90 days 1stQuad solutions - a short recap on the birth of a new company
Published 06/04 courtesy of SharePoint University
Wow, already 90 days since leaving the Microsoft Consulting Services and as a small summary: Probably the happiest time in my working life for quite long. Nothing against MCS at all, don't get that from the negative side - i had a great time there too and Microsoft as an employer is for sure in the top ranks, but hey, there's nothing for me that compares to building up an own company.
So how is it to start a company these days? Maybe 1stQuad ist not the best example to answer these questions. We have a very simple business model, mainly focussing on the individual skils of our employees as consultants, solution architects or engineers in .NET and especially SharePoint. So if you want, we are (currently) mainly body leasers, but since together we have quite a broad network of potential customers and partners together with the strong link into Microsoft and especially Microsoft Consulting Services this almost guarantees a jump start into business. So it is not surprising that we've had first (and luckily longterm) engagements coming out of these sources almost instantly which took away a lot of the risk and enables us to get used to the new situation slowly. Mid- to longterm we can now focus on enlarging the team, focus on certain services and technologies and we are even considering going for some products which are in our heads already for a long time.
We've chosen to outsource everything that is not our "core business". There were people setting up all the legal stuff for the company, there are designers that create the corporate design and so on and so forth. This has proofed to be a great decision as still we were pretty surprised to see how much work was still coming back from them to us - kind of "singature here, more details there" etc. While we could focus on our projects (and therefore earn the money to pay these services), everything around has been setup smoothly and - most important - in an efficient and professional way.
While this all sounds very positive and easy, there are still some issues: First of all you have to know that for the - in our case - first two month you must be aware that there is little to no money flowing in as the invoices have to be issued and payed first. So there is a (small) streak that must be financed somehow. As we are still a pretty small team, this was not so much of an obstacle. The other is much simpler but takes tons of time that you might have not expected: While you can outsource some activities, it is in every case still you that must provide the content, so to speak. That's for example why we still haven't got a fancy web page up and running... The design etc. is done for long, what is missing is simply content and this has to be created mainly by us, as we know best how to describe what we do etc. This stands in a constant conflict (at least in the beginning) to the fact that you could bill these hours to your customers instead and fill up the gap of the first months... And last but not least: If you're as much involved in the SharePoint community as I am (trying to be) - this is additional time that must be planned or simply added at the end of the day. While this was of course similar in the past, it is now new to me to think about it from a different perspective (the boss' perspective )
But in general, founding a company has been a great enrichment to my professional life and I'm looking forward to all that will come in the future. Besides some new project requests, I have recently received invitations to autumn SharePoint conferences as a speaker and as well an article in a big (german) magazine is in the pipeline. So everything flows and i hope i can keep the head above water .
Stay tuned and in touch, soon to come more (if i somehow manage to get over the cold that catched me this Sunday...)
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