One Man Shops: How and When to Hire

How to Sell…. anything.

I’m writing this post as a response to something someone posted in a peer-group I’m a member of. I started to compose this as an email and decided halfway through to re-write it as a blog post and share it with you. Maybe you’ll find it of interest and maybe you won’t.

The topic is: How to sell as a computer service provider, managed service provider, etc.. how to sell IT services.

Who am I Talking To?

This isn’t for everyone. If you already have a sales and marketing plan that works, keep it! You’ve got your way and there’s no sense reinventing the wheel if you dont’ have to. If you alreayd have a sales force, I doubt this would work for you. There are different strategies to make multi-team sales work.. maybe that’s a blog post for another day.

The gentleman who first posited the question is a guy who owns a one-man IT company and who is considering hiring an outside salesperson to increase his sales and have a more prominent footplace in the market. He feels he cant compete without increasing his sales and he feels that he’s not successfully able to sell himself.

For those who can’t: My own .02 cents on the “I cant sell” mentality.

1. You’re probably right.
2. You have to get to where you can… 

I was lucky when I started my IT business. I have no formal education in sales, but I worked for two companies in the past that were completely 100% sales driven. You didn’t sell, you got fired. I’m not kidding! I walked into a sales meeting one day and was told we’re having a “Fire Sale!” Sweet, I thought. I bet there’s some cool prize for the top sales person! I wonder what I’ll get if I sell the most today? Nope! Wanna know what a fire sale is in the sales industry? The manager looked at us and said “Anyone who doesn’t make a sale today is fired!”

I needed work. I needed food. I learned to sell. It was really that easy… (easy is the wrong word. It was the most excruciating half year of my life!) What I should say is that once I understood the way to sell, it was easy. It just took me a LONG time to figure it out. Most people quit before they got as bad off as I was. I consider myself lucky that I had no alternatives at the time and HAD to make this job work. I was driving my mother’s car I’d bought from her, living in a 1 bedroom apartment I was three months behind on, and stayed home because I couldn’t afford to do much of anything. I was at the “getting creative with Ramen” stage of life.

Selling Managed Services

I’ve been all across the country to seminars and strategy sessions, vendor showcases, and seen everything the IT world has to offer. I’ve used every tool at my disposal, tried every product to compare them to my existing offerings, bought PSA software, spend hundreds of hours reviewing other’s methods, etc. I’ve noticed a few common threads from all these events and instructors.

1. If you already know how to sell, these tools are great. 
2. If you already have a sales staff, these methods and tools will improve them by 300-400 percent if you follow them. 
3. If you want to be the most-informed, best educated, most reliable IT guy around, these tools will help you get there. 
4. If you’re a one man shop with no budget, you should have stayed home because you can’t use what you learned here effectively. 

Let me quantify item number four a little better: I use some of the most amazing tools out there, tools that mystify the end-user when they see what we can do. These tools are expensive as hell! I pay per account for some of the best Microsoft Exchange email-hosting money can buy to offer to my clients. I pay monthly per user for the best backup solution money can buy for my users. I pay monthly for the PSA tool that helps me coordinate all this and remember who has to do what and when. I pay for membership in organizations that help me put those cool little initials behind my name in an email signature. I pay for the software that helps me invoice customers. I pay fees for taking their credit cards. I pay for computers I need to do my job. I pay for new toys I have to purchase, just so I can troubleshoot them when my clients buy them and need me to fix them. I pay for the insurances that help me from getting sued. I pay for insurance for giving bad advice. I pay and I pay and I pay… that’s the theme here. This stuff costs money!

If you’re a one-man operation and you come back from an IT conference and start signing up for every service you can because you just KNOW you can improve your bottom line, you’re fooling yourself. You dont’ believe me? Asky my twelve ex-employees, three ex-sales people, and most of the people who ever worked with me when I was learning what you’re haven’t learned yet. Having the best tools doesn’t do you a lick of good if you’ve got no one to sell them to, and you can’t sell based on how shiny your tools are.

