Written by: Mark Brimm

Article Overview: Why hoarding or micro-managing the business tasks is not a good idea for a solo web entrepreneur.

Advice for Web Startups: Web Startup Kings Do It Thus

You've seen the wheeler-dealer big-shots calling the dance from their cell phones, telling underlings what to do, when and how to do it, but when you get to your own desk, you end up thinking "Now I could probably keep more of my own money if I could just figure out how to do this myself..."

Introducing: the Blackberry 8800. No this is not a commercial for RIM, though I might be willing to do one some day, based on my experience thus far. It is, instead, a call to reasonable connectivity. If you could post a project on Elance and find the ultimate freelancer to do what you know you can't, forward a copy of the completed email project negotiations to your virtual secretary and have her oversee the new project, and then order movie tickets in time to follow up the dinner you are about to have with your wife or significant other, wouldn't you live that way all the time?

It's called delegating authority to trusted employees, and it's what makes a startup go corporate in months instead of decades. So why aren't you doing it? The answer may be because you're still focused primarily on trying to save money. Who isn't? Answer: Startup Kings aren’t. "But what about Warren Buffet" you say, and to that I will counter, let me see a Warren Buffet do that today. He'd get eaten alive in the dot com world.

Startup Kings eat what they want, pour that glass of wine and curl up with a good book at night after the misses has turned out the bed light. Well I do. They take trips to foreign countries and do things they've always wanted to. Okay again that's me. They make something big out of whatever they have at hand--because they understood at the outset that to do business well, one must delegate menial tasks and focus on the big picture and keep the focus clear. In short, they manage...they don't micro-manage, and they don't pinch every available penny. Your credit card is your best business partner. It doesn't say no, it just says how much this time?

Why am I going on about management style? Because this is what holds most new startups back. Lack of the ability to delegate and then simply let go. Let's say I had this client. And his name was Don. Don likes the idea of residual income streams, but he is rather tight fisted with his capital. Now, Don has worked for big companies in little rooms. He knows how things work, but in his mind, he's not a big fish just yet, so why should he act like one? He'll just end up spending his lunch money, right?

Every year, more startups go under and die forever, along with any hope of that residual income dream, because of timidity, not spending freely on neccessary expenditures and thus putting the business growth curve on hold. Many of the top billionaires today, like Donald Trump, for instance, made a fortune by being eager to play the game, lost it all just as flamboyantly (some more than once) and made it all back in spades. How were they able to do it? They used what they had a background in ruthlessly, boldly, courageously, and didn't spare the expense to build the business step by step, at accelerated pace. In short, they delegated. Taste or business sense has less to do with it than available capital and courageousness.

With 100 bucks, you can hire a smart little web marketing boutique agency consultant to select and register and host a domain for you and set up some starter content and AdSense ads based on your site's topic. It would help tremendously, of course, if that agency is fully grounded in SEO. For another hundred you can get them to package your brilliant new article into a downloadable PDF and set up PayPal as the ad-hoc merchant. With one more Franklin, you can get an email list compiled from a guy on Enlace and start your own Constant Contact monthly email campaign, to locate buyers for this and future such articles. And for another $150 a month, you can hire that same Elance guy to run it each month and refine and add to the list, as well as writing the email content.

Now your site on auto repair or gourmet baking or whatever it is you know about is developing a real audience and generating a few sales. You've set up your business. The next time you want to do a site, you can go to the same network and ask for repeat performances. The first site cost you just $500 to start. Say that you just invest another $150-200 per month to have your site maintained and expanded and improved each month and the email list expanded and refined.

At a certain point, perhaps 6 months in, you’re making enough income back from the site to devote another $250 monthly just to Search Engine Optimization and $250 for a content writer to write new articles and dream up ways to use the newsletter to monetize them. Say, a free newsletter that sells a goldmine newsletter that costs top dollar, or whatever makes the most business sense for the niche you’re working in. Now you’re spending $700/mo and making $250/mo, $350/mo, and eventually $1000/mo. You’re not doing anything, remember. You set this up a long time ago by now and it’s still chugging along. All you have to do is review the work 1 day a month, bark softly to a few people and the system runs itself.

