Family business in the field of IT. My three golden rules

Foreword

Remember my previous article ? In it, I talked about how my husband and I started our own business. More precisely, my husband founded, and I later joined him.

What we were doing then is very difficult to call a business. It was rather a pair work. We never agreed: you do it, and I do it. Separation of duties was formed by itself.
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You ask: "Who is in your team chief?". Let's just say, we both perfectly understand who is in charge. But we are not discussing this out loud, because one of us may be offended, and the second will think too much of himself ...

Of course I am joking. All decisions are made together. I will not lie that we always think the same way and never disagree. However, we learned to listen and understand each other. Learned to negotiate. I think this is important for any business partners, whether you are family or not.

Time to move on

In fact, what's the difference who is in charge, if there is no one to command? We were stuck on the stage of family freelancing, we had to move on. It's time to expand the team.

Then we realized that there was no point in chasing two hares and decided to completely abandon IT outsourcing. Now I can say with confidence that this decision was the right one.

And then we made one very serious mistake, which I want to tell you. The realization that we did everything wrong came about a year later. In order not to step on this rake again, I formulated the first golden rule for myself and now, when making important decisions, I always remember: “money should not be idle”.

From the previous article, you know that I did not come into the business alone. I brought some small capital with me.

What was to be done?
To invest money. That is, hire a designer, programmer and manager. Debug work. A little later, take a specialist in website promotion. This would speed up the process and freelance would grow into a business much faster.

What did we do?
We are a coward. After all, hiring employees is a very, very big responsibility. And what if there are no customers, and employees will have nothing to pay salary? Therefore, you first need to ensure the flow of customers. We decided to take the risk, but not much: the first thing we did was hired a sales manager.

The decision seemed logical. However, we did not see an obvious problem. Who will execute orders when we adjust the flow of customers? If there is no command, then we are again. That is, it is necessary to plow even more. And this means that we simply won't have time to assemble a team and debug work.

We were afraid there would be no customers. In fact, it is even funny, because after a while, there were too many customers and we simply could not take new orders.

Another customer? Yes, how much can you ?!

In general, we fell into the trap that we prepared ourselves. Valera, our manager, phoned potential clients (yes, those hellish cold calls) and made an appointment. The meeting most often we went with him together, Sasha at this time was developing another site.

After the meeting, my husband and I discussed the information received from the client and thought through the concept of the site. Then I designed this concept in the form of a presentation for a client, and most often at the second meeting we entered into an agreement. To be honest, we made good sites. They approached their work very responsibly, so a second, powerful channel for attracting clients soon came up - word of mouth.

Then the minimum cost of developing our site was 25,000 rubles. (end of 2011). For this money, the client received a good corporate website with a paid domain and hosting for 1 year. Development of additional modules was paid separately. For example, a product catalog or filter, or sorting, or 3D visualization. Of course, we negotiated the cost at the time of the conclusion of the contract and during the development process it did not change.

In doing so, we suffered some kind of mania to do cool. Each site had its own chip, often not even noticeable to customers. For example, for the corporate site of the management company, we made an adaptive layout. Then almost no one did such sites, and we really wanted to implement it. I think the client still does not know that his site has been adapted for mobile devices. And we added a new chip to our portfolio and subsequently sold more responsive websites.

Work has become a kind of endless running in a vicious circle. We worked, worked, worked. Do you know what is most interesting? We practically did not earn.

In a month there were a maximum of 3 new customers. Prepayment was 30%. Salary Manager 15 thousand. Rub. + 10% of the contract amount.

So consider: 3 clients, an average of 30 thousand rubles. With an advance payment of 30%, we get 27 thousand rubles. Once a month we handed over some regular site and received postpay. In general, the monthly income did not exceed 50 thousand rubles. At the same time, we paid the salary to the manager (15,000 + 90,0000.1 = 24,000), rent, taxes. The so-called profit was no more than 20 thousand rubles, and still it was necessary to eat something and feed the cat.

One evening we looked at the truth and made 4 important decisions .

1. Raise prices by 2 times and change the payment scheme. Now the minimum cost of developing the site will be 50 000 rubles, while the client makes a prepayment of 50%.
2. Change the scheme of work with the manager. Salary of 15 thousand + 10% from each contract, while interest is charged if the total amount of contracts exceeds 100 thousand rubles.
   Those. now, having found 3 clients, the manager received 30 thousand rubles, instead of 24. And if he found only one - 15 thousand, instead of 18.
3. We form a team: we hire a programmer and a designer.
4. We develop the direction of SEO.

