I’d like to tell you the story of what I discovered after I left my former job and began working at my own company.

I’ve always been a product-driven guy, both Human-Computer-Interaction and Technology (Yeah, I’ve been addicted to JavaScript and Rails as long as usability and wireframing).

I had been working as operations manager in a marketing company; my job was mainly outsourcing the whole design and development. After spending nearly two years there, I realized it was actually becoming too hard to fail. It happened that, working in a big company, I always had someone to blame (sometimes it was the purchasing office, sometimes the legal office, sometimes the broken coffee-machine).

Eight months ago I decided to quit that job and join Moze, a 1-year digital company originally founded by 2 smart guys of great talent: Giovanni was so good at talking with people (and selling) and Matteo was so good at web design that they had soon too much work than they could manage. After 1 year their business was stuck, they couldn’t deliver their projects because they missed any serious project organization and the initial idea based on freelances outsourcing for development was failing. That was the turning point: we began building a real company starting from scratch with processes and people and specific responsibilities.

We’re still on the go, but at this point we’ve learned some lessons and it’s time to make a short recap of them.

1. Passion and patience

The first driver is about passion and patience.

Running a company in its startup phase means that, at some point, it will happen that you will get overwhelmed by problems that will keep you awake at night and you’ll be temped to send’em all to hell.

Passion for the job you’re doing will give you the patience to take the problems, analyze them, break them into little pieces and plan their resolution; also considering that, in some cases, these solutions will become the starting point for new problems that will lead you to new resolutions: it’s a loop, patience will come useful again and again.

2. Methodologies

Sometimes, working in a small team of 10 people gives you the illusion of being able to manage everything by e-mail and by a little talk at the coffee machine. That’s completely wrong: the smiling client so happy about your Photoshop designs will quickly turn into your worst enemy once you’ll say that your complex JavaScript application needs some additional time to fix all the unexpected issues arisen during the testing phase.

Put order into the chaos: the second driver is about establishing a method for you and your team.

Almost everything should be measurable, do not save on tools: use your fancy-all-in-one project management and collaboration tool, use GitHub or BitBucket for managing source codes and issues tracking, use a time tracking software to see if the project estimate you did at the beginning was right, use a planning tool for your resources to avoid them to burnout. Learn a method and then teach it to your team once they will be ready to do that on their own.

3. Re-invent your plans

You will plan and measure everything. You will soon see all your plans failing. Strategy is an inexact science and you cannot predict future. Plans are reasonable only in the short term: I cannot really believe in the accurancy of a Gantt chart that schedules something for more than 3 months. Be honest, you’re going to replan that anyway.

As project plans might fail and you might be forced to change, you could also see the same result for the people of your organization: what you thought for them might, at some point, become wrong or soon obsolete. It’s easy to reschedule tasks (even if the client won’t be happy in the majority of the cases), it’s not so trivial to re-think people. The hardest thing I’ve found so far it’s about finding the best configuration of people, processes and responsibilities that will make everything run smoothly.

Do not get overwhelmed by that, every reasoned action you take is another small progress towards the approximation of the perfect fit; this leads you the the third driver: reinvent the ideas you had at the very beginning because facts might soon change your plans.

4. Relationship over deliverables

The project lifecycle begins with a brief, system concept, planning, design, development, testing, go-live and a champagne-party with a drunk and happy client.

Come back to reality.

Everyone has his reasons, sometimes it happens that software development is a pain in the ass, client expectations often collide with real-world timings or economics. What happens, for instance, if the client is expecting a set of functionalities that were not included in the initial agreement, maybe just because of a misunderstanding? What every project management handbook will tell you is to take contract in your hand, tell the client these deliverables were not in the agreement and make an extra-requirements revision.

Just don’t do that.

Be sure to dig out the contract only when you have no other options available. Even if this might be against your methodology, trying to understand a client (and maybe add an extra little feature for free) could open you for you unexpected doors and possibilities.

The fourth drive is about smoothing edges. The dirty little secret of a (design & technology) consulting business is that networking — but also being helpful, honest, and friendy — is essential even more than writing a perfect requirements specification and doing an excellent delivery.

5. It’s not your business (but do it anyway)

The most common thing happened since I (co)owned a company has been temporary changing my job many times: sometimes I’ve been a usability engineer, sometimes I’ve been a developer, sometimes a salesman and sometimes I’ve been able to do my real job as CTO.

When a business is growing it’s inevitable to work undersized and the more you can rely on your ability to learn fast different skills, the more you will be able to identify the boundaries of your business and — at the right point — hire a specialist that takes care of that unit and then «fire yourself, again» (read the post from Joel Gascoigne).

While this approach from an employee perspective might be generally considered a sign of poor professionalism, it is essential — in a startup business — to leverage on flexibility of skills, not for transforming your agency into a we-do-everything company but as a principle to give birth to new kind of related business opportunities. The fifth driver is about curiosity because the best way to achieve that is being curious and willing to learn things beyond your specific field of knowledge.