So now what?

Ok, so I just told you that what all the successful people are doing is wrong? No! I’m telling you that you can’t run your one-man operation successfully the same way the owner of an ten-employee company runs his. The farther your are numerically separated from the point you’re comaring yourself against, the further you’re going to fall before you learn.

Absolutely all the managed services materials I’ve seen published or taught encourage you to push selling your value (why you’re better than the other guy), or using the right technology to get the job done (which makes you better than the other guy), decreasing your cost while increasing your margins (which means buying their product because it’s cheaper, better, etc). None of these things I’ve ever seen teach you how to SELL.. how to put your head where it needs to be to get a positive outcome.

I’ll give you what few pointers I can from my perspective.

Rule #1) Desperation stinks.. literally.

Potential clients can smell it coming off you like a rabid dog smells fear. They sense it in your body language, in the way you spend time justifying your proposals, etc. I learned this the hard way. I was in a sales job that I sucked at. I sucked for a solid month straight, and a month in a sales company is like dog-years.. it’s seven months of a regular job! I spent all my time and money sucking and sucking and sucking until I was fed up. I finally got to a client one day that I had to pitch that I KNEW in my mind wasn’t going to buy. There was no way in hell they’re buying anything! This client couldn’t afford what I was pushing and I knew it. So I gave up!

Yup. I walked into this client’s place, took one look around, eyed the potential customer up and down discreetly, and said to myself “Well Tommy, you just wasted 15 dollars in gas, an hour’s trip, and you’re about to be here another hour for nothing. Epic Fail!”

That was the best decision I’d ever made. I’d been hearing my mentor (and now long time friend) drill “Have fun and have confidence in your product” into our sales meetings for a month straight and so I fell back on that because I knew darned well I wasn’t going to accomplish anything anyway no matter how “hard” I tried to sell this lady. Instead, I launched into my demonstration of my product, goofed off, made her smile, made myself laugh, and didn’t try ONE SINGLE TIME to close a deal. In fact looking back I’m amazed I DID close the deal. She tried to cut me off at various times throughout the presentation of the material and I just didnt’ let her. She wanted to buy and I ignored her and just kept having a good time. I truly enjoyed myself. I showed her, with genuine enthusiasm because I was getting caught up in my own pitch now, how wonderful our product was, why it was trusted by others, and how great it was. My only thought with respect to sales was maybe this woman knew someone who COULD use my offering and would think to pass on my name in the future.

Two things I want you to take away from that parable. First, if a client is ready to buy, you aren’t done unless youv’e showed them EVERYTHING you have to offer. You’re not going to get a second chance later to make your first impression, so you’d better get it all out of the way right up front. If I had stopped right when she asked me to, I actually would have sold her, but I’d only have made about two-hundred dollars. Instead I continued my presentation and walked out of there with a nine-hundred dollar commission!

Second; the moment you stop selling a product and sell confidence instead, your entire body language changes. I knew I sucked at selling, but I also knew that it truly was a great product. Even though I had no confidence in my skill, I had plenty in the product. That came through to the customer. The difference in why I made that sale and why I’d flopped on the previous thirty presentations was immediate. (Yeah, my closing ratio was 30 and ZERO at the time!)

Rule #2) Get out of your own way!

If you don’t know me in person or haven’t ever spoken to me on the phone, you most likely dont know I stutter, sometimes horribly! Can you imagine a stuttering, broke, sales rep trying to sell you something? I took this job simply because I needed work at the time. I was mortified at the prospect of being a sales representative. The moment I walked into a place of business I got so nervous I literally couldn’t spit out a greeting with out stammering through it. (Note: They shouldn’t make the name of a condition that affects the ability to pronunce hard consonants contain three of them. Know one of the hardest words for a stutter-er to say? “Stutter!” That’s st-st-st-stupid!)

