Startup Sofa

6 Tips for Managing and Leading People

This week I was asked to talk to our local university’s management club and I thought I’d share what I did with them here.

My background in management

In January 2008, I started iThemes in my home. It was just me. Four years later, we now have 20+ employees (spread through the world from the Netherlands to San Francisco but mostly based in Edmond), with hundreds of products, four major brands and thousands of customers worldwide.

Before I started iThemes, I had managed only a part-time person. So I was a total newbie to management. A year into the business and I woke up one day to the realization I had to become a manager and leader FAST.

Here’s what I’ve learned (the overview) …

Managing and leading is about people and going far together with those people. My personal mission statement for our business is to “lead our tribe to go far together.”

In April last year, we held our annual retreat to discuss our strategic plan for the year. In that meeting, I explained that our business is like a mountain climbing expedition. We are teethered together and on a journey. We are a small team, on a mission. We march together. Everyone on the team must pull their own weight. When someone lags or falls, we need to figure out how to help them get back into the pack.

As a small team, climbing towards our summit, each person must contribute something of value to the completion Read More→

New WordPress Design for Startup Sofa

Really excited to officially unveil the new WordPress theme design for Startup Sofa!

The site has been powered by iThemes Builder, but with a previously lame design by me. Ty Carlson from Made by Wheat did the custom design work and I’m very pleased.

Now … I HAVE to start blogging more here.

Whatcha think about the design?

Sell Out To Your Passion

One of the guys in WordPress I’ve gotten to meet is Andrew Norcross … he recently wrote a really honest (and funny) post about going to work full-time for a company after running his own business.

The title is dead on … “It’s not selling out, it’s buying in.”

He talks about wanting to focus on code versus doing things like marketing and sales and other aspects of the business.

I think that rings true for many people and why they’d rather work for a company and alongside a team of people passionate about areas they hate.

For me, I realized as an entrepreneur that there were things I hated to do and drained my energy and passion for other things (accounting) … so I sought to find people who loved (or liked) those areas to do them for me.

But it comes down to passion … and the time and energy you’re able to devote to your passion(s).

Some entrepreneurs are passionate about just the work of the business — the art and science of their actual craft. To them, it was the love of the labor of that craft. And so the marketing, human resources and otherwise management of the business gets in the way of and distracts from the exclusive focus on that passion.

Michael Gerber, author of E-Myth, might call these types of people “technicians.”

My passion was and is building a business, not necessarily the craft or work itself. So I’ve sought to hire people Read More→