How I'll grow my business

It's that sticky place for small businesses. It's that point where the owner has plenty of work to keep him/her busy, but he/she isn't quite ready to bring on more help.  The business is reactionary.  The appointment calendar is booked for the near-term, but beyond the next month or the next quarter or the next contract, business is uncertain.

This is such a common problem for small business owners that I want to share what my strategy is for getting a company to the next stage. 

To give the context, I just started with a small company called Epimedia that does contract work for other companies. Epimedia writes software that makes hardware work. I am now one of four full-time employees of the company.  All of the contracts up to now have come from word-of-mouth. Every year has seen more revenue than the previous year, but the work can be exhausting as we continuously work at our maximum capacity.  We enjoy the luxury of high enough revenues that I can focus some attention on proactively finding new business.  The following is an outline of what I plan to do to find new business:

0. Be sincere
As I mentioned in

Walking away from "Good"

It's been official for a couple of weeks now, although the paper work was just put in place last Friday. The announcement was made to the team this morning, and the job posting will likely hit LinkedIn this afternoon. Let me know if you know anyone that would be a good Tektronix account manager in New Mexico because I'm quitting my job.

I'll be joining a couple of friends at Epimedia.  At this point there are four of us full time with a couple of contract programmers.  We write software to control hardware.  

I've alluded in my blog posts to the fact that

What are you working towards?

I've been enjoying Tony Hsieh's memoir Delivering Happiness about how he grew and sold LinkExchange and then grew and sold Zappos.  In the book, he describes the deal that he made with Microsoft as part of the LinkExchange sale.  His portion of the sale would be $40 million.  He received 80% at closing, but to help with the transition, he was required to stay with the company for one year to receive the remaining 20%.  At first, he dutifully went to work and sat around checking email and taking long lunch breaks as he put in his time.  After a short period of time he realized how bored he was, and realized how