Diorex

I just learned that our 125th employee is starting tomorrow and that really made me stop and think about some of the things that helped us grow so fast (as well as some of the obstacles and roadblocks).

A few things that I think every business needs:

Team: No single person can scale to where we are, it takes a team of managers and visionaries. All of whom must have their own skills and talents, someone to pay the bills, negotiate the lines of credit, a lawyer to negotiate contracts, tech team to build the wild and crazy ideas that the marketing folks come up with, as well as a strong character to hold the whole ship together and chart a course. One of the major differences I see between lots of affiliate marketers and what we do is the existence of that team.

Focus: Our periods of the most rapid growth have been when we have focused on a specific objective. Launch this project, pursue this oportunity, fix this problem. Whereas when we get in phases where the team is working on lots of different project, our productivity suffers. With more people we can now cover more than a few projects at a time, but by my count I am working on 9 major projects right now, and none of them are getting the proper focus as if we only had 4 or 5. One of my shortterm goals is to put some of these on the backburner and get back to focusing on specific items.

Long Term View: My biggest problem with most affiliates is that they seem to have a flavor of the month - recently it has been Acai and Grants, in the past it has been ringtones or MFA sites or arbitrage etc. Sure these opportunities are lucrative and the cash spends just like everything else, but these are quick hits that often last only for a few months. One criteria in our decision making has always been how does this help grow the long term valuation of the business.

Scale and Scope: We do not put resources into projects that cannot scale, for us 6 figures a month is about the bare minimum we would accept, and then only on a developmental project. If a project does not have the potential to do at least that within 90 days, then we move on. Similarly with scope, we dont want to pioneer brand new business models or new projects that do not play on our core competencies. Just because I can build the next great iphone/twitter/facebook application does not mean I have any advantage there. We know we have an edge when it comes to analytics, testing, and paid search - so that is where we should be investing our time and effort.

Diversity: A few years back Google was something like 70% of our profit, with the other 30% pretty much Yahoo and all of the revenue coming from a very small number of suppliers. We made it a focus to get diversified, today Google is our 3rd largest marketing channel. We have signifcant revenue streams from multiple suppliers and we have back up customers for all of our major verticals. Still working on further diversifying, but eventually all middlemen get squeezed and so we have worked really hard not to be in the middle whenever possible.

Own the mission critical stuff: we have never considered outsourcing any of our tracking or analytics, we built it from the ground up to meet our needs. We dont outsource our creative or any of the key IT functions, it costs more to have them in house, but well worth them knowing our systems inside and out. The contrary is true as well - we could build a better email delivery system, or better call center etc, but we get 95% of what we need from a vendor without the fixed costs. Basically if it is proprietary and critical we build it otherwise we outsource. Also when we build, we duct tape it together first and then gold plate it later. Nothing ever ends up where it started on the whiteboard.

Perspective - of late I have been killing myself with busines travel and work. I am logged in 24/7 and was not taking time for myself or my sanity. I have a great team working for me and they can pretty much cover for me and make 95% of the decisions without my input and importantly they know when they are over their head. I am going to start stepping away and recharging my batteries more frequently. I am going to every continent other than Africa and Antartica in the next 4 months, so hopefully that will offer some perspective. In the past when I have stepped away, I have come back with a burst of creative energy. Letting go is never easy, but it is often necessary.

Kind of a random rambling post, but hopefully their are some nuggets in here.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 23rd, 2009 at 1:12 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.