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Five years ago, I went back to work for someone else briefly. It was a small web development shop in my local area. I was employee #4, after the owner, his wife, and the chief developer. I took over many of the smaller websites that needed to be built, completely freeing my boss from having to worry about them. I talked to clients, gathered specs, and built the website while learning Mambo and Joomla.

During the year I worked there, my boss grew the company from 4 people to 12.

This was an excellent lesson for me to learn. My boss was no slouch when it came to coding, but he also had a great personality. People really liked him. He could get technical points across to business owners without all of the geeky mumbo-jumbo. He was good at bringing clients on board, and he was good at keeping the clients happy.

I learned that if the boss gets away from his coding desk and becomes free to chase business, you could really grow a web development company. I learned the boss had to have the right personality to talk to clients all day, and then translate those conversations to technical specs for developers.

In the last year, I’ve migrated to doing the same thing at 4Web. I’ve gotten away from building sites myself in the last 5 months. Instead, I’m intensely mentoring my partner, Heidi Stanclift. I’m working on new videos for Lynda.com and a new book as well. I’m trying to post to the blog more often, and I’m working on getting more connections through social media. I’m still involved in site projects in that I’m talking with clients and translating their requests to specs for Gwen and Heidi. I’m checking their work to make sure it’s done correctly. I’m also helping to figure out whatever problems arise and hiring developers and designers as required to get the job done.

Getting away from coding started as a necessity. I just had too much other work to do to code, and coding was the one task I could offload to Heidi. But as soon as I did it, I realized what a benefit this was to the business.

This summer, we’ve been so busy we’ve had to bring on another full time person to help us get through all of the work (Gwen Ames).

It was hard for me to leave the coding, something I love intensely. However, that’s been mitigated a bit by learning Joomla 1.6, which has been challenging and quite fun. After Joomla 1.6 goes stable and my books and videos are done, what’s next? I’m hoping for more new things to learn – something that’s rarely hard to find in this field.

The end result is that I’ve learned to have fun in new ways. I never ever thought I’d enjoy writing a book as much as I did for my first one, and as much as I am now with my second. And the movies I’m making now with my fabulous producer, Samara Iodice, at Lynda.com are the high point of this summer, even despite some bad tech karma this last week.

Now: how can Joomla apply these lessons to the project? More in my next post.