Carsonified

I’m really excited to say that we’re launching The Future of Web Apps Expo in October 2007 in London!

Here are some quick facts:

• Registration opens June 11th - If the last three events are any indication, it’ll sell out quickly
• Three new tracks: 1) Development 2) Business/Marketing 3) Showcase. We felt that the audience at FOWA was getting more diverse and a single track event wasn’t always relevant to all of our attendees.
• We’ve invited two amazing conference chairpersons: Simon Willison (Development Track) and Brian Oberkirch (Business/Marketing Track). They’re going to help us create a presentation lineup that you won’t want to miss.
• We’re adding an expo. We want to give you a chance to meet potentially valuable suppliers and get a good view on what’s going on the industry. An expo is a great way to do this. Early bird Expo seats are only £5!
• We’ve switched to a really exciting new venue! The event sold out and the old venue was jam-packed, so we decided it was time to give everyone a bit more space.

We’re so excited! For more info, please head over to the new FOWA blog.

Brian and Simon are going to be blogging about their choice of speakers on the blog, so please participate in that conversation and let us know your thoughts.

I just finished Tim Ferris’ excellent book The 4-Hour Workweek and it’s already had a significant impact on my life: It’s given me more free time.

The best tip I picked up from the book was hiring a virtual personal assistant (PA). Everyone has those annoying things on their to-do list that have been there for months, which just aren’t getting done. They’re important but you just don’t have enough fricken time to finish them.

Enter a ‘Virtual PA’. If you’re running a small business like Gill and I, you can’t justify spending £18K-£30k on the luxury of a PA. However, with the advent of the global marketplace, you can get a quality PA who works remotely, at a very affordable price.

I signed up with Get Friday, a reputable service in India. I’ve been assigned a PA named Shinu and he’s been very professional and helpful with the two tasks I’ve given him so far. The rates start at $15/hour and if you use them enough (160 hours a month) you can get that down to $7/hour.

Tips for using Virtual PAs:

1. Make sure their English is excellent (let them know you’ll need to speak to them over the phone)
2. Clarify exactly what the task is - don’t assume anything
3. Give them a deadline
4. Tell them how long they should take

(By the way, I took the above photograph while I was at the pub tonight. I just picked up a new Casio Exilim Card camera, so expect to see some more photos in the future.)

When Ryan Singer did a workshop for us at FOWD, he and I got chatting about how they run things at 37signals. He gave me an amazing idea that we now use at CS, and I’d like to share it with you all.

Any of you who are managers will know that you need to keep up on how your team is doing and what they’re doing. At the same time, it’s never helpful to micro-manage and constantly bug your team.

Answer: A company chat room!

We use Campfire for this, and it’s perfect as it’s cheap and simple. We have a room called ‘The Howdy Room!’ (for no other reason than I think the word ‘Howdy’ is rad).

Daily check-in

Here’s how it works: When you get in the office, you log into the room (I have it set as my home page) and I post a message starting with ‘[IN]’ and I then list what I’m up to that day. Here’s an example:

Then right before we go home for the day, everyone enters a check-out message, starting with ‘[OUT]’, like this:

Weekly check-in

In addition to daily check-ins everyone does a weekly check-in. It starts with ‘[THIS WEEK]’ on a Monday morning, and ends with a ‘[DID THIS WEEK]’ at the end of the week.

We have weekly Tuesday meetings (for the Bath office) at a coffee shop and by doing this weekly check-in on Mondays, we already have a good idea of what everyone’s up to for the week, when we start that meeting.

Extra benefits

In addition to helping Gill and I know what everyone is up to, doing a daily and weekly check-in also helps everyone else know what they’re up to. It keeps everyone informed without having long meetings and lengthy unnecessary conversations.

We also use this room as a place to chat about interesting things. As you all know, when someone starts talking about something so everyone in the office can hear, it can be quite a distraction. You have to ‘come out’ of whatever you’re doing, listen, and then respond. After that, it takes a good 3-5 minutes to get back into what you were previously doing.

By saying things like ‘Hey, has anyone seen the site www.xyz.com?’ in the chat room, only the people who have time to answer will choose to jump into the conversation. If someone is super busy, they’ll just ignore the ‘Beep’ from the chat room. It’s great!

If you have any tips for keeping your team running smoothly, please share!

I’m sorry it’s taken me so freakin’ long to get these designs up! Here are the entries:

Sean Johnson

Grant Bissett

Chris Abad

Karen Stout

Anna Bergman Template Monster

And the winner is … Grant Bissett! We’ve notified him and hopefully we’ll be able to up the new design soon.

Thanks everyone for participating. It was a lot of fun!

The other day I was starting to feel overwhelmed by my massive todo list and my overflowing inbox. (Isn’t everyone?!) I’m sure you all have those moments - mild panic attack are fun!

Then it hit me - it’s because I was nicely organizing all my todos into categories, but I wasn’t prioritizing them at all. Everything was shouting at the same volume: NOW!

So I created a new category in Outlook 2007 called ‘Important’ and chose the color red (see above image). Now I can categorize all my emails (that need a response) and my todos with their category and whether or not they’re important.

This is one of the things I love about Outlook 2007 - the visual colors that go along with your categories. It’s very helpful to just scan my list of things to do today and do the Red ones first. Bam!

I’ve been doing some research trying to figure out a normal EBITA multiple for a company like Carson Systems. I think it’s important to have some idea what your company is worth, so you can do financial planning for your future.

The problem is we do so many things! Vitamin, DropSend, Amigo, FOWA, FOOA and FOWD.

In regards to our conference business, I’ve had a look at one of the few publicly traded events companies, which is Informa. They’ve got a P/E ratio of around 17, which seems quite hight to me. I’m thinking that if we ever sold the conference business, we’d get around 5x - 7x multiple on yearly profit. But as we learned with DropSend, something is only worth what someone will pay and no formula will calculate that for you!

If anyone has any experience in valuing businesses, please share!

We just hired our fourth employee! (Six total, counting Gill and I). Her name is Jo and she’ll be starting next Monday.

It’s so exciting to be growing, but our office is really starting to creak at the seams. We’re just getting too big for the space and when we add a web designer, we’ll have to move.

Right now we spend £500+VAT (17.5%) for rent, which is a fricken bargain. However, we’re technically throwing our money away on rent, instead of investing in property.

We’ve found an amazing office right in the middle of Bath and we’re going to meet with our accountant on Thursday to discuss our options.

You can only get a commerical mortgage for up to 80% of the value of the property (unless your willing to get hammered with a really high interest rate), so we’ve got to come up with a way to secure the 20% deposit. It’s just beyond the cash we can afford, so we’ve got to get creative.

There’s all sorts of clever ways to buy property. I think Gill and I might actually form a Partnership and have it buy the property. Then we’ll rent it to the company which will make selling the property much tax efficient.

However, I could be wrong - after our meeting with Nick (our accountant), we’ll know more!

If anyone has experience buying an office, please feel free to share your experiences. Tips are welcome!