In a routine business call to Manish and Manasi this past Saturday, Manish informed me that he wanted to discuss something that couldn’t be handled by phone.  I immediately began to worry.  Was Manasi expecting a baby?  Did they need to return to India?  Had Manish been offered a job  by the people at Yahoo whom he had met at a recent conference in California?  I grew more anxious as our meeting at NXNW, our favorite brewery, grew closer. 

We ordered a beer, and I asked Manish to lay it on me.  He told me that he had been offered a job with Yahoo.  I cried.

Manish has been with me for 3 1/2 years, and I never thought he’d leave our group unless he was returning to India.  Manish came to TDS as a first year Master’s student in electrical engineering.  He had no programming experience, but he did posess a deep desire to learn. I had just hired my first intern when he applied in the winter of 2002-03, and I told him that if my intern experience was a fruitful one, I’d be intersted in hiring another student in the spring.  He came back right on schedule, and I gave him a job. 

This kid caused me gray hairs back when I didn’t have any! He started out doing web design stuff, would get stuck on some complex table layout (back before CSS), I’d spend too much time fixing it, and he’d manage to muck it up again.  This happened a lot.  :)

Manish had never used the Vi editor, typed with two fingers, and had written little code.  The code he did generate, he wrote in Dreamweaver.  Niall Durham and I introduced Manish to the basics of Vi and file editing in SSH, but his comfort with a WYSIWIG editor kept him from breaking out of his comfort zone.  I finally demanded that he learn to use it and insisted that no real programmer–what he was aiming to be–would write code in Dreamweaver.  He argued his point in futility before reluctantly abandoning his beloved software and eventually learning that bosses sometimes have a point. 

Now a Vi expert, he was hungry for more and started playing with shell scripting.  In one marathon session, he took ten hours to write a script that was maybe 20 lines long.  I ribbed him about it endlessly before promising I’d never bring it up again.  (Does this count?)

Fast forward a year and our programmer was still typing with two fingers.  I set a date for him to either learn to type with all fingers, or forgo any raises until he did, and as his employer, I learned that money talks.  (I used this same threat of a “withheld raise” when he started to buy an overpriced car from an unscrupulous car salesman.)

Just as I can joke about his early shortcomings, I can highlight his successes.  My position as teacher was soon overshadowed by my one time student and now full-fledged programmer.  Manish spent a lot of time adding to the success of Thunder Data by an insatiable appetite for learning.  He loved cool new technology like Ajax and mashups (using the online tools of his new employer, Yahoo), and was a primary force in bringing us to where we are today with fully 55% of our revenue coming from programming.  No programming project or technical question felt out of our reach, because I knew that Manish would rise to the challenge to hammer it out.  I realized over time that I didn’t know what I would do without him.  He had become my partner.

So, on Saturday, when Manish told me he would be accepting his new position, I was heartbroken.  I realized that part of my sadness–even grief–came from the realization that I was experiencing the loss of a dream.  All the plans we had mutually laid in our early period and refined over the later were for our success. 

But in my sadness, there is also pride.  My student intern who had become like a son is leaving for a world-reknown company because he has earned it.  I am thrilled that his success in school–and I hope here at TDS–has enabled him to acheive what many in his country can only dream of. 

So, my dear Manish, know that I will miss you greatly, and know that you are taking a little piece of my heart with you.  Don’t you forget your roots, and know that if you ever want to come home, I’ll be waiting.

With all my heart, Dawn  

I had been telling Stacy that for many people, the most difficult part of starting a business is actually telling others that you are! I had read that once you lay it out there, people will wait for you to fail. I don’t know if I agree with the sentiment, but I do know that the fear of failure keeps many would-be business owners from taking the first step.

Another fear is lack of money. In a book I am revisiting from my bookshelf, “Growing a Business”, I read an interesting point by author, Paul Hawken. He discusses the concept that for small business, “too much money is worse than too little.” He continues, “The major problem affecting business, large or small, is a lack of imagination, not capital.” I agree.

Back in 2000 when I started this company, a laptop was a pretty expensive investment at about $2500. And like all new businesses, I knocked on a lot of doors trying to get sales. I needed to show prospective clients the quality of my work (neither particularly good nor bad), and without that expensive laptop coupled with a time when many businesses had no computer connection, I was limited. So, what did I do? I used Photoshop 3.0 to create prints of the website designs I had done and carried them in those cheesy plastic sleeves. I laugh about it now, but you know what? I sold my clients on my work.

Creativity offered an opportunity.

When I read Hawken’s words tonight, I realized that at TDS we serve well the businesses that don’t have a lot of money. I like to tell prospective clients that we will do as much or as little as they want us to do or that their budgets allow. We create editable websites and ecommerce sites, and offer a lot of guidance to help our clients use the web to help them sell. In short, we give them ideas that cost nothing but time. The clients willing to invest the time and energy needed to create dynamic and useful sites are rewarded with increased sales. Those clients come back to us a year later a little busier, having a little less time to devote to site maintenance, but holding a slightly thicker wallet to hire us for the work that adds to profits.

So, consider the possibilities and make your expenditures count. Have attractive, professionally designed, business cards made with your web address on them. Join your local chamber for a couple of hundred bucks a year, and hand out those great looking business cards. Get a cell phone, and when you are out of the office, forward those sales calls from the chamber folks who found your number on the business card you gave them at the last event!

Creativity and hard work are more useful than money, and honing these skills early helps lay the foundation for real profits when used in concert with smart investments–bought through increasing profits–to accelerate growth.

And what of those slick presentation “brochures” I created? I still have them. Stop by the office, and I’ll let you see what money can’t buy.