My point here is that in order to sell effectively you need to get over yourself, over your foibles, over your own failings, and get out of your way. ENJOY YOURSELF! If you don’t really enjoy your job, and especially the IT field, then you shouldn’t be in it. There should be hundreds of things you can offer a client that get you excited about the prospect.

Rule #3) Fake it until you make it!

I’m not sure who coined that phrase originally, but it’s one of those thing Bill Stovall (the aforementioned mentor/friend) said in a training class early on, but it applies to all types of sales. My suggestion is to become an actor. Stop laughing an pay attention. I mean it. It works. What’s the last thing you do before you get out of your car at a prospective client’s site? Most of us gather our sales materials, check to make sure there’s no residue of the value meal we just ate on our face, check our shirt and tie, and then we sigh inwardly and say a prayer that we can close this deal. Any of that sound like you?

The “fake it until you make it” idea really applies to yourself, but especially applies to training new salespeople. As part of my job as a manager (yes I actually got promoted) we had to train all the new sales people. They were ours, like it or not, and they failed or succeeded based on how good we were at our job. If I failed to train this guy I’m working with properly, he’s going to be as unable to feed his family just like I was only a few short months before.

If you’re a one-man computer shop, this trick REALLY might make help you succeed if you cant seem to master number two above on your own. It did for me. I KNEW I was a mediocre salesperson but that with enough diligence I could pay the bills. The guy who’s riding with me that day didn’t know that. He only knew “Cool, I’m out with the boss. He can sell anything! He’ll make me a lot of money today and I’ll learn how to sell on my own!” Again, I was nervous like you can’t imagine but there’s no way in hell I can let this new guy know that! He’ll have no confidence in him or me either one and this presentation will be a total bust for both of us!

From the moment he got in the car with me I was a whole different person. I didn’t have any great success stories to tell him. Well, ok I had one, but I’d already told that one. So I made some up. I told him stories about successes from others like they were mine. I was acting. Tommy stuttering sales manager walked out of the office with his trainee, but the moment I opened the door of the car and got in, I was John-freaking-Wayne; the most successful young entrepreneur in the west. I can sell ice to frost-bitten eskimos, sand castles in the desert, and no one beat my sales numbers. “Cmon kid. I’ll show you how it’s done.” (It should be noted that I got to the point I kept my Stetson cowboy hat in the back seat and I routinely wore cowboy boots to work when my co-workers were in slacks and ties. Hell yeah I can sell in boots and a hat… all day long baby! It became part of the act.. I was faking it.

When I got out of the truck at the site (Yeah I’d upgraded to a new SUV at the time thanks to my success thus far) it was a whole different character who greeted the prospective customer. My stutter didn’t go away in the least, but I didnt’ care. So what if I’m the stuttering six-foot-three cowboy? I’m the best in the west (I live in the east) and no one here at this site knew the difference anyway! (I actually had a guy stop me one time and ask me if I knew I stuttered? I looked at him for a moment.. my act shattered.. and then responded with “No, sir. I think your ears just flap” and jumped back into character. (He bought that day.)

I’m not saying you need to take it that far, but you need to get out of your comfort zone. My comfort zone was being a stuttering sales-rep that had no confidence. When I walked into a client’s place of business, my character was that of a smiling, successful representative who knew his product through and through and who was absolutely 100% confident that my company could handle his business! They bought the act, and then the product. I didn’t try to sell the product. I simply demonstrated our values, how we would handle his probems and make them go away, and sold him on the fact that this cowboy was as good as his word. Nowhere in there did I justify myself, get defensive about why others are better, or let him lead the presentation.

Rule #4) Know when to hold ‘em, know when to hire ‘em. (and in what order)

Ok, so maybe my cowboy persona got the best of me in that particular title, but read on anyway. There are hundreds of metrics and formulas for you as a one-man company that will tell you when to hire a sales rep and more technicians, how much you need in the bank before considering this, what your volume needs to be first, etc. They’re not all “bull” but they’re not all for you either. One guy told someone in the email thread I saw that prompted this posting that you need to have six months worth of a potential sales representatives salary on hand, liquid, before you can consider hiring someone for sales. Well hell, if I had twenty-five thousand dollars lying around in cash, I don’t need a sales rep. I need an investment banker!

