E-myth Revisited

Originally Posted by Ankesh

I've been juggling 2 very promising new big projects since a few months now. I don't want to give up one of them - although working on both together is delaying them both...

Yeah, I kinda know the feeling.

Originally Posted by Ankesh

Hiring some one to read my emails. I usually spend 1-2 hours everyday - when I work - on emails. How do you outsource emails when all of the emails are not related to any specific project? Its a scary thought - training someone and teaching them how to answer questions for 6 different projects. At the same time, its not a job I can outsource to more than one person...

Where are all the emails coming from? Are a majority of them from a specific website of yours? Are a lot of the questions the same? If so, there are a lot of programs out there for support ticketing systems.

I'm sure you've seen them. Users can select from a list of topics and ask their question about that topic. They are then sent an auto reply answering questions about that topic and asked "did this answer your question?"

If yes - the ticket is closed.

If no - the ticket is routed to whoever you specify for that topic.

If your emails are coming in from a variety of sources, it would obviously be much more difficult and I don't see an obvious solution.

Originally Posted by Ankesh

Hiring a project manager. Right now, I over look the day to day work. And supervise 2 people working for me. But would like someone else to take this over. The problem is transitioning - how do you hire a CEO without giving away a lot of control - when your company is so small?

Why do you want the control? Control causes headaches. I used to think I needed to control everything. Now I think totally opposite. I try to give that control away to people smarter than me (not hard to find) whenever I can.

I use Basecamp to check in on things whenever I want to and I can see what's going on with all of my stuff on one screen, any time.

I know you've seen Basecamp, but probably only very few things that it can do. It's the best online project manager in existance....

http://www.basecamphq.com/

I've got three businesses that run on one Basecamp account.

You can assign different people or companies to different projects and give people different levels of access.

For example - each business only sees their own stuff and is not able to see what the others are doing.

All the updates and project statuses are posted there for me to see.

My lawyer and accountant have access to all projects, but only to contact whoever they need to. People that don't need to see that stuff don't have access to it.

If we set up with a new vendor, I can add that vendor to the project so they can communicate with whoever they need to but not have access to things they don't need to see.

It's really cool and a great way to keep all communications in one place and sorted in a logical and easy to follow way.

Jim