Kim Coffman, Founding Office Manager of AEBN – Advice for a Webmaster considering going corporate: “Get a good accountant. Get a good attorney.”.[Part One]
Reality Check
Kim Coffman, Founding Office Manager of AEBN – Advice for a Webmaster considering going corporate: “Get a good accountant. Get a good attorney.”
In any business, as profits increase and demand begins to outpace your production level, you reach the point that you have to expand just to keep up the pace of production needs. However, expansion actually makes it much harder to turn a profit. When you’re just starting out, you have great growth in sales because you have no sales to measure yourself against. It’s much harder when you have to keep good numbers up. If you’ve already established a good business it’s very possible to make better money with a broader profit margin by staying on a smaller scale. Working from your house with only two or three people that you deal with directly is a lot cheaper than renting a building, buying equipment and hiring loads of people.
Let’s start with the bodies – the hiring of employees. Even if you are careful with your hiring choices, sooner or later, your body count of employees begins to climb. Then you have to train managers to train your newer employees and pass along policy changes. Add to this all the legal issues that come with having employees that HAVE to be paid whether or not you turn enough of a profit, then toss in a building to rent and equipment that needs constant maintenance and taxes on everything. All of this eats into your profits.
“These days, the managers train the new staff and we don’t even know half the names of the people we work with every day…”
When you go from a small business to a corporation, one thing that is sacrificed is decision-making speed. It’s a lot faster when there are only a few people and you can shout down the hall. As a corporation, with offices and employees in cubes, implementing a new idea has to go through channels to get the word out to each of the different departments. This means rounds of inter-department meetings with department heads – which can take a whole day or a whole week to accomplish. And this is after the whole thing has been cleared with the investors.
Having investors sounds like a great idea – until you learn that other people’s money frequently comes with other people’s opinions on how you should run your business. If there’s a differing opinion, and you haven’t done your legal paperwork right, you can be out of a job while your baby – the business that YOU started – goes on to become mega-huge and amazingly profitable… without you.
Just how easy is it to lose your company to investors?
It’s as simple as selling over 50% of your stock or holding the wrong stock – common shares instead of the preferred (or voting) shares. At 51%, the investors can suddenly outvote you. The name can change, the product can change or worse… they can vote to pack up the whole company and take it to another state or country or sell the company outright – leaving the founding Webmaster and all of his employees behind.
Scott Coffman, CEO for AEBN – Advice to a Webmaster considering going corporate: “My advice? Just stay at your house and do your own stuff, right there – it’s the best place to make money and keep it.”
The Corporate Webmaster
Brad O’Dell, Chief Systems Architect for AEBN: “We first started with six ‘individuals with a common goal’. We had to retool ourselves, to be a group of individuals who have to milk that goal out of everyone else.”
In a traditional corporate environment, established techniques get passed to the next set of newcomers to the company through regulated training, as the key to continued production. Research is conducted, books are written and training techniques are codified for uniform and smooth integration of the new employee allowing for predictable results.
This, however, doesn’t quite work when you are dealing with Webmasters.
From The Industry Standard: “On the ‘Net, education is a process, not a place. What is learned is more important than where it’s taught. With online learning, people can get training and educate themselves, rather than waiting for faculty to write a costly, multiyear prescription.”
The Webmaster mindset is purely results oriented. The Internet is an incredibly fast-paced market where instant communication and instant implementation are the accepted norm. The only established rules in the adult Internet market are: “Find what works” and “Lose what doesn’t.”
As a rule, an applicant with experience usually has a leg up on another with a handful of degrees but no practical knowledge. With an Internet company run by Webmasters, a resume loaded with degrees will get you a raised brow and a very pointed: “Yeah, but what can you DO?”
Webmasters normally come fully trained with purely on the job (or rather, on the ’Net) training. Their resumes have lists of programs that they use and lists of sites that they have built and / or manage.
A Webmaster-run company expects its employees to drop into the chair ready to go. Training is more of an introduction to their fellow co-workers and an informal orientation on what is expected. In most cases, this is more than enough as the newly hired Webmaster has already proved, through the creation and marketing of his own sites, that he is capable and qualified.
Scott Coffman, CEO for AEBN: “We didn’t sacrifice the dress code – we’re not strong on the corporate image. I pretty much dress as I did then, so that hasn’t changed, but I have a bigger desk, a bigger computer and a bigger staff.”
AEBN is located in the “deep south” and the only adult Internet company in town, so when it suddenly needed to increase its staff, the company had a hard time finding potential employees with any Internet experience.
The founders of AEBN all had special skills that they brought with them but now they had all these new employees and they had to be trained practically from scratch.
Suddenly, they had to get different groups of very different people to work together, and quickly. Then they had to hire and train managers to take over for them so they could get back to their own work.
Chain of command is something many new corporate Webmasters struggle with, whether they are sitting at the top of the food-chain in their own office or sharing a cube with another Webmaster. It’s very different when you have someone working over you, or under you, as opposed to when you’re working for yourself.
On managing Webmasters: “It’s like herding tigers.”
For a new executive-level Webmaster delegating responsibility, trusting someone else such as a new employee, with the delicate inner works of a project that you are used to having direct and complete control over, can be an alarming prospect. And sometimes that trust is not repaid, even with someone you thought was a friend.
The founding Webmasters of AEBN originally wanted a relaxed working atmosphere with people coming and going as they pleased and working very hard while they were at the office.
They discovered the hard way that the bigger their company got the harder it became to keep up close friendships with their employees. Not everyone had the same work ethic as they did. The sheer size of the employee population forced them into a more corporate environment – complete with time clock – to make sure that the business ran smoothly.
Many long-time friendships shattered under the pressure of good business.
“It’s very hard to fire your friends.”
Going corporate may not be the most profitable route for every adult Internet business. Radical changes in direction will shatter even an Internet corporation where a solo Webmaster can scrap an entire collection of themed sites and start back up from scratch in a matter of weeks.
A corporate level adult Internet company usually consists of a powerhouse of Webmasters working under a layer of management with a very tiny circle of Webmasters or a single business-savvy Webmaster at the top.
In a traditional “brick and mortar” company it can take up to six months to get the go-ahead from upper-level executives to change gears, and then another month or two to implement those changes. When it comes to implementing policy changes or radically changing business dealings it is common knowledge that Internet companies are capable of running circles around the traditional brick and mortar corporation. Yet, while quick on their feet, a solo-run adult Internet business is even faster to adapt and make radical changes – and better equipped to deal with emergencies or failure.
Jo is the copy editor and writer for AEBN and is also a published erotica writer. To contact Jo please email her at hawke@aebn.net.
Her latest book reviews can be viewed here:
http://www.loveromances.com/demoness_ruby.html
http://www.shebitch.co.uk/TheLair/entertainment/MorganHawke.htm