His premise is 100% correct according to most financial calculations with companies that have multiple sales reps, but there is no way you’re going to sit back and bank that much as a one-man operation, not for that purpose anyway.

The best common-sense math I can offer:

As a one-man operation the day you need to hire a new sales rep is the day you are losing sales because you’ve got too much work already. If you’ve got free time and you’re broke then you don’t need a salesperson. You need an attitude adjustment and you need to get your butt out there in the field and sell. Now you might think you should hire a technician instead at this point, but then you’d be wrong, and we’re not trying to focus on the wrong way to do things.

Why that is wrong:

Think about it logically for a minute: You’ve got enough work between sales and support that you’re busy 100% of the available work week, whether it be 40 hours, 70 hours, or somewhere in-between. If you hire a technician you’re making two assumptions.

1. You’re ok with giving up half your productive income-generating work to another guy you have to pay, so you’re cutting your own income. 
2. You’re stating with absolute fact that you can sell enough with your additional free time to to make both your paycheck and his. 
3. 2b) (only applicable in a fantasy world) You’re thinking that if you BOTH go out and sell, then you’ll all make more money. Bull! 

Almost without exception, technicians make crappy salespersons. If they were able to sell AND provide support then they would already be doing it on their own, wouldn’t they? And for you to expect them to do both is just going to ruin your working relationship with them as well as your financial status, which is already probably shaky to begin with at this stage of your business.

If you hire a salesperson first: I’m going to toss some hourly numbers here to make the math easy.

You spend 20 hours per week making money (actually doing billable stuff)

You spend 20 hours per week selling or trying to.

You spend 5 to 10 hours per week on all the administrative crap you have do deal with; quickbooks, banking, taxes, emails, paperwork, etc.

Hiring a salesperson frees up 20 hours of your week. Their goal is to, first, make up that 20 hours by booking you 20 more hours of billable work. If they can do that much, they are at least an asset worth keeping because they’ve got you working productively 40 hours per week. After all you’ll be billing out twice as much as you were and you can assume that not all 100% of that additional income will be paid to them. You’re making more money and spending the same amount of time each week working. Nothing wrong with that.

Shortly after that your sales rep needs to get to where they can book another 20 hours of work per week. They’re naturally going to improve their closing ratio as they work for you, and you’re going to get a groove going together that should make this possible.

Wait.. what? You want a salesperson to book me ANOTHER 20 hours of work per week? Now I’ve got to work 60 hours per week on billable time?

1. Stop your complaining. Only a few paragraphs earlier you were only had 20 hours of billable labor per week. Now its tripled! Most people would be thrilled! 
2. You actually NEED this.

 NOW HIRE YOUR TECHNICIAN!

You’ve got so much work coming in that all your bills are paid and both you and your sales rep are successfully making money. Now is the time to hire the technician! Primarily because you can afford (both financially and with respect to time) to train them properly. You might go through two or three of them, but there are two good reasons to do it this way.

1. You can financially afford the learning curve while they learn how do do business your way, how to handle your customers, etc. You’ve got enough work that you can even make them shadow you for a week straight. No time spent sitting around the office or home-office learning bad habits they’ll have to break later. Take them with you. Watch them work. Nothing ruins a new hire like not having enough work to keep them busy. You can bet dollars to donuts that they’re spending all that additional free time looking for a job that can provide them more work or else they’re taking work on the side to supplement their income, which means they’re competing with you. 
2. Supposing they are the right fit for you, now you can cut your work in half again. You go back to spending 30 hours of billable time per week. They spend 30 hours of billable time per week. You spend the other 10 doing administrative crap and free up some time to live your life, see friends and family, and enjoy being successful for a chance. You also get the additional income of having someone else billing out 30 hours of work per week! 

If you can do that successfully, my advice is to stop!

