I was honored earlier this month to be asked to do an interview with DropTheMike.com, an industry-related blog managed by Mike Muise of Register.com, who is also a popular blogger on TheWhir.com and a few other industry hot spots.  Here’s a copy of the interview that should also be available on DropTheMike.com in the near future…

About Cotton:

Cotton is a veteran developer having worked on several hundred projects worldwide, ranging from small business to the Fortune 500.  Today Cotton enjoys software development and website integration with all business models in mind.  Cotton is also the President of Powersite and oversees New Software Development under the Powersite Brand for Pleth Networks. Cotton has served on numerous boards of directors and most recently as the President of a State Tourism Organization. He resides in Conway, Arkansas with his wife Donna and attends The Church Alive, where he is a Youth Leader in his spare time.  Cotton also remains active in many aspects of the development community and interacts frequently in blogs and forums with other members of the development community. Something that a lot of people do not know about Cotton is that he is also an accomplished Artist and has had his works exhibited in various venues.  Cotton is also currently studying photography and aviation as hobbies.

The Interview:

<Dropthemike> We crossed paths professionally several years ago, back in 2000 or so, when you were still in the early stages of your web design business Powersite Design, you also worked for a local hosting company in your area. Can you tell me what it was like during those early years for you?

<Cotton>  I actually wore several different hats way back then, My primary gig was the IT Director at a large Conference Center, my primary function was to coordinate with the Big-Wigs for corporations who were chairing these large conferences.  I worked with them to manage logistics, sound, and networking.  We did a lot of distance learning via T1 line which was kind of pioneer thing in those days, broadband wasn’t a household name then.  Utility Media, the hosting company you are referring to was actually started as a side venture by the management company that operated the conference center I worked for.  When they learned that I had some prior programming skills (had written a few ag-related desktop app’s in the mid 90′s) they asked me to come on board as a designer / developer.  The thing to remember is that this whole thing (Powersite) started out really small in it’s inception, we had like 5 clients at one time and I thought it was really taking off for us, ha.  Over the course of the next two years or so we were actually doing some design, development, and hosting deals with our contacts from the Conference Business so our growth rate was probably above average to say the least.  I started Powersite Design and handled 100% of the development work for Utility Media during those first few years with a skeleton staff of just myself and a few part timers that knew HTML, Flash, and Photoshop pretty well, I also outsourced a lot of programming.  100% of the sites we did in the beginning were just static sites with a little flash and Photoshop mixed in.  All in all they looked pretty good and we gathered some state and national attention by winning a few awards along the way.  We never advertised our business, it grew by word of mouth, that’s probably something I am most proud of when looking back at our business.

I continued on with Powersite for the next year or two until the Conference Center that I was being employed by decided to close their doors to pursue other interests.  I was one of the few staff members that stayed on board for a short time to help tie up lose ends and I kept my office in the conference center and continued to service my growing client list, I think that by this time we had probably 200 or so accounts.  Over the next few years I was able to grow my client base to several hundred clients in order to supplement my salary that was missing from the closing of the Conference Center.  During that time I had a lot of great advisors that worked with me and offered up advice and innovative ideas that helped me to grow my business in a few different directions. 

I began working with a few different ad agencies early on and had high expectations that I would see a lot of work from my relationships with them but that didn’t really pan out the way I thought it would, the bottom line is that a lot of ad agencies, even the larger ones, don’t have but maybe 20 or so clients they do business for.  With margins being as small as they are in the development and hosting industry this didn’t really provide me the growth I was looking for.  Another direction that I pursued was working with some larger development firms that were using PHP, ColdFusion, ASP, and Perl on client projects.  I designed a lot of front-ends for websites that they handled the backend development for.  While this move didn’t really give me as much cashflow as I would have liked at the time it was still pretty lucrative in that I had the opportunity to learn a lot about backend development for the web. 

I am not for sure exactly when it happened but somewhere along the line the requests for small static websites just seemed to slow dramatically.  90% of the requests I was receiving for work seemed to revolve around dynamic site development.  I dove headlong into learning Perl and PHP about this time and called in a few developers that were doing freelance work at the time to help me a long in putting together some pretty impressive sites, of course these sites had a much more impressive price tag on them which finally solved my cashflow problem.  I had enough clients now that my marginal hosting residuals were finally starting to pay the bills.