Another lesson learned

After the increase in value, the number of customers has not changed. Their quality has changed. Now we did not have to explain to customers why they need a website. We explained how to make a website make a profit. Customers immediately realized that the site needed to be promoted and we usually concluded 2 contracts: for development and promotion.

But this does not mean that it was easier to work with such clients. Working with people is always difficult. In fact, we met the ideal client only once. But it's not about him, but about one mistake, which every entrepreneur is simply obliged to make at least once.

Everyone knows that it is impossible to work without prepayment? And we always knew it. In general, only complete idiots work without prepayment ...

But what would you do if you were approached by a representative of a large, Russian-scale company. Say, Sberbank. He invites you to a meeting and explains that in a week the high authorities come and they need to prepare just an awesome presentation on the development of the banking network in the region.

You quickly estimate your strength, estimate the amount of work, make a markup for speed and voice the amount of 70 thousand rubles. Bank representatives affirmatively nod and tomorrow you agree to conclude an agreement.

In general, some advantages. Firstly, 70,000 per presentation is very good. Secondly, this is Sberbank. Who doesn't want to have such a client in a portfolio?

In fact, I no longer want. After that incident. In general, we brought the contract for the second meeting, he was sent to the accounting department for signature. And we were very, very much asked to start working today, as there is very little time left. A contract today will be signed and tomorrow will come prepayment.

When you hear the words “make urgent” from the client and “pay tomorrow,” you should think about it. Who needs urgent: you or him? If he, then let him urgently and pay.

Under the terms of the "contract" presentation should have included a small animation. All night we worked through the structure of the presentation and made this animation. The next day, sleepy and tortured showed the result of the work. The representative of Sberbank “forgot to take the meeting” signed an agreement, but according to him, the money “has already been transferred, just so far apparently has not reached.” We received comments and corrections on the presentation and went to work.

Slept a couple of hours and again for the cause. After all, tomorrow it was necessary to show the result and adjust further actions. The next night, sleep again failed. And in the morning an hour before the scheduled meeting, a representative of Sberbank called us and said that they nevertheless decided that they would cope with the presentation on their own, but thanked us for their help. To the question: “And money?” The answer was received: “But you have not done anything yet.”

Actually, thanks for calling. Because, first of all, instead of going to a meeting, it was possible to fall asleep. And secondly, if they hadn’t called, we’d probably have three nights working like idiots, until it came to us that no one would pay us for it.

In general, we spent only two sleepless nights to learn the law still derived by Ilf and Petrov: "In the morning money is in the evening chairs."

Tired of reading? Be patient a little more. I really want to end on a positive note.

The third golden rule

Remember your first job on a full schedule? This feeling of incredible loading? Some kind of subconscious waiting for the holidays and disappointment, because the holidays ended with the graduation from the university. And this feeling of confusion, because in the university there was so much free time. And now you do not have time for anything.

So, resigning from work and becoming an entrepreneur, I experienced this feeling again. I realized that before I had just a bunch of free time. This is taking into account that at the previous place of work I rarely left before 8 in the evening (working from 9 in the morning).

Now work just took all my free time. My husband and I worked during the day, at night, on weekends. Sometimes they fell asleep right in the office, as there was no strength to get home.

Parents and relatives worried and asked not to scoff at themselves. Friends are tired of hearing from us “let's do it another time, a lot of work” and stopped calling. And we could not stop. We tightened to the full.

Once I talked to a client and she told me that she and her husband worked for 2 years like an institution, not giving themselves the opportunity to rest. And then my husband had a stroke. Stroke at 30! And then I understood where we were going, and that I don’t want to repeat the story of my clients.

I remember, I remember that I promised a positive. So, it was by the end of 2012. After that conversation with the client, my husband and I decided to take a vacation, left to travel for 10 days and completely disconnected from work. Returned fresh and rested. During the New Year holidays, we revised our business structure and our new ideas allowed us to move to a new office next year, increase our profits fivefold and earn our first million.

This has become another of my golden rules. Regardless of workload, we ourselves rest at least 2 times a year and make colleagues relax.

What's next?

I plan to publish the following article in 2 weeks and will tell you in it:

• how everything collapsed, but we already knew what to do;
• what changes in the business structure made it possible to increase profits by 5 times;
• why some orders are beneficial to refuse.

To be continued ...

PS read the sequel:
Family business in the field of IT. Time making money
Family business in the field of IT. How we launched our first service
Family business in the field of IT. The first six months of our startup life
Family business in IT. How we put together a team