One of the most terrifying fun things that goes along with growing a company is adding additional staff. At some point, it gets to the point where you can't do it all. For some organizations, this will happen on Day One. With some other organizations, it will take months, years, or never happen.

There are some people/roles that can be added without an immediate effect on the customer. Adding an Office Manager or Accountant isn't likely to impact your customers directly. It means invoices might be generated/paid more quickly and calls/emails might be answered a bit faster, but the bigger impact is that it frees up your schedule to get back to the important stuff... building your systems. You have to have a lot of trust in these people as most of your most sensitive internal information will be available to them at any time. You have the tough decision of figuring out which information is necessary to do their job while restricting access to the unrelated information.

A couple ofpeople have noted that in my responses - titled "It's the Tech Guy Obviously!" and "What about the Business Guy?" respectively - to Ann Bernard's initial post "The Tech Guy vs The Biz Dev Guy" that I've been hard on the BizDev Guy. As in incredibly hard, ripping him to shreds, openly mocking him, and just short of bringing up elderberries. I'm sorry gentlemen, but it's time to take a look at ourselves...

What does the Tech Guy lack?

When the highly esteemed Zend'er Cal Evans was in DC earlier this week, a number of local DCPHP'ers met up with him for drinks.

One of the hottest topics we discussed was conferences. He - and much of the PHP Community on Twitter - are currently at php|tek in Chicago. Then we have the 2008 DCPHP Conference in less than two weeks. Then we have ZendCon 2008 in September.

And the question always comes up...

Why should I go to these conferences?

Well, they're fun.

But don't tell you boss that.

This is a followup to my previous post - "It's the Tech Guy Obviously!" - which was written in response to Ann Bernard's "Tech Guy vs Biz Dev Guy". As she is my partner in WhyGoSolo, lots of disclaimers apply. An yes, all the pronouns here are male... oh well.

In my first post, I dinged the BizDev Guy pretty hard because - to be blunt - he's ignorant of the technical issues. Which, in my opinion, are the biggest and most fundamental at the beginning. As I noted last time:

The Tech Guy might incorporate as the wrong business structure, he might have a terrible UI, he might not have any market research to support his project. All of those things are easily fixable and since he has a prototype, it's simple to figure those pieces out.

In terms of disclosure - and you couldn't figure it out from this site - I'm a technologist. I always have been and can't imagine being anything other than the Tech Guy sitting at the table. That said, I do tend to have - and share! - business insights and perspective... some of them are even valuable...

Yesterday, my friend and colleague Ann Bernard asked an interesting question in The Tech Guy Vs. The Biz Dev Guy. In fact, I wrote on a similar issue just a couple weeks ago in Managing Technology in a Startup. In that, I focused on making sure there was a Tech Guy at the table in a startup. That technical issues and information were considered on Day One. That the technology was not treated as an afterthought. But Ann's question is a bit different:

Who do you think has the greatest battle to fight and who is best setup for success? The Tech Guy or the Biz Dev Guy??

Earlier this week, I sat on a panel at American University titled "Starting your own Business: Trials and Tribulations". While all of the panelists work in startups, have managed in startups, and have often founded startups, I found myself as the sole technologist in the bunch... speaking to a bunch of MBA grads and budding entrepreneurs.

Update on 27 Apr: I forgot to link to the great pictures taken by the Jobmatchbox team.

Disclaimer: With all due respect, what I describe can easily happen someone without an MBA, I've seen but I'm talking patterns here. ;)

One of the things that often - not always! - drives someone to business school is the desire to start their own company. The flexibility, the power, the excitement, the big idea that they have. No, seriously the *big* idea. Somewhere along the way, the get all the pieces that go into making it happen... they learn about the marketing, the strategy, the presentations, the research, and all the other little bits and pieces.

Once you have code out the door, once you have customers, once you have people actually wanting to give you their money, you reach a certain place with any technology company. You have some attention, people like it, it could even be selling!

Sure, now that you have customers (users in web2.0 language), you have feedback. Everyone has ideas for new features and functionality and has been asking for them, so you - like a good PM - work to prioritize them and figure out what will/won't work with your schedule. In a matter of no time, you're starting to add things to the system and doing new and interesting things. Your customers love you, your bizdev guys love you, and you get great press coverage.

But... isn't this a good thing!?

Well... maybe, but this is also massively dangerous.