Member Article

Growing pains: navigating a business through the tumult

I am lucky enough to have created my own web based business taking it from initial concept to market leading position and then eventual acquisition by a large company, writes Brett Marlow, managing director of web development company The Digital Mix.

As difficult as this process was in terms of establishing the business within its market and turning it into a profitable business I have recently had to manage a possibly more difficult issue with the new business I bought into last year.

I now run a Nottingham based web development company (The Digital Mix), post the acquisition of my web based jobs boards in 2011 I realised I wasn’t suited to working for another company even one that had acquired my company so in the middle of 2012 I was keen to get involved with another entrepreneurial venture.

Having considered numerous possibilities I was hit by the realisation that the web development company that had supported my previous companies activities over a seven year period had massive potential to grow with the additional resource I could bring.

Therefore in October of last year, I joined the business as an equal shareholder and set about developing our presence and therefore revenue opportunity. With a strong network of contacts and the benefit of having gone through the digital quagmire of setting up and running a web based business to successful acquisition we started to very quickly attract new business.

The issue we faced was suddenly how to deliver twice as much business with the same size team? Obviously we started recruiting immediately but to our surprise (bearing in mind current economic conditions) the process proved far more difficult than we expected. This was partly due to the location of our offices which forced us to relocate to new City Centre offices which increased our cost base.

We now started bringing in a number of new recruits some good, some less so! This was great as we could start delivering more projects quicker but as I have started to realise being on this side of the equation (not as the client) the world of web development is something of a dark art and each and every project is different presenting unique challenges which can delay original timescales. This in turn means we didn’t hit revenue expectations as predicted but with vastly increased costs to pay in terms of office/staff/etc. It has been an interesting challenge to say the least.

Fortunately we have been able to get through this problem by a number of different routes. Firstly we applied for business financing via The Funding Circle which was surprisingly easy and fast - I would fully recommend this as a route for any business looking for investment to consider.

We also focused on our project management skills to better manage the delivery timescales of our projects therefore helping reduce the amount of “slippage”. For example we started using online tools like; Basecamp and TeamworkPM.

As someone who has worked in large corporates as well as having run my own small businesses I hadn’t experienced a challenge like this one before, in that we had fantastic sales coming in through the door but the pressure of delivering them genuinely put us at risk of complete failure.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by The Digital Mix .