Building an online business…online

People are always surprised to find out just how distributed Alfresco is as an organization. Aside from a small hive in London, it’s hard to find more than two Alfrescans in the same city. The same is largely true of MySQL and a number of new open source companies (MuleSource comes to mind).

At Alfresco in the US, we have people in Austin, Boston, San Francisco, Denver, Salt Lake City, Atlanta, and New York City. Even where we have people in the same cities (there are now four of us in Salt Lake City), we don’t have offices and only see each other at conferences or other gathering points. Given this, how do we keep in touch? Sometimes I feel like we’re missing out on the “watercooler discussions,” but more often than not I think we gain by dropping the waste that can come with an office.

Here are the basic principles of how we work:

1. If you’re not online, you don’t exist. This means that we talk all day, every day over IM. We talk over the phone, too, but our watercooler discussions happen over IM. Therefore, people need to always online.

   One of our members – who shall remain nameless – came to us from a big technology company. When on the phone, he’d set his IM to “Unavailable.” But if we’re on a conference call, that’s precisely when we need to have him online. A huge amount of chatter goes back and forth during these calls.

2. If you can’t close a deal online/over the phone, you belong at another company. In an online world, you have to follow SugarCRM’s sales model: “Go big, lose early.” There is no time to fritter away months with on-site visits – that’s the proprietary model where buyers pay for the privilege to stare at a salesperson in their lobby. In an open source world, the software has to (mostly) sell itself. We hire people who are good over email and good over the phone.
3. Email should not remain unread/unanswered for more than a day. We have to rely on everyone else in the org to respond to email quickly and comprehensively. We don’t have the luxury of walking over to someone’s cubicle to pose a question. Every email must be answered, every day.
4. Emails must be directed to the people from whom a response is needed. Because so much of our business happens over email, it’s easy to skim through email and miss deliverables and what-not that have been assigned to you. Therefore, we try to call out (often in the subject line) who needs to pay particular attention to an email.
5. Software should be supportable online. This means that documentation needs to be solid (self-support), and processes need to be in place to use web conferencing/etc. to “remote” into an organization’s server to fix problems. I also think something like Meebo Rooms or some way to online chat with customers is important (though we’re not yet doing this).

These are just a few of the principles that guide our online business. Nothing revolutionary here, but it’s different enough that each new recruit we bring in takes some time to acclimate to the Alfresco business environment.

And despite what I said above, keep in mind that there are absolutely instances (many, in fact) where customers require a person sitting in their office, looking over their IT environment, etc. Could such things be done online? Yes, but old habits die hard….

I’d be interested to hear how your business functions online, too.