Can you go on and build that managed services empire you dreamed of? Can you be the next state-wide chain of computer stores? Probably not. Some make it, but unless you’re in that top 1 tenth of 1 percent you’ll just be back to a one man shop again in three years when you fall flat on your tail. The strategies to make a larger company successful aren’t the same as a small company. Once you get beyond two or three employees you lose the ability to have your finger on the pulse of your customers and your market. Every employess has headaches associated with them. The administrative paperwork gets to be more and more. More employees means more points of possible friction between personalities. More employees means more office space, more overhead costs, etc. Find your golden number and be successful and happy at the same time.

KNOW YOUR NUMBERS:

As you graduate from chief-cook and bottle-washer to CEO of your business it becomes critically important to know your numbers and to always work on improving them.

The old adage in sales is “1 in 4.” That means it takes four calls to get one person to let you meet with them. It takes four meetings to get a client. It takes four clients to get one who doesn’t hassle over the bill. It takes four of those to get one that pays on time consistently. The math goes on and on. The most important thing you can do is know your own numbers and to do that you have to track them. Use excel, a notebook, or a PSA tool, though my opinion on the latter is that you spend more time updating it than you do actually talking to people.

When I started out my numbers were 1 in 10 for calls and 1 in 30 for sales.

10 called = 1 appointment.

30 appointments = 1 sale.

This means it took me 300 calls to make one sale it might be as low as $50 on a sale.

Do the math and you’ll discover that each phone call I made to a prospect was only worth about sixteen cents! It takes a LOT of calls at that rate to be successful!

I learned a few other things through practice that apply specifically to managed services and computer work, that don’t apply to my old sales job.

If they call from my website, I can close about 1 in 3 on the first call.

If they call out of the phone book, I can close about 1 in 5, but only because of what I call “ghetto-calls.”

What’s a ghetto call?

You’ve probably heard the person who calls who never offers to give their name, but instead just starts with “Hey, do you guys fix computers? Really? How much you charge? Oh. Umm, ok I’ll call you back.” That’a a ghetto call. You knew as soon as you answered the phone they arent buying. They don’t care who you are, whether you accept credit cards or not, where your office is, or what your service policies are. They’re just hoping you’ll say “Sure Jethro! I’ll fix your computer for ten dollars and you can pay me with Visa, Mastercard, Ramen, or Hot Pockets!”

I corrected this by getting contact information at the beginning of the call. I started getting the names and numbers of those who call after awhile and then I call them back a few days later. Most of the ones who didn’t call back didn’t find anyone to handle their problem because they can’t afford the fix or don’t want to pay the going rate. Fine, let them go and dont count them in your numbers.

What’s most important is the person-to-person closing ratio. If they call and I can get an appointment in person or a “site survey” where I meet with them on-site and spend the time to see their problem with my own eyes, my closing ratio is almost 100%.

Why this works for me: (not that it works for everyone)

If they take the time to meet with you at all, you know they are serious. Otherwise they wouldn’t take time out of their day for a stranger. That’s a good sign. I meet with them at the location they’re having the problem or in a conference room. I take notes on the meeting we’re having. People think you’re taking them more seriously if you’re taking notes. What they are saying is important enough for you to write it down. That shows you care about their problem. I try to ask pointed questions and most importantly I try to be sure I’m asking all I’ll need to know before I leave the meeting. It makes you look scatter-brained if you have to call them back later because you forgot an obvious question and impinges on your credibility.

Right now I’m still about 1 in 10 on phone calls, because I hate soliciting business. However my closing ratio is overall 75%. That means if I see ten appointments I’m guaranteed to sell eight of them. That’s almost 1 out of 1. I have great tools and I know how to use them forwards and backwards to deliver the best for my client. I’ve been doing this long enough to have stories that can relate to every type of prospective customer and I use them. I inform medical prospects how we’ve helped other medical companies like them and I do the same for other industries. I still sell in my Stetson from time to time, but now its no longer an act. It’s who I am. I’m a country guy who folks consistently under-appreciate on first glance and I love that. That way when you over-perform and surpass their expectations, they have no choice but to write your check with a smile on their face.