This is the model that most thriving smaller corporations actually use, and so should you. You’re what they call the CEO. So act like one! Call the shots, make things happen. The consultants you hire along the way will improve based upon your commitment to supporting their businesses. Your business will improve as a result of this also, naturally. And eventually, you’ll expand your team to include all sorts of people who can help you to make WAY more money than you’re actually putting in. At the critical stage, you’re going to take a big leap and invest big, and get the big returns, because you are (most likely) smart enough to know what to do and when by this time.

I myself am such an entrepreneur who started my business by consulting on various/multiple--even ALL--of the above mentioned types of website tasks and marketing duties for other entrepreneurs. I literally get paid to help people to make their businesses grow, and my primary meta-lesson for my startup consulting clients is the number one lesson I myself had to learn: learn to let go and let others be responsible for your business tasks that you are too busy to do yourself. If it's worth doing, you can probably make it happen from a smart phone. Blackberry. It's the business tool of champions.

Outsource all tasks that you can to people within your own country, someone who will be on the same page when it comes to your preferred business protocol (don't be fooled, the myth of offshoring is just that, there are people in your home country or even your home state who will do it cheaply enough and WAY better in terms of appropriate deliverables and clarity of communication). Just delegate it to atomized people with no connection to each other--or to one web marketing (SEO-expert) agency who will stay on budget, but make it someone you can call Monday through Friday. You’ll live longer, go grey much later, and have much more fun spending money and time the way dreamed about when you worked for someone else--with the looming threat of recession and bubbles always overhead. And if you think life is cool and meaningful without Web Startup King Cool working for you, wait till you see how it works WITH it.

Related Articles
  Five Steps to Startup Success
  A Five Point Strategy for Job Creation
  What’s so difficult about building a successful startup?
  It\'s good to be king
  Four Stages of Startup Development

