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> > > HOME / MANAGE / BUSINESS / RUNNING YOUR BUSINESS / Losing
Control Of Your Company: Lessons from eFront Trick 1: Great Offers The reasons most people sign away portions of their company are money and security. The webmasters that became involved with eFront realized they'd save a lot of money in hosting fees and were enthusiastic about receiving a share of the advertising revenue. Most were blinded so much by these things that they failed to ignore other clauses. They weren't allowed to accept advertising from any other sources. If you had a successful Amazon referral scheme in place, tough! It sounds obvious but losing control is unavoidable. That's what it means to lose control of your company. Don't think it only means losing control over the color scheme or who you can hire and fire. Giving away your company for a bit of cash each month might be okay for the first few months, but soon you'll realize that you're just a cog in a machine and that 'your baby' has become a site entirely controlled by a large corporation. The first rule of giving away control of your company is to understand the terms fully, and not to be only guided by the positive results. Imagine the negative results too. Trick 2: Less Work "If you sign control of your site over to us we'll hire two people to help you work on the site and we'll sort out all the advertising for you! We'll even provide the hosting for free." Wow! Free hosting and extra staff!.. You might be excited that you'll have some extra hands on deck and that you won't have to pay those annoying bandwidth fees anymore, but before you sign away a portion of your business, take stock of your business and see what it is really costing to run. It's simple. Take a sheet of paper and divide it into two columns. On one side put 'Expenses' and on the other side put 'Income'. On the expense side make a list of all of the money you spend each month to keep the business/site going. Domain name fees, hosting fees, telephone calls, freelance workers.. On the other site put any income from advertising deals, referral sales or work you receive through the site. We only tend to take a mental tally of our expenses and income every few months or so, and things may have changed since then. If you realize that you're not making a large loss every month after all, you can use this knowledge at the bargaining table. You might be willing to offer a sub-50% share instead of a much larger one. If you believe you can make a profit on your own within the next few months, why hand a share over to someone else? It's your business and you could keep all the profits! The second rule is to realize what you have and to work out if you could actually create a better company/site by continuing alone, or with friends and family.
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