Find your own ratios and improve them through practice.

The Quote or Estimate as a Closing Tool

Important: I dont EVER give a quote on-site, ever ever ever!

Some people really want a quote on-site and I’ll usually offer to “spit-ball” a figure if I can’t get out of it any other way, but I always guess high. My experience has shown me that prospects value the professionalism of a thorough quote as long as its promptly delivered. This gives you a solid way to get their contact information as well. I always offer to email the quote them that afternoon or to have it waiting in their inbox when they come to work the next day.

If you tell them you’re going to have them a quote in 12 hours, you’d better do it. There’s been a few times when I’ve gotten side-tracked and completely forgotten to deliver the quote in a timely fashion. I’m rarely ever able to go back and salvage the job that way. You lied to them on the first meeting, so why should they trust you further?

If you have someone you trust, have them work the quote over after you’re done to look for things you forgot. I’ve learned the hard way that forgetting a tiny piece of a quote, even a 1 dollar item, can have significant impact if your quote required three hundred of those items. Now you’re faced with either eating the three hundred dollars or admitting to your potential client that you don’t even know enough about your own business to deliver a quote properly. Either way its a negative impact on your relationship with the prospective client.

I have a few guys I work with, and some sub-contractors that have worked with me over the years that know what should go into a certain type of job. When I get home I prepare the quote, strip out the financial figures, and email them a quick copy to review. If one of us misses something small, there’s a really good chance the other will catch the omission and you can correct it before you send it to the client.

Structuring your quotes this way serves two purposes:

1. If you line-item everything then both your team and your client can see everything involved and it simplifies the ordering process when you get to that stage.
2. If a client has is asking for quotes from more than one company, sometimes the most detailed quote wins, not necessarily the cheapest.

Detailed Quotes Help You as Much as it does Them:

I just performed a network installation for a state government agency that took three months to install. Just quoting the job took me over two weeks and the final quote was seven pages long, but what the client saw when they reviewed the quote was a concise list of every material that was going into every building, the quantities of those items, etc. They had almost a digital blue-print of what we were going to use when it came time to do the job. This inspired them to ask questions about some of the items which opened the door for us to discuss how we were going to implement their network. They wrote the deposit check within 24 hours.

Later on an issue came up with a change-order. The client had forgotten they’d changed their mind about something and made a change. Thanks to the detailed quote, it was relatively painless to go back and say “See here where you approved 125 widgets on the estimate? Well you added 50 more widgets later.” It’s transparent for both you and them.

My Perspective about All of This:

I’m writing this from my 525 square-foot home office. I’m 34 years old and have been in business for myself for most of my life, at varying stages of success and failure. I used to run a computer company where I hired and trained 14 employees. We bounced across the entire country working every day of the year. The CEO invoiced over one third of a million dollars in labor the first year I did this.

Was it successful? Yes. Was it a headache? Hell yes.

Managing the drama and schedules and crap associated with fourteen computer geeks was a complete pain in the rear that kept me busy and on call 80 hours a week. I brough home about $30K that first year.

A few years later I opened my own IT company. At my peak I’ve had six employees and 6 contractors on 1099, an administrative assistant and two sales people. The first year I did this I invoiced over $385,000 that year. I personally brought home about $20K after taxes and overhead. Eleven thousand dollars a month was my budget… that’s what it took to pay for what it required to run that many people and I was on-call and working almost every day of the year.

Two and a half years ago the economy tanked and I did what I had to do to survive. I laid off employees, cut back on contractors, fired the administrative assistant, dropped the sales people, and now I’m down to me and a few 1099 contractors I sub-contract out for remote work in areas I don’t want to travel to. So far it’s November and I’ve billed out only about $125K for the year.

