Crossbone Systems

There’s a great new article over on the bootstrapping blog all about the benefits of being short of time. Over the years, I’ve seen lots of projects expand to the time available - they end up taking months when they could (and should) have been completed by the right staff in just a couple of weeks.

The causes of this waste are rarely intentional. However, while every medium or large company has its share of slackers, it’s often the split of job roles that leads to the biggest problems with efficiency. Although everyone often appears to want a project to succeed and to be seen to be helping things along as much as possible, if there are too many cooks, the broth will always come out spoilt.

Take a web design project, for example. In a small or medium sized company, your classic structure would require the following “resources”:

1. A project manager
2. One or two designers (depending upon the scale of the project)
3. An HTML guy
4. One or two back-end developers
5. One or two systems guys responsible for server support once the project is live.
6. One or two customer services staff to field calls from site users

This can easily be reduced to two people. A personable, business-savvy developer can talk to the client (or the rest of the business) and still keep on top of a project. An mature developer should also have experience with deploying real sites into production environments, so he’ll know how to cope with server load and scalability. Support calls should be minimal and best handled by the person who knows the system from inside to out. (And if support becomes a big drain on time, the developer can probably set up a system to help customers to help each other, such as Satisfaction).

Combine that with a personable designer who actually knows and cares about the web, and you’ve got yourself an unstoppable two-man team! The bonus is that if your team needs to go to a meeting, it’ll be highly technical and highly creative.

It’s still all about your employees

It’s not easy to find the right kind of employees who can cope with the challenges of an entrepreneurial environment. However, without the right people, and the right environment for them to work in, it’s impossible to produce anything efficiently.

Never make a project manager your first hire unless you have a huge client that will need nursing through every poor decision. If you can build a team of people who have solid skills, can manage their own time and have a passion for what you’re trying to achieve, being short of time becomes a blessing in disguise.

The sales bit: you could always contract such web work out, by checking out our products or getting in touch.

When they talk about small companies, people often seem to get very scared about “looking like an amateur” and treat it as a big bad bogey man who must be appeased at all cost. Granted, everyone wants to look professional, no one wants to appear incompetent, least of all to their prospective clients or customers. But most of the time, these people are not really concerned with the professionality of a company at all, they’re scared to death that someone might see the human side of your business.

This fear of the human touch is endemic, from the roots of government right to the franchised shops and banks on the high street. Behind the scenes, call centres generate a total lack of personality - even when an operator gives their first name, who ever rings up later in the week and actually asks to speak to them?

In some instances the Internet can make things worse. Automated ticketing systems for technical support are meant to improve accountability, but the reality is that they often give a large support group a wall of anonymity to hide behind. In some organizations, a single ticket is picked up by several different staff member and any notion of being helped by a real person vanishes. Unless rapid resolution occurs, customers can easily be left feeling frustrated and under valued. The workers in this process are also left feeling uninspired because they do not get to build any kind of relationship with the customers.

Employees count

When your company is small, the people in it are what count. In the early months of a business, they may be the only thing that differentiates your company. They all need to be able to talk to your customers, and your customers need some visibility on who does what.

My message: be bold and show that you’re a person. We’re all people, so when friends and family warn you about being too personal, be kind but firm with them. Before hiring your first employee, you’re all you have - say NO to becoming a faceless corporation!

I hope the mere existence of this blog reveals something about my own personality, but as the site grows in the coming weeks, I’ll be adding more information about my background, (including why I think I’m qualified to do what I’m doing).

Crossbone systems was formed electronically with Companies House on the 21st of November, 2007. Using myself as the example, the dates on documents I have received indicate that it takes only two days for HM Revenue & Customs to receive notice that the company has been formed. Pretty impressive when it can take up to 4 weeks just to get a passport approved by other government departments.

Your first corporate letter from the Inland Revenue is very much a meet & greet affair. They want to get to know you a little before they start coming on strong and demanding ‘returns’ later in the year. They send you a charmingly named Corporation Tax New Company Details form. It basically requests the following:

1. Are you actually trading yet? (so will you be owing them tax any time soon)
2. Who is actually directing your company? (so Companies House don’t really tell them very much after all)
3. Can you be bothered to answer these questions (and more) yourself?

The last point is important, because this is the stage where you can nominate someone else to take care of all this tax-related drudge work for you. hoorah!

The good news is that they’re not demanding the form be returned for a fair while. It must be returned three months from the beginning of the first accounting period. In laymens terms, that means that once you take money on behalf of your company, you must return the Corporation Tax New Company Details form no more than two months after the end of that month. So if I make my first transaction at any point in December, I better make sure the Revenue have my completed form by the end of February or there are some serious fines to be had.

There are also decisions to be made in regard to the dates that the official corporate accounts will be prepared for. This is an area I’m not too familiar with so I’m going to do more research and write up more when I’m better informed.

Back to bank

I’m a little surprised as to how long it is taking to actually process my banking application forms. I’ll be chasing that down at the beginning of next week. Once my account is opened and ready for business, then with any luck I’ll be able to actually start taking my own advice and get hold of an accountant.

On Friday I signed the first support contract for Crossbone. And today I started on our first development contract. It’s all terribly exciting.

Working on the website and some interesting apps for facebook, too - it’s all go go go.