It’s nice to see some others in the same boat.

Still it feels like luxury in the office on the Saturday when I can stick my headphones on choose to finish an entire task uninterrupted

I’ve just ordered a few of the books mentioned here, including The E-myth Revisited - thanks. I hope they were affiliate links you put up Jim LOL.

I have to come home and work at night and on the weekends to do all the regular work. I guess management itself is a full time job. Fun and interesting, but a LOT of work! (You just don’t see any tangible results…other than those that the employees produce.)

As far as reading goes, I’m still on the basics (One Minute Manager/Getting Things Done etc. ) I’ll be checking the others mentioned here.

My biggest problem is knowing where to spend my time. My team like having me on call for them (ad hoc training etc) but equally I need to get my head down to write quotes/documents. Time management is helping there (GTD) and finding the right people to take roles off my hands (then supporting them).

Regular wednesday meetings with full disclosure have worked very well for us. Using the GTD mentality - you need to get that 12000 ft view of everyone’s progress.

“Motivating Employees” is also a good read, by Anne Bruce & James S. Pepitone. Great topics including motivating small groups (teams) of employees, which should be right up your alley

Thanks for stopping by Jill - I always appreciate views from the Queen of SEO :). I’d love to get you to stop by our offices some time! (we’re not too far!)

I really liked “The E-Myth Revisited” and plan to try to base my company around it as much as possible over time.

One thing I forgot to mention is one of the most overwhelmingly successful companies I ever worked for had quarterly meetings on a SATURDAY of all times, from 9-12.

Everyone from the janitor to the CEO gave a brief presentation basically stating their achievements since the last meeting, what they were currently working on, and what their goals were for the next 1 or 2 quarters. It gave everyone accountability in front of the whole company and the CEO and sales people put actual numbers on the screen with the threat of DEATH if anyone leaked this proprietary and confidential information.

At first everyone bitched and moaned about having to waste time working on a small presentation, wasting a weekend day, etc. but after a couple of meetings the entire company started to see how the entire team worked together as a unit. You would notice how EVERYONE started to get vocal when weaklinks were uncovered as there was no hiding from the facts but the flipside was the overall enthusiasm from the group when we hit or exceeded the sales projections with everyone behind it.

In our case, we grew stronger by the month as everyone was doing everything to make the sales jobs as easy and efficient as possible. More customer issues hindering sales that were easily solved most of the time came out of these group meetings than anything else. We didn’t drill into details at the time and derail the debriefing, but new agenda items were set to resolve before the next quarter.

Don’t know if you’ve ever tried this, but it definitely stops the complaining that nobody knows what’s going on.

It was fantastic unless you partied too hard on Friday night…

You’re going to do a super job–there’s no doubt about that. To me the biggest difference between a “level 4″ leader & a “level 5″ leader was the humility component–a leader who simply acts & enacts rather than preaching & showboating. To a large extent, you’ve proven that point several times with your reluctance to talk about your own sites, development of exclusive in-house tools, etc. Keep doing that solid work and your team will only get better by rallying behind you.

As for reading, there is one that is a no-brainer. A friend introduced me to this book long ago and I never forgot about it. The author was a driving force behind a Yahoo incubator in the mid-90’s as well as a leader in the creation of strategic partnerships between companies that would just “gel” really well together. Ok, enough of a preamble:

Love is a Killer App by Tim Sanders. Absolutely a must-read. Don’t buy it–I’ll send it to you (and you’ll see why after you read the book!)

Cheers,
*ap