<Dropthemike> Having been through the challenges of starting your own design company, do you have any advice for other young entrepreneurs in the field who are also looking to head out on their own?

<Cotton> My first advice would be for them to sharpen their skillset’s.  Websites today aren’t so much about flash and fancy as they once were, today websites are more about functionality.  Having a solid background in a programming language like PHP, ASP, or ColdFusion can go a long way.  There are a lot of companies out there that can provide a product, most of which are out of the box type solutions, being able to innovate and bring your own coding skills to the table will help land some jobs. 

Another suggestion for aspiring designers / developers would be for them to first define their own development process before ever going into business.  Good project management skills is something that my Pleth partners, Greg and Stephen Smart bring to the table and it has helped us to grow considerably.

From the Business Aspect, I would recommend that any developer make sure that they don’t undervalue or underprice their services when bidding for a project.  Getting a project by underbidding your competitors bid is great but be sure to leave yourself enough padding in your pricing to cover yourself through the lean times as well as to cover yourself for unforeseen requirements that a client may fail to mention on the front end, my partner Greg calls this “scope creep” and it can be one of the biggest profit killers out there.

<Dropthemike> At what point did you realize you could really make a go of this business? Was it a difficult decision for you to then put everything into the business as your primary source of income?

<Cotton> As I mentioned earlier, I had a pretty good gig initially when laying the groundwork to my development business but it soon went away.  It was a little scary taking the leap to go into business for myself initially but prior to doing so I ran the numbers and made sure that I had a minimum amount of residual income to cover the necessities, (condo mortgage, car, food, etc.), I’m not going to say that it wasn’t tough making ends meet at the onset but I honestly can’t really remember being in that big of a cashflow crunch.  I will say that there were probably some scary times.  Fortunately, at the time I started my business I was still single and lived in a 1400 sq. foot studio / condo and had a very nice working arrangement when it came to office space.

<Dropthemike> Today you are also running your own hosting company (along with other partners), can you share with us why you decided to also get into that business as well? Was it something you always knew you would get into?

<Cotton> The opportunity came up in 2002 – 2003 for me to actually purchase one of my competitors that did development and hosting.  Remember, at the time I was just doing development work and outsourcing all of my hosting to Utility Media.  This purchase allowed me to jump into the hosting industry on my own and finally get my feet wet.  Being the host and the developer has it advantages big time, don’t ever let anyone tell you anything any different.  Having total control of my development and hosting environment allowed my skillset to really evolve. 

I went on for a few years operating a fairly large hosting and development business with a staff of 3 folks, counting myself, another developer, and a lady to handle the accounting.  It was a full time gig and I often times found myself working around the clock to make sure that projects came out on time and within budget for my clients.  I wasn’t as discouraged with the time investment that a lot of folks would have felt I don’t think partly due to the fact that I was loving what I was doing for a living. 

Along the way I had built a lot of close relationships with some of my clients, one of those relationships turned into paydirt for me.  My current partner Stephen Smart, was tasked with managing the web presence for a large manufacturing client I had.  He and I worked closely for a long time on a wide range of projects and the whole time I had in the back of my mind, “man, this guy is pretty detailed”, i honestly dreaded to see his number come up on caller id because i knew that he was going to want something in-depth added to their website.  Our working relationship went a step further when he and his brother Greg came down for a visit one day while I was in the middle of one of my busiest weeks.  They expressed an interest in what I was doing so talks began to take place about the possibility of us starting our own business.  It didn’t take much to convince me that by this point I needed a lot of help managing my business, I was pretty far behind on client projects and I hadn’t touched my email in a day or two.  Pleth was born!

Having been a developer for a while I knew exactly what I wanted in a hosting company.  My partners and I built Pleth from a Developers Perspective and spared no expense in putting together our business model.  We initially started working with a contact I had from my previous hosting acquisition to handle our network infrastructure but after a few months we decided that we weren’t progressing in the direction we were wanting so we severed our partnership with that provider and started building our hosting infrastructure at the Planet.  Today we have continued our close working relationship with the Planet and are in our own Private Rack Environment at their Dallas NOC. 

Today our typical client projects have a budget of around $10k on startup. If you would have told me this about 8 years ago I would have laughed at you but that’s the honest truth.  We still from time to time when scheduling allows will take on a project with a smaller budget but I would say that this is our average project.