The difference now is: I’m happy. I bill out a third of what I used to, but I’m keeping half of it, rather than only 5-10% of it. I specialize in networking, structured cabling, and managed services. Ninety-five percent of my work is done from this home-office. No more dual conference rooms, or large offices to hassle with. My commute to work is exactly 12 feet from the coffee-pot and about 50 feet from my bedroom. I have a great home, finally. I get to see my kids every afternoon when they come home from school, can have the time to attend almost all the high-shool events for my daughter, and spend the evening cuddled on the couch with my wife rather than out fixing computers (most of time, anyway.)

My goals for next year are to improve about 50% over my current levels and then I’m done. I have no desire to get much bigger than I currently am.

Now, I pick my customers rather than taking whatever comes at me. I’m confident in my ability to sell and confident in my ability to provide the absolute best service for the money to my customers. If I can’t provide what they want within my own scope of services  then I send them elsewhere.

Mentally and financially now I dont need customers. I select the customers that need me. The ones that cause me headaches get dropped.

In short, I’ve decided to run my business for ME, not to be the biggest guy in town. I focus on doing the best job for every customer I run across. I’ve expanded my comfort-zone to the point that I have no need to step out of it because it encompasses so much more than it used to. I LOVE prospective customers who want to negotiate terms, pricing, etc. I simply psas them my card and say “I’m sorry. I’m not a good fit for your business right now, but if you think I can be in the future, please don’t hesitate to call.” If customers want to work with unseasoned college kids or computer companies that do work for thirty dollars per hour, I encourage them to do so. Then I encourage them to call me when that fails and they decide they need a professional to handle their services.

I’m no longer a “computer-guy” but instead I’m the “trusted advisor” to my customers. I seek out customers who call BEFORE making an IT decision and who want to make the right one, rather than being the fire-fighter who responds to people who just buy the cheapest crap they can and then expect me me to make it work for them. But my absolute main business goal now is to be though of as the “best” solution for a potential customer, not the cheapest. I’m not the cheapest. That’s a fact. I’m certainly not above the market-norm for my industry and in fact I think I’m significantly below it, but I charge enough to weed-out the ones I don’t want.

I hope this helps someone out there realize a way to get ahead with their own small company. Truthfully there’s enough to be said on the subject to write a book, but I thought I’d try to condense it to a few pages. Hopefully I’ve done so successfully.

Best of luck to you and if you find this post useful, thought-provoking, or even down-right wrong, please feel free to comment.

One Response to “One Man Shops: How and When to Hire”

1. Chance Daniels says:

   February 10, 2012 at 5:07 pm

   Hey mate,

   So I’m posting this away from the insanity that has become your Facebook wall. As a former 15 minuter and an IT security specialist, wanted to chime in and give a little piece of advice: For the next couple of weeks, you should make every effort to be just as absolutely boring as possible in whatever posts you make, running on the assumption you won’t just make your account private. You’ve stirred up what I affectionately refer to as “teh crazies” with that video of yours, and it’s best to just wait them out and let them find some other cause du jour to latch onto.

   Only saying something cause I see you doing a lot of responding to all the attention your video has been getting lately, and all that does is validate these people in doing whatever it is they feel like doing, be it calling CPS or the police or threatening bodily harm or…whatever.

   All it takes is one to completely flip a life upside down, and you don’t want them focused on your family when they decide to lose their marbles. I mean, I found this extension of your online presence in less than 2 minutes, and I wasn’t even looking all that hard. Who knows what’d turn up if someone off their rocker and slightly savvy did a full day of research, but assuredly no good could come of it.

   Just…let them vent, say whatever they want. Make dull, boring posts about things most people wouldn’t care about, or more posts about charities or something. By the end of next week, there will be some video about a baby polar bear or a Kardashian entering rehab to get everybody’s attention. Hell, the Powell kids here in Washington were the big story up until your video went viral today.

   The last thing you wanna do is feed the beast. Take it from experience.

   Oh, and kudos for being in the minority of parents who actually, you know, parent.

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