Will Bridges

Just in the past 8 months BluePaw Software has went from a company that brings in 3-4k a month to a company that brings in 15-20k a month. I think by the end of the year we will be to 25-30k a month. This is a lot of growth. I remember I was posting articles before about our foreign worker strategy. We adjusted that strategy because we couldn't find any really good, viable and cheap workers. While we aren't abandoning that strategy completely we are postponing it till we have some more resources to spare. We have decided instead to find local candidates that are good programmers and have an interest in Ruby on Rails. From there we believe we can mold them to the type of programmers we want.

Yes, the market is a flood with Ruby on Rails programmers. But, we have difficulty finding good ones. We've went through a lot of programmers that we though were weak or didn't like their additude. I ended up hiring a friend in Virginia that used to be an ASP programmer. I'm currently training him on Rails. I'm doing it because he helped me when I was in need in the past and seems to have a strong desire to learn. I told him I would be watching him though and want to make sure he is learning at a good pace. We are paying him to learn so in that situation you want to make sure the guy is really learning. He's been learning for about 6 weeks now. I'm about to really put him through a test of what he's learned so that should prove interesting.

I find it funny that everybody thinks rails is so easy and that anybody could do it. Yes, any descent script kitty may be able to learn rails, however to actually produce clean code that is reusable is a different story. You really have to keep up to date, watch the plugins list, watch the blogs and keep informed by discussing rails to be a great rails programmer. We believe that, our style of business and our charisma is our edge and what keeps us moving in an upward direction with profits.

I was pretty concerned at first because I had never managed a business to this degree. Yes, I've been a contractor for about 8 years doing independent work as a programmer and even managed a few people from time to time. But, being a CEO made me nervous and growing so quickly proved to be a serious challenge. At some times, I haven't been sure what my role is or if my role is everything. So, I've started to break apart my roles and look for experts that could satisfy those roles better than me. I still do the things I'm unconfortable with to a certain degree but I take guidance in order to do them from people I'm sure are experts. Things like accounting I've completely given to an accounting firm. It's cheaper for them to use their time to do it then it is for me to use my time to do it. Being a good CEO is about good delegation and focusing on the important details by wading through the confustion.