How to Grow a Company Fast
As a transparent company that's in the spotlight during an intense period of innovation and growth in our industry, we at Demand Media think it's important to share with other aspiring entrepreneurs and managers some of our most valuable learnings. In the spirit of continued growth and success of the internet industry on the whole, we thought it would be appropriate to use our own fastest growing property, eHow, to demonstrate how to grow a company fast and effectively, according to our own experiences.
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Things You'll Need
- Patience
- Ambition
- Determination
- Concentration
- Phenomenal people and talent
- Vision
- A sense of humor and humility
- Ability to make tough decisions
Instructions
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1
Be willing to bet everything on your management team, because fundamentally, you are.
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2
Assemble a board that brings more than just money to the table.
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Prioritize entrepreneurship (including previous CEO experience or small business ownership) as a mandate of recruiting and employee development. At Demand Media, a significant proportion of staff and most of our executive team members have been CEOs or small business owners.
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Recognize that failing quickly and iteratively is one of the best ways to succeed. We call this "failing fast," and we live by it in launching new online properties and site features, religiously practicing test-driven development across our software systems, and fundamentally wiring it into our Demand Studios content creation ecosystem.
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5
Keep the office fridge packed with a variety of caffeinated beverages. And in general, go out of your way to make it easy and convenient for your heads-down, hard-working team to stay heads down and working hard. Ergonomics, onsite services and even food & beverages are an important part of this.
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Make innovation an "always on" part of the product development process, not something that's revisited periodically. Reward and make noise about innovation and creativity internally.
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Enable and motivate your most valuable contributors to find new roles and sometimes new locations that suit them best.
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Be as transparent as you can, without sacrificing your competitive advantage. As it happens, social media, used correctly, is one of the best ways to be open. With it, you can learn from your community AND integrate its power into your product and how you serve customers. There is no better growth catalyst than the motivated and enlightened crowd that is loyal to your brand and product.
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Recognize that when something isn't yet being done or isn't yet seen as valuable by the market, that's not necessarily a reason not to do it. In fact, it's often a reason to do it.
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Measure everything.
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Keep measuring everything.
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Comments
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mdat
Feb 21, 2011
This is a fine example of crappy, ambiguous "writing" the guidelines from Demand clearly state as unacceptable. LMAO that this was written by the head guy.
