So just when I was pondering this aspect, I got a link via @jkleske that fitted perfectly. In his blog, Toni Schneider from Automattic (of WordPress fame) lists “5 reasons why your company should be distributed“:

1. Your employees will love it
2. You can hire great people wherever you find them
3. You will use better communication tools
4. You can still be social
5. Your offices will be more fun

Go read the article for his explanations, and read the comments as well.

I’m convinced that building myself a distributed company is the way to go. On the technical level, the Internet and especially Cloud Computing prove that virtual, distributed systems are superior to monolithic ones. It doesn’t matter any more where a server is located if it’s well connected, so you can choose simply by price and performance.

Since my company will take advantage of those principles, it’s only consequent to apply them to the company itself, isn’t it?

At the beginning of the week, I decided to offer our “Perl Meisterkurs” online seminar from now on in regular intervals. I planned three courses for April, July and October, created their registration pages, and sent informational posts to several blogs and social networks. Training is the most intensive and time-consuming work I do currently, but it helps getting in some cash that will be needed when we have to expand our IT infrastructure.

Side note: Maybe it was organizing a Perl online training that triggered some sleeping Perl development enzymes in me. On Tuesday, I picked up my old project CGI::Session::Auth, a Perl Module I published as free software many years ago. I fixed a few bugs and finally implemented suggestions I got back in 2008 for improving the documentation. Because I now use Bazaar as my version control software, I moved the project from BerliOS to Launchpad where I’ll hopefully maintain it a bit better now.

Website building

On Saturday, we got the finished design for our new Drupal hosting website. We’re now working on the site content to get it online ASAP.

Communication infrastructure

Now that first business contacts are forming, telephone communication becomes very important. I tested and chose Sipgate Team as our virtual PBX system. We got a set of phone numbers that we’re able to distribute among our VOIP accounts by single user or by team. Voicemail is integrated and delivers incoming messages via email; new message notifications are sent as SMS. The system is easy to configure and has a good cost structure.

Family

Carolin and Amalia will return home next Wednesday, so the days of my all-day quiet home office are coming to an end. It’s a real challenge to balance work and family life if both happen at the same place, but to me it’s a challenge worth taking on.

When my new tax consultant told me on Tuesday what amount of tax return I can expect for 2008 (cough), I could not help but wonder why I didn’t get help with my taxes earlier.

Many hours this week went into my talk titled “Drupal in the Cloud”. I held it at DrupalCamp which took place in Essen over the weekend. Judging from the questions I got from the audience, I hit an interesting topic. After the talk, I had conversations with several Drupal service providers that I had start thinking about moving their hosting to us. This and the praise I got for my presentation made the journey worthwhile. If only the storm on Sunday wouldn’t have disrupted train traffic so thoroughly that I ended up at my brother’s place at midnight because I just couldn’t make it all the way home.

I’ve decided to change our web meeting service provider. Up until now, I’d used GoToMeeting to do webinars and online trainings. It worked okay; only an audio problem that made people sound like the Chipmunks when I used an USB headset on the Mac had been annoying me for some weeks. Not until Acquia recently switched from GoToWebinar to WebEx, I realized that an important part of our customer base couldn’t join our webinars in the first place: There’s no Linux client for GoToMeeting. It didn’t take me much more time to decide to switch to WebEx, too.

For starters, we won’t incorporate. I discussed my plans with my tax consultant and she advised me not to incorporate early on but start lightweight as a sole proprietorship company.

What happened

How did it come that, amidst a recession of all things, I decided to leave my corporate shelter to start my own business?

One could  assume I got tired of commuting every day for more than two hours. But the opposite is true: My one-hour train ride to and from the office often was more productive than double the time in the office. I have noise-blocking earphones, so on the train I got interrupted at most once an hour. Try this sharing an office with two other people. Salary reasons then? Well, there certainly are people getting paid a lot more for doing less work and having less responsibility. But no, I got enough to get along fine, and money isn’t my top motivation for sure.

The real reason is that I felt I wasn’t growing any more, speaking in a professional sense. I realized that certain conditions to further develop my skills and talents had vanished over time. (Maybe I’ll describe those conditions a bit more at another time.) I felt a growing incompatibility with my work environment and when I had the opportunity to sign a dissolution contract in October, I decided to take it.

Since then, I’ve been doing a bit of freelance work from home (or my “office desk” at Starbucks). More importantly, I caught up on the paternity leave I didn’t take when Amalia was born. It feels so great to have quality time with my family and at the same time enjoy the freedom to work on the things I have a passion for!

I’ve thought hard about my next steps. Shouldn’t I look for another job providing me and my family security? Oh shoot, it’s 2010 and job security a thing of the past. Going into another employment has virtually the same risk as starting your own business nowadays.

