On December 23, 2009, Normal Modes officially celebrated our 6 month anniversary. (Still true, but irrelevant.)  On June 23, 2010, Normal Modes officially celebrated our 1 year anniversary.   Whew!  We made it!

We originally intended to mark our 6 month anniversary with a series of posts about lessons we’d learned.  We wanted to mark the important milestone of our six month anniversary by sharing a few lessons we’d learned over the course of the first six months, as well as share a few wonderful resources that helped us out along the way. What we didn’t quite grasp is how busy we were to become beginning in January.  So, unexpectedly, this post was delayed.

The previous post focused on the personal change of becoming an entrepreneur. Today’s post, the second in the series, focuses on getting the company off the ground and finding clients.

Starting a company is like drinking from a fire hose.

Wow. It’s been more than a month six months a year since I wrote the post about how I started Normal Modes and a new work lifestyle.  In that time, I’ve heard from at least one person each week, often by email but sometimes in person, about how the post resonated with their own experiences – in particular the loneliness of working from home.  Thank you all for your kind comments and feedback – they’re most appreciated.

Lest you think all my time in the first 6 months was devoted to personal pursuits and adjusting to my new lifestyle, it was decidedly not. It’s a lot of work getting a startup going and finding clients. I likened it to drinking from a firehose.

Business Formation & Legal

In addition to developing the Normal Modes website – which I’ll talk about in a later post – I spent a lot of time in my early days just getting basic business and administrative matters in place.  Setting up the company and sending the state their money so you can become official is almost inconsequential in terms of time.  It has to be done, and luckily it’s relatively easy.

If you don’t know how to do set up a company, many attorneys will offer a package of documents for around $1000. This is worth the investment if you either a) don’t have a clue about what’s needed and have the money to spend or b) if you plan to register as a historically underutilized business or some other special situation.  In the latter case, you’ll need additional corporate documents that the attorney usually includes in their package.  In the case of Normal Modes, the company is 100% owned by a woman and plans to be certified with the Women’s Business Enterprise Alliance (WBEA) in 2010, which opens some opportunities allocated under corporate vendor diversity programs. (We’ll see how that goes – I promise to write about it.)

The other important service a good attorney provides is in writing contracts.  I’m a pretty methodical and logical person, so I thought I’d be able to cobble together my own contracts based on others I had available to reference.  Be ye ye not so stupid. Or cheap. Seriously. A good attorney has seen it all and will think of scenarios and protections which would not occur to you unless you’ve had a bad experience.  My contracts were decent and sounded good before my attorney reviewed them.  Now the contracts are tight, protect me (and, at times, my clients), and just AWESOME.  I feel confident when I give someone a contract now.  You should too.

My other piece of advice?  Allow yourself like time.  Contracts, like websites, all have an urgency  rating of “immediately!” but take awhile to put together.

Administrative Overhead

There’s a lot to be done the first days of a business, and almost everything you touch is something new.  This means that there’s no template, no standard, no reference for all the tasks we’re accustomed to taking for granted.  As a result each wee little task, if begun from ground zero, is orders of magnitude more difficult to knock out.

Contracts – for both clients and subcontractors – take time to fill in. Proposals take anywhere from 1.5 to 12 hours to complete, depending on the level of complexity of the project. And don’t even get me started on accounting and money. (I’m saving that for the next post.)

In short, administrative overhead at the beginning of a business venture accounts for a considerable amount of time.  Be patient.

Office Supplies – Another Unexpected Administrative Lesson

When my husband and I bought our house, we made multiple trips a day to Home Depot.  There was so much we didn’t have.

When you start a new business, you make multiple trips to Office Depot. And here’s the thing about office supplies you don’t have: they’re expensive. Pens are expensive, especially if you have specialized ones you like to use for your work.  I’m more conscious about using the printer, not because I’m a tree hugger so much as that printer paper and – more importantly – printer ink, are expensive. Those giant tape balls I used to make to blow off stress? No more.  Tape is expensive.

I have newfound empathy for my former employers who, during cutbacks, first attacked the office supply budget.  The waste in most corporate environments is institutionalized and a by-product of lacking awareness.  If I had employees, I’d spend the extra money to put stickers on each office supply, reminding us of the cost.   Waste not, want not.

When it pops, it pops.

After the initial euphoria of starting my own company wore off, I was anxious about prospects of success. Business was slow throughout the summer. (Remember I began the company in June.) None of the proposals I prepared went anywhere. (I’ve since learned that this was just part of the standard lead time.)

And then, literally in one week in the fall everything changed.  It was as if I’d prayed to God for more work than I could handle and the Big Guy called my bluff. This, of course, is a happy problem to have. Under a tight deadline and with more work than I could handle, a former co-worker started contracting with me to help out. I discovered that while there are a lot of website design companies, there are precious few who specialize in the user experience work we do.  Of those who do, 99% are full advertising and/or interactive agencies with project budgets that greatly exceed our minimum requirements. Normal Modes fills a niche that larger companies, by their nature, cannot. It’s the best type of situation – everyone wins.

Final Notes

As I mentioned in the intro, this piece took me more than six months to get online, and I want to make sure I don’t muck it up today by not having a nice little closing.  So I’ll finish real quickly with my advice to anyone looking to start their own company:

Do it!

Prepare to work your ass off.  This is a labor of love.

Have fun – running  your own company is a blast!