Come for the Ride!

How fast can you start a business doing it by yourself? How much faster can you grow a business by working in a team? I just read this article from one of the blogs I subscribe to and the author too advocates working in a team environment for startups.

The truth is, the more right people you have on a team, the faster things can get done and the quicker you can grow. Even if you are a master of all trades, having moral support by your side can greatly enhance your attitude towards the business. Besides, all things require time and attention and as one person, you only have so much bandwidth to give.

Let’s take our favorite entrepreneur Marcus Frind of PlentyofFish.com as an example. I first heard about him while surfing WebmasterWorld.com and like everyone else, I was shocked and somewhat envious when I heard he made a million dollars on his site from AdSense alone. Based on his latest video, he claimed to make about $5 mil a year maintaining his site and working on it part-time. Not too bad for a programmer who created the site to learn asp.net.

Throughout my research on the web to see what site he created, I did not stumble upon one bad article about this guy. Seeing how he’s a nice guy, I don’t see why I would. However, even though everyone was focusing on the money he made, the truth is even with $5 mil a year in revenue, a ton of money was being thrown out the door by keeping the business as a one man operation. How much more could he had made had he hired a business development guru or marketing guru? How much would that have cost him? How much did it cost him by not growing the team?

As a business development person, these are the things that are a cause for concern in my world. For programmers, maybe not so much? (Because they have other worries)

Working with a team isn’t all sunshine and lollipops, but a good team with complementary skills and experience does have value and it’s one we’re banking will pay off.