But working hard in IT management would at least grant me a decent salary over the next few years, wouldn’t it? Yes, it probably would. But why work hard for other people’s wallet when I could do the same for my own — and towards my own goals and to my own rules?

After reading an informative book on how to properly start a business in Germany, I read “Crush It!“, “Escape from Cubicle Nation” and “Meconomy“. And then I decided to go on a new journey of personal and professional growth by starting a full-time business.

Going freestyle

Now, what kind of business? I’ve been thinking hard about that question and also talked about it with some friends. I still haven’t finished my business concept yet, but it’ll certainly involve the things I’m passionate about: high performance information technology, open source software, consulting and training services.

It’ll also be about finding new ways of doing things. That’s why I chose “Freistil Consulting” as the company name.

What lies ahead

As I said, I’m working on the business concept. I’ve done a rough business model, but the detailed business plan sketching out all the strategic and financial points will still require some effort: exploring my strengths and weaknesses, checking on chances and threats, talking with my tax consultant, my financial advisor, and, most importantly, with potential clients.

The number one condition is already met, though: I have the official support of my family, for which I’m very grateful.

At the same time, I’m working on the technical side of things, writing concepts as well as building a basic IT infrastructure. I finally understand the general enthusiasm for Amazon EC2.

From now on, I’m going to write regular posts about my experiences growing (with) my business. Having just discovered Weeknotes, it’ll probably be in a weekly format. Is there something you’re especially interested in? And please tell me your thoughts in the comments, I’ll highly appreciate it!

The creative congregation of the Church of Mac seems especially interested in which tools help in getting things done. Summing up many conversations I had on blogs, IM, Twitter and in real life (gasp!), I put together this mind map of the tools I use to collect ideas, thoughts as well as important documents I need to refer to.

In another article, I’ll describe my work and data flow when I use those tools.

Take a look and please tell me in the comments what tools we have in common and what your recommendations are!

A boss creates fear, a leader confidence. A boss fixes blame, a leader corrects mistakes. A boss knows all, a leader asks questions. A boss makes work drudgery, a leader makes it interesting. A boss is interested in himself or herself, a leader is interested in the group.
(Russell H. Ewing)

Carmine Gallo even wrote a book about his presentation style named “The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs”. And in this SlideShare presentation, he summarizes the key points which push Steve’s presentations from good to great.

Interesting, right? I recommend you take the time to watch his MacWorld 2008 keynote (again) and learn how he not only gets his message across, but how he really hammers it home.

(Image courtesy of Dr. Hemmert)

Another year comes to an end, and it’s been a good one. So I say Thank You to all my friends and readers and to everyone who I met and had a good time during this year.

May the blessing of Christmas be upon you! Enjoy the holidays and have a good start into a new year called 2010.

But the honeymoon was over when I upgraded to Snow Leopard. That’s when the NAS Navigator Software coming with the LinkStation stopped working — and with it the auto-wakeup function. My support request was answered in the way of “Apple broke it with their OS upgrade, so pester them instead of us”. Take the “inexpensive” and put in “cheap” instead.

The straw that finally broke the camel’s back was when, two weeks ago, the status LED on the LinkStation started blinking frantically and I couldn’t switch the device off any more without yanking out the power cable. Trying to log into the administration interface didn’t work any more either. Looking through the support forum, I found that it’s a common problem that the LinkStation forgets its administrator account! And it seems the support staff couldn’t come up with something other than “Pull the cable out a few times, which will enable emergency mode, then you can do a firmware rewrite”. Well, I value my data. And I value my time as well, so I spent it instead on ordering a Drobo.

Fortunately, Cyberport currently offers a discount on the Drobo bundle which also contains the optional network extension called DroboShare.

First, I have to admit that the Drobo plays in a different league than the LinkStation Live. Since it houses up to four disks, it’s a good deal larger and, of course, more expensive. But you get back a lot more value, too.

Data stored on the Drobo gets replicated across disks (obviously you need at least two then), so if one disk fails, you can replace it without losing any data. What makes Drobo different from the usual RAID storages is that the disks don’t have to be of equal size. If an old 250 GB disk fails, you don’t have to look for a used one on eBay. You just replace it with a 1 TB disk and Drobo uses the additional space. Also, if you run out of space, you simply pull out a disk and put in a bigger one.

After the first week, I can say that it’s working very well. The only thing the storage is missing is a proper standby mode, because the heat generated by the disks is pushed out by a not so quiet fan and the Drobo sits right outside of our bedroom.

But with the good reputation the Drobo has in the tech community and the data security it provides, I might now sleep even better than before.