Why I shutdown my web development studio

everybody its Steph with killer sites and other sites so why did I stop or shut down my web development studio now this is going back a long time it's going back to the 90s well late 90s early 2000 actually excuse me later Lee 2000s late 90s so I had a web development studio and we're doing a lot of web apps and so on and it was a small team at its big as maybe six or seven people or the lead working under me and after a few years of doing this I decided to shut it down as far as having people work for me in web development to to sell you know so in terms of building other people's systems and the number one reason I shut it down well there's two reasons number one when you become a manager of people when you're you become successful as a web developer has an independent which it will happen you know if you keep developing your skills you keep improving on what you do what will happens you'll find is you get more and more and more clients and then uh soon you're gonna have more work than you can handle so there's a couple of ways to deal with that number one you could start implementing more frameworks like bringing jQuery and really know how to use a property heavier an MVC framework like within the PHP world that would be today I think the best choice would probably be lair eval or if you're in a ruby camp you would use rails and you become really good with these frameworks and other frameworks of course bootstrap yada yada yada and then you take these and then you can put together projects much more quickly another way you can handle this is you can start bringing in help you can start hiring other developers whose skill sets complement yours so if you're strong with coding then you might want to bring in a front-end guy or if you're more of a front-end guy you want to hire him so maybe some guys who do the backend you know the server-side coding the PHP to Ruby to Java whatever anyway so you have those two options now what happens though if you go the second option where you higher in people and ultimately if you become really successful this you will have to do what you're going to see is a you're going to become detached from the process of writing code for instance because you just won't have time you're going to be too busy dealing with clients too busy managing the team and managing the projects from afar you won't be you'll be losing touch with the code and that was one of the big reasons why I shut it down because I was becoming too detached from the code and I didn't want to be at that point in time I didn't want to lose touch with the code I really love to code back in those days that's for sure now that I don't like it now but back then back then it was like a DOS totally obsessed with code and building projects you know I was one of those guys on Friday nights my friends will go out you know drinking a playing pool I mean oh no I'm working on a dating app here it's like I have so much fun building apps anyway so that's the so if you bring in a talent you bring in people working for you you're gonna get detached from code from the process and it becomes you have a whole new role you have a whole new job so keep that in mind you may love that you may not like that but that's the reality of a situation another thing that happens with your discovers but it takes many people working for you to equal the salary you would make or the money would make as an independent contractor working on your own my calculations back in a day it takes about ten takes about ten people working for you full-time before you you know you can earn enough from their work to be able to make the same money that you would be making if you worked on your own keep that in mind as well so there's this there will be this lag period between you start hiring a few people and you're going to see your the money that you put in your pocket is gonna drop because you've got all these other costs associated with having several people working for you management cost and accounting costs and it just this general overhead I find when you have more than three people on a project the productivity of the individual person individual people rather working on the project drops quite a bit not that they're not doing good work it's just that you've got this overhead of coordinating the activities of four or more people so keep that in mind I find the optimum group size for working on projects is about three people working on a particular project well no one jumping around anyway so what happens you're gonna need about ten people working for you full-time before you make the same money as you would working as in your own independent and what excuse me you have to have 10 people working for you for you to make the same money as you would if you were working on your own but again and what the frameworks were you start using frameworks that maximize your practice your productivity which I did a lot of that now you can make really good money that way when you get into that the problem with that it's limited there's always so much you can do so keep that in mind so I got I decide to stop the original studio web by the way was a web development firm Studio web and I registered that domain in 1998 because the ice it was called believe it ah I design before in in the mid-90s and then I said I'll call studio web should have kept the ISIS find domain right you know anyway so that's it so I just got I want to be more into code again so I shut that down and also I didn't you know I was at that period I was at that plumbers like five or six guys maybe yeah five or six guys we said that was some points working for me I forget the exact number and I was still making less that I would have made when I was just going on my own so that's just something to consider if you're in the freelance web development business right now and you're thinking about bringing in staff another thing you can do is maybe partner other guys where you have them you outsource to people you know and trust parts of the project so you still keep your hands dirty in code that you love if you like the code you like the design and so forth but you out stars little bits that you don't want to do necessarily this is a compromise if you will and I can tell you if you do that right you can make very good money much more than you think my peak in the 90s I was doing I was building out about 200 the hour that's what I was making at for of my time I have spoken to people I thought I was doing pretty good I spoken I know people who were doing 300 the hour now it's not what they said to the clown pain I'm charging 300 the hour but they say okay hour rate my rates 75 and but because of the they had their own frameworks that's what I did I had my own framework and this is what I was in my java days I have no Java based framework was a POJO based MVC system but I had put together this this is back in the day when MVC frameworks they were out there but I didn't like what was out there so I just removed my own I wouldn't do that today today if I wasn't PHP I would use lair eval or if I was in Ruby I would use rails for instance or today in JavaScript you look at node.js I'd be a good choice I think anyway by using your framework you could be very very productive and so you know you know you say yeah I'll do this job and I'll charge you five grand and you calculate your hours and you say I'm charging 75 bucks the hour and you actually I'm making 200 is that ripping off no because they're gonna compare your bid with other people's bits as long as you deliver the work it's good and you're competitive of everybody else that you know as far as I'm concerned it doesn't matter how much time you take you know in that time you've invested in your framework or learning this framework or putting together a workflow the tighly efficient that's worth money that's just like the time and author puts in their book and they make residuals off that book it's not it's not nothing wrong with that so if you invest in your skill sets you invest in your own framework or some other framework you should use other frameworks by the way I'm not somebody I hadn't these days you don't need to build your own framework just to be clear when you invest your time and effort into that there's residuals from that you're heightened productivity and anyway that's pretty much it

Channel: Stefan Mischook

Views: 36,770

Rating: 4.8646822 out of 5

Keywords: web developer career, web developer, web design studio, web developer business

Id: Rr3VynZfWYo

Length: 8min 54sec (534 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 14 2015