A FIRST PERSON ACCOUNT OF RUNNING A SMALL BUSINESS

It’s a textbook example of how Internet companies morph to fit the rapidly changing digital economy.

Originally a small Web hosting company, L.A.-based Netvolution responded to customer demands by starting to design e-commerce and business-to-business Web sites.

A booming workload led to the 1999 addition of two partners and relocation to fully wired offices in downtown Los Angeles. Jennifer Smith spoke with Netvolution partner Matt Engler about managing such rapid growth in a small company.

“We began as a straight reseller of (space) on other people’s (Web servers) working out of our respective houses. It was an easy way for an entrepreneur to start out as a small business.

“As our number of clients grew, so did the demand for design. Today, we’re generating about 90 percent of our revenues from high-end design.

“We’ve done it without private investment. We have four partners in the business two started in 1997 and the other two came on in February of ’99. We’ll be incorporating soon, and we’re writing a business plan.

“We all sort of migrated to our strengths. I do business development and take care of the administration. Two other partners handle the programming side, and the last partner does the graphics.

“Our clients are small to mid-size businesses. We’ve really developed strength in databases for e-commerce sites. We recently redesigned a site for a large automotive parts warehouse, enabling it for e-commerce so customers can order parts online.

“We’ll be focusing on business-to-business over the next year. We still do put up brochure sites (simple company home pages), but now we’re concentrating on more-complicated sites as our skill set grows.

“We’ve had to work hard to manage our growth. We don’t want to hire a bunch of people, so we hire conservatively. What we’ve tried to do is stair-step. We’ll all work like dogs, then get a new employee, then we get more work and work like dogs again. Bringing in new people and learning how to manage them was an adjustment in and of itself.

“Our strategy from the start has been that we’re not a dot-com. We’re invested in the infrastructure of the Internet. Web sites come and go, but there will always be a need for people to host and build them.”