From 2002 to 2007, I owned a Software development and Hosting company. This company was actually my 3rd attempt at this type of company, and though it was certainly not as successful as I would have wanted it to be, it did manage to survive for 5 years before I sold it the beginning of 2007. The first 2 ‘trials’ were failed partnerships with friends. The final version was a single member corporation.

One of the main issues that this company had was that it was severely under capitalized from the start. My intent was to run the company debt free with no investors, and as a result… the company’s growth was seriously hindered, and took a lot longer than it would have had we leveraged better, however… it was because of the debt free and sole ownership status that we were able to sell it so easily.

As is the case with many small companies… early on, I was the sole developer for the company, as well as the bookkeeper, system administrator, sales manager and chief bottle washer. I did everything. The one benefit to this was that I learned quite a bit along the way, but it did wear me thin. My wife eventually took over the bookkeeping and some of the office management duties, for which I owe her more than I could ever repay.

While the company grew, I took on full time positions with a couple of companies as a software engineer. This helped to pay our bills, and I would take contracts on as I could. At one point there was so much work that I was forced to make the decision to leave my full time job with a great company to go and work for my company full time. It was also at this time that I began to outsource the majority of the work, and I made the decision to become an owner /  project manager for my company instead of a software engineer. I believe that it was this decision that led to the growth that we saw in the next several years, and this decision was a direct result of my reading ‘Rich Dad Poor Dad’. I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to become an ‘owner’ of your company as soon as you are able to.

Before the company sold, I had managed to outsource our hosting call center to a company in Texas, our Tier 2 server support staff was based in India, and we had software developers working from Ukraine, Romania, Israel, and Belarus. I worked with local graphic designers for user interface and web design, and handled the sales and project management myself. The only system admin duties I performed from that point forward were hardware related, or provisioning related (putting new machines into the rack at the datacenter, taking old machines out). Jobs that actually required someone to be there physically.

We had our share of issues for sure… a datacenter eviction at one point, a fire in the same datacenter while i was on vacation, project timeline and budget issues, downtime / network issues, customer service issues related to the call center in Texas (we eventually moved to another call center in Knoxville)… but I love a challenge… and there were certainly plenty of those!

If I was to do it again (and I might!)… there are quite a few things I would change… For one… I would have taken on debt to manage growth and probably sought out investors / partners. I also would have concentrated on building a sales and marketing team, as sales was never one of my greatest strengths. I would have spent some time on internal products / projects instead of focusing entirely on custom development for our customers… and lastly, I would have spent more time planning up-front how to maintain uptime on our network and servers. Our infrastructure wound up sort of quilted together as we went along, and as a result it was not as robust as it could have been.