Article Tags: business tasks, web entrepreneur, web startup, web startups



Related Forum Posts
Re: 10 Reasons Who Startups Fail & Book Recommendations - Great post,but please edit the headline. I presume it is "10 Reasons Why Startups Fail & Book Recommendation
Interview Questions - Hi Shri, I have a series of interviews with fast growing entrepreneurs on my website for startup entrepreneurs. It's called If I Were A Startup... I ask each entrepreneur 4 questions: 1) How did the company get started? 2) What advice do you have for new startup entrepreneurs? 3) What mistakes did you make that you would advice others to avoid? 4) If you were starting a new business in a different industry what would it be? These 4 questions tend to generate a lot of discussion and from their responses I'll ask more probing questions. Hope this helps!
Meet Kim Kleeman - Shakespeare Squared: Named one of Inc.'s - THIS IS PRETTY INTERESTING. WISH I'D THOUGHT OF IT FIRST!!!! Meet Kim Kleeman: Shakespeare Squared: Named one of Inc.'s 500 Fastest Growing Private Companies in America. Recognized as one of Working Mother magazine's 25 Best Small Companies. Awarded the title of Illinois Family Business of the Year. Lofty accomplishments for company founder Kim Kleeman, a woman who just a few short years ago swore she would never own her own business! Having grown up the child of business-owner parents, Kleeman knew well the stresses and demands that entrepreneurial life can place upon a family. She met her husband, Jay, on the first day of college, and together they earned their teaching degrees and started making plans for a modest but happy life. When Jay's stint as a student teacher strained the family budget, though, they both started doing subcontract work proofing elementary school textbooks. Before long, they were taking on bigger jobs and hiring other teachers to freelance on various projects, and from that point on, they never looked back. In 2003, the couple founded Shakespeare Squared, an educational development company that employs an army of freelancers to write and edit materials such as textbooks, lesson plans, teacher guides, activity workbooks, and test-preparation materials. Initially a home-based business managed by Kim while Jay continued his work as a high school teacher, the company now has a full-time staff of 20 and is branching out in new directions, publishing its own materials and offering an educational editing certification process. In three years' time, the company has grown by an incredible 815 percent, bringing in $2.3 million in revenue last year. What we learned from Kim: That the most incredible resource for launching might very well be your own friends and family. Kim started this business with her husband; her best friend since high school is her director of human resources; her sister is a remote project coordinator; her lawyer brother weighs in on various matters; her mom is a managing editor; and her parents are her de facto advisory board, with whom she meets every morning to share a cup of tea and conversation in their backyard. Words of Wisdom "Trust your instincts and empower your people." From Teacher to Tycoon "I don't know if I had a big 'aha' moment about starting a business; our growth was really organic. After my second child I immediately got pregnant with my third and there was no turning back, because we weren't going to be able to afford day care for two babies on two teachers' salaries. I had been working from home and continuously had one or two projects going, and I set a goal of having 10 projects running simultaneously. So after my son was born, I enacted my own guerilla marketing plan and e-mailed every editorial director at the big publishing companies, looking for projects. We soon landed our first big client, HarperCollins Children's Books." Not About the Money "I just wanted to make the best company that I could and be happy doing it. If that included millions of dollars, great, but that wasn't really the goal. I didn't know at first how much work we would end up getting, but I think the extensive classroom experience of our people sets us apart in this field. As teachers ourselves, we understand the needs of our clients and we deliver on that." It Takes a Village "We employ over 400 freelance writers. Most are former teachers but we pull from publishing, journalism, and other fields as well. We developed a writing test that covers everything from copyrighting to educational taboos, and prospective freelancers must earn at least a B+. A nice plus with our business is the opportunity we can offer teachers for life beyond teaching. I really promote teachers in the classroom, but if the classroom just isn't your thing and you're still passionate about education, there is a place for you here." Those Who Can, Teach "Educators in this country are getting a bad rap. We ask them to perform many roles and yet we're not supporting them as a society. Prospective teachers must student teach to become certified and are expected to not work while doing so, but there are so many people from diverse backgrounds who would love to teach-and who would be great teachers-who can't afford to do that. The Shakespeare Squared Foundation helps pay for prospective teachers to student teach. My passion is to get the right teachers in place, because that makes all the difference for students." The Best and the Brightest "It is definitely a challenge to find and retain the best talent, because I am up against large publishers. I have to provide a different culture and be creative in the way I offer benefits. We really believe in the work/life balance and offer such things as flex hours, remote work capabilities, and a working-parents room in the office. We've been recognized for these efforts, and because of them, our turnover is very low." Networking 101 "You have to go into a networking situation with the idea in mind that there will be one person in the crowd who can make a difference to you, and you have to find that person. You may be talking to someone who makes shoelaces and has nothing in common with your business, but she may know someone in your field or know about an interesting business practice that could translate to your own. But the bottom line is that if it's not the right conversation, you politely cut it short and move on." Strength in Numbers "There is so much value in the process of incubating an idea with other women. I am always looking for women who are coming together creatively and collaboratively because things flow from it that you would never dream. When women support other women, we empower each other to take charge of our lives, whether by owning our own businesses or making a career change or making decisions about our families." Best Advice "I read in Working Mother magazine that women CEOs need to take the ability that they have in their work life to delegate responsibility and create a management team and apply that to their home life as well. So I really try to think of running my household the same way I run my business; whether it's cleaning ladies or repairmen, I find people I trust and have them take care of tasks that I don't need to spend time on. This has relieved a lot of guilt and allowed me to focus on the things that are really important." Most Rewarding Moments "Winning the Working Mother award as one of the 25 Best Small Companies felt pretty great because it showed that having a unique workplace does pay off. But even better is realizing that your message is getting across to your people. I love seeing quotes at my team's desks about goals and achieving your dreams, all of the exact things I say to empower them. It's cool to realize that there isn't a lot of cynicism, and that people are really buying into these ideas and making them their own." Parting Thoughts ... "My secret weapon is the news articles that I send to my team." "I will retire when I have no more dreams to accomplish." "I will always think of myself as a teacher." "My greatest strength is my enthusiasm." This featured lady was profiled by Noelle Pechar Hale, a freelance writer living in Los Angeles.


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Tweet

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

Google Panda and Your Search Engine Rankings

The new marketing question. Will they follow?

Tips to Take Control of Credit Card Debt

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.