Hiring is easy on paper. I am usually really good at hiring but this year I selected an employee that wasn’t right for our team. In retrospect I knew he wasn’t right after a few days of working with him but I had deadlines around the corner and no other candidates on the radar. After a month of deadline chasing it was crystal clear it wasn’t going to work—he knew it, I knew it and the rest of the employees knew it.  I compounded an already bad problem by keeping him on a project because of an impending deadline. Nothing makes a potential employee watch You Tube all day quicker than the combination of being paid hourly and knowing you aren’t getting hired FT. This mistake on my part led to: two late/micromanaged projects and  lots of do-over’s.

Scope Management involves more than saying, “that’s going to cost you extra.” I want our company to do great work. I want us to work on projects that allow our employees to shine and leave our clients thrilled. But the reality is when you are starting out you:

a. Need to build up your reputation and pay your bills

Which leads to…

b. Going above and beyond

And…

c. Sometimes doing too much out of scope work.

Scope definition at the outset of a project is usually clear if you did your homework. Scope-creep near the end of projects is the silent resource/profit killer that isn’t always as obvious. I said yes to out of scope work on a number of projects this year that neither made the client happy, saved time or made the project better.

A few times this year I let my frustrations become visible to clients and employees. When I give 100% and my 100% isn’t good enough I get flustered. When I should have given 100% but was pulled in too many directions I get frustrated—see the difference. There were a few meetings I was on where clients changed their mind, or vendors came unprepared, and my tone went to absolute shite. Passion may beget perfection. But unburnt bridges beget friendlier drivers. Ya know?

Not committing enough time to marketing and handshaking. I wear many hats at Eat Media, such is the life of a business owner and such is the life of business in its 2^nd year.  There are long-nights, business lunches, fires to douse, servers to reboot, proposals to re-do and credit card machine salesman to say “Please take me off your list,” to. During the past year I have been in one of two places—my desk and the whiteboard wall—good for work, bad for the sales pipeline. Face-to-face marketing and handshaking are absolutely necessary and I did not do a great job of being out there in 2009. I relied too much on our blog and Twitter and not enough on meeting people and creating relationships in person.

Not sticking to my strengths. Creative/CS and big picture strategy are my strengths. Content Strategy forces you to make many disparate pieces fit together and that jazzes me.  Unfortunately great Content Strategy takes time and time management can be a start-up’s worst enemy. You need to have laser like focus but be able to drop and roll for a fire at any moment. Once you have the fire under control you need to hand off the hose. I spent too many nights in 2009 editing XML, making love to Photoshop and making sitemaps.

Growth requires honesty. What were your 2009 mistakes?

—Ian

@eatmedia

The entire Eat Media team is happy and humbled by this. Being recognized as “good people” is about as good as good gets. Thanks Joey.

Here is Gary Vaynerchuk’s call for “good people” on Good People Day
—Ian

Ian and I had lunch yesterday with our wicked smart “virtual CFO,” Joey Brannon. Since Eat Media’s inception, Joey, who owns Axiom CPA, has been our right hand financial man. We tell him our goals, he helps us make the right choices and he isn’t afraid to hold our feet to the fire. (Plus he draws right on his window, which is super cool and keeps us creative types engaged as he talks about FUTA and SUTA.)

Some of the many lessons I’ve learned from working with Joey:
-    Write out an org chart for where you expect to be in the next year.
-    Rent an office space large enough to accommodate this org chart.
-    Keep a minimum of three months operating costs in a separate bank account.
-    When interviewing potential employees, look for those who ask “vision questions” rather than “how much” questions.
-    Speaking of employees, most of the time, young and hungry trumps experienced and set-in-their-ways.
-    Keep a running spreadsheet of your projected sales, labor costs and monthly operating expenses. Organize it by month. At the end of each quarter, plug in your actuals, and adjust your budgeting accordingly.
- It might take an hour to write out a process for an action that could take you five minutes to complete. But that hour you spend documenting a process will be your LAST hour working on the task (vs. a lifetime of five minutes).

Yesterday, Joey told us about a few things he’s been doing at his own business—things we hope to do someday soon:
-    Time blocking: Schedule one day (or one morning) a week to work on your business.
-    If, as a business owner, you’re not taking at least as much vacation time as you’d get working for someone else, it’s time to re-evaluate.
-    Even better, decide how many vacation days you want to take this year, and block off the time. If your time is billable, figure out how much you need to increase your billable hours each week to make up for your time out of the office.
-    Make updating operations manuals part of your employee’s jobs. This applies to everything from documenting their daily processes to keeping their job descriptions up to date.

For a goldmine of more small business tips, check out Joey’s blog.

—Britta