 Most
people, according to surveys, consider starting their own businesses
at some time during their working years. The risk of failure and the
cost of startup are what prevent most elsewise entrepreneurs from taking
the leap of faith in their own abilities. Not everyone is cut out for
running a business whether it be a one-person venture or a conglomerate
with a payrolls of hundreds. Knowing and heeding your own limitation
in deciding to remain under the employ of another company is as virtuous
and sound a reason for dismissing thoughts for self-employment as is
having the knowledge and will to strike out on your own. A lot of business
are started on the sideline while being employed fulltime in a regular
job. Indeed, that was RF Cafe's origin. It wasn't until I had confidence
that I could subsist on RF Cafe's revenue level that I left the security
of the best engineering job I ever had to tend to the website full-time
(at a substantial reduction in pay, I will add).
 Every
year or so, Inc magazine does a major poll of successful entrepreneurs
to find out what motivates them (2013
Inc 5000), what decisions they consider to have been the best and
worst for their companies, what they would have done differently, what
they would and would not change about the way their companies have evolved,
how they view the business climate today versus when they first began,
what are the qualities of good leaders, how to select the best employees
and how to dump bad ones, whether to seek out venture capital investors,
how to handle undeserved bad publicity, etc. The September 2013 issue
is an example. It is chock full of graphs and charts to let you see
the responses of the founders and CEOs of the Inc 5000 list of
companies (Portrait
of a Leader). Some might surprise you. For instance, 19%
say their employees view them as a "tough taskmaster." You might think
that would be a big negative, but there are some people that are at
their best when given a requirement and an expectation that the job
be performed as outlined, with little or no room for error. Out of a
list of 21 qualities of an outstanding leader, #1 was trustworthiness
and #21 was likability; in other words, being the best friend of all
your employees and overlooking underperformance is not considered anywhere
near as important as running a company that is successful and keeps
the paychecks coming to employees. That doesn't mean it's okay to be
a tyrant, but you don't have to sacrifice the good of the company to
be everybody's best friend. 29% think achieving a good work-life balance
is "a nice fantasy." What probably doesn't surprise you is that
42% identify finding and keeping good employees and skilled workers
to be the biggest challenge facing leaders. Delegating financial control
to someone else early in the game was the biggest regret. A whopping
93% believe there is a distinction between being a great manager and
being a great leader.
So, out of 5,000 top companies which one ranked numero uno?
Why, Fuhu,
of course! Right, I've never heard of them, either, but then their 3-year
growth in revenue of 42,148% is a tad higher than RF Cafe's similar
growth. Fuhu makes the Nabi, an Android tablet for kids. Number 5,000
is ALL4,
which consults with companies on air quality issues. Tops in engineering
is
Integrity Engineering & Design Solutions (#533 overall), which
advises on design, development, and manifesting in the aerospace, telecom
and military industrial communities.
Sparc
(not the Sun Microsystems' Sparc) headed the Software category with
an overall rating of #14 - they're proud of it, too, as evidenced by
their homepage.
The top telecommunications company was Spoken Communications (#90 overall),
which provides large-enterprise contact centers using a cloud-based
Avaya platform.
 In
the same issue is the
Inc 500 list. Rather than me summarizing the results, you might
consider taking a quick visit to the website. Here is a cool graphic
from the article. No, RF Cafe didn't make the list, and probably
never will. My prices are too dirt cheap and have remained fixed for
years. I could probably double or triple revenue by selling one of those
wonderful full-screen website entry advertisements or by allowing those
beloved ads that pop up onto your computer screen, but something tells
me you wouldn't appreciate it very much, even though the industry has
trained everyone to tolerate them. I don't even set cookies or collect
and sell visitor URLs or e-mail addresses. There's a lot of money to
be made by employing those tactics. Let me know if you'd like to be
subject to any or all of them so maybe I can get onto the 2015 list.
Posted October 6, 2013
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