Do You Think Co-C.E.O.s Can Work?

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Is Appster succeeding because it has two chief executives, Mark McDonald (left) and Josiah Humphrey? Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Today's Question

What small-business owners think.

As Sarah Max reports in an article we’ve just published, Mark McDonald and Josiah Humphrey started developing and optimizing websites as teenagers, skipped college and started their web and mobile app company, Appster, in 2011. They eschewed outside funding and put what little money they had into office space, setting up shop in downtown Melbourne, Australia, right next to Google and IBM. And then they settled into their shared role as chief executive officers.

So far at least, the arrangement seems to be working. In three years, the co-C.E.O.s have expanded the company to $10 million in annual revenue and 110 employees, and they are in the process of adding 50 to 60 employees this quarter. While the two chief executives are not opposed to bringing in a professional C.E.O. eventually, they think there are more benefits than pitfalls to working side by side for now. “We think we’ve achieved these results because there are two of us, not in spite of it,” Mr. McDonald said.

What do you think? Please read the article and tell us if you have had any experience with an organization run by multiple leaders.

Today in Small Business: A Lesson in Pricing

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Dashboard

A daily roundup of small-business developments.

What’s affecting me, my clients and other small-business owners today.

The Economy

  • Existing home sales for September surged to their fastest pace of 2014.
  • Unemployment rates fell in 31 states during September.

Retail

Pricing

Read more…

What Would You Pay for This Wholesale Distributor?

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Creating Value

Are you getting the most out of your business?

In my posts I often take a look at businesses for sale. There are always good lessons to learn on both the buy side and the sell side of a transaction. This post is a little different because the transaction has already been completed.

The business that was sold is a wholesale distributor of electrical parts that is in the Western United States and that sells parts and supplies to electrical contractors. The business is split between small contractors that come to the company’s eight locations and large contractors whose parts are delivered to construction sites.

It was a second-generation family business that had more than 27 shareholders. Most were not involved in the day-to-day operation, and they were ready to cash out. (As with all of my posts on businesses for sale, I had no stake in the sale. Nor can I certify that any of the information provided to me by the investment banker on the sale, Kevin Short, is accurate.) Read more…

Answering the Hard Questions on the A.C.A.: Does the Employer Mandate Apply to Your Business?

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The Agenda

How small-business issues are shaping politics and policy.

Today’s post, another in our series attempting to answer lingering questions about the Affordable Care Act’s impact on small businesses, goes to one of the fundamental issues the law raises for employers: the responsibility to offer health insurance to workers or face a penalty. The employer mandate, as it’s known, applies to companies with at least 50 employees. Originally, it was supposed to take effect at the beginning of this year.

Last year, however, the administration put off enforcing the mandate until 2015. By last spring, the mandate, staunchly opposed by most Republicans, had lost the support of some Democrats as well. And in April, a former Obama administration spokesman predicted that the employer mandate “will be one of the first things to go.”

So the first question for employers is, Will the mandate actually take effect next year? And the answer is: Not for companies with fewer than 100 employees. Read more…

Today in Small Business: Is Apple Pay the Future of Money?

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Dashboard

A daily roundup of small-business developments.

What’s affecting me, my clients and other small-business owners today.

The Economy

Employees

Technology

Read more…

A Soap Start-Up Looks to Clean Up (and Do Some Good)

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Gentry Lane: “I’d like to have 10,000 subscribers within a year." Andrea Hausmann
Start

The adventure of new ventures.

The pitch: Proper Soap sells an oversize bar soap that is French milled, vegetable-based and natural (vegan, no parabens), and that uses both olive oil and shea butter as moisturizers. Its fragrance is “elderflower with lychee, pears and marine notes,” said the company’s founder, Gentry Lane. “We use 17 fragrance notes. I have a really sophisticated scent because I’m appealing to a really sophisticated customer” — customers who, like her, choose to vote with their wallets, patronizing socially conscious companies and brands. For each Proper product sold, 50 cents is donated to water sanitation and water-access projects in the developing world.

Location: Los Angeles.

Employees: None.

Started: June. Read more…

Growing American Exports, One Small Business at a Time

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Capitalizing on China

An American tries to expand into China.

The International Trade Administration is like no other federal agency. Its theme for this year is “Dare to Be Great” — not the kind of rallying cry you expect from government administrators.

I’ve written before about the United States Commercial Service and how it can help small companies looking to do business overseas. Recently, I met with Stefan M. Selig, America’s under secretary for international trade. Mr. Selig heads the International Trade Administration, which oversees the group.

“We are the only part of the government that is charged specifically with helping businesses,” he said. “There is no topic more important to a C.E.O. then how they grow their business — and if you talk about where growth is going to come from in the next decade for U.S. companies, it is going to be in tackling some of these overseas opportunities.” Read more…

Today in Small Business: How Hackers Can Stick Businesses With Huge Phone Bills

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Dashboard

A daily roundup of small-business developments.

What’s affecting me, my clients and other small-business owners today.

Around the Country

Data Security

Employees

The Economy

Read more…

Meeting Face-to-Face With Our Unhappy Customer

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Managing

An old-line business tries to compete in a high-tech economy.

Fred Warmbier, at the board, designing a "plan-do-study-act" experiment at Finishing Technology. Finishing Technology

After the complaint I described in my last post, we needed and we got a face-to-face meeting with our demanding customer. We weren’t sure what to expect from this client who wanted to begin a 100-percent inspection of all of the parts we process for them because their inspectors had found six bad parts out of the hundreds of thousands we had finished.

When we walked into the business, it was obvious that the company’s employees were more tense than we were. In fact, despite the high stakes, we weren’t very tense at all. In part, this was because I was thinking more along the lines of the many helpful comments my last post received from readers. I was no longer thinking that our customer was trying to punish us; instead, I saw them as people caught up in a large system with a lot of rules. Their hands may well have been tied in regard to what actions they could take after finding bad parts.

Nevertheless, we needed to get to some resolution about their intention to charge us for a 100-percent inspection, and to figure out what to do about the future — because we can’t afford to lose this client, but we also can’t afford to pay for those inspections. Read more…

Today in Small Business: Paying Retail Employees $50,000 a Year

By
Dashboard

A daily roundup of small-business developments.

What’s affecting me, my clients and other small-business owners today.

The Economy

Employees

Management

Marketing

Social Media

Ebola

Start-Up

Around the Country

  • A major settlement means Detroit may soon be pulling itself out of bankruptcy.
  • Regulators in Washington State are trying to make it easier for financial institutions to track customers in the marijuana industry.
  • A new competitor to Uber in New York will raise driver pay.
  • There’s a baby boom in North Dakota.
  • Detroit’s mayor apologizes to business owners who were ticketed by mistake for graffiti art.

Around the World

  • An Australian restaurant is making soup out of waste.
  • Office Depot plans to cut 1,100 jobs in Europe.

Washington

  • The JOBS Act was supposed to allow smaller investors to buy shares of private companies through crowdfunding.

Online

Opportunities

  • After last year’s rough winter and with forecasts for another snowy season, some small-business owners are planning to make money.

Technology

Gene Marks owns the Marks Group, a Bala Cynwyd, Pa., consulting firm that helps clients with customer relationship management. You can follow him on Twitter.