In the beginning, we approached new business with a take-what-we-can-get mentality. This simply means that we’d take any and all work that came our way. The goal was do as much work as we can for as many different clients and work really hard so that we could do it all at a high level. This also meant compromising on hours and budget in order to get happy customers.

This was fine then, but as our business matures, we find that this is ultimately just plain wrong.

Your relationships need to be based on mutual beneficiality. The work we do should provide good solutions that impact our client’s businesses and in turn they should value the work we do appropriately.

Touchy-feeliness aside, this makes business sense when it comes to bottom line. We have some clients that don’t really value our work, we see this when they try to suck every last minute out of us for free and expect something for nothing. This is shit. And, this is not a good relationship.

I believe that if you truly value something (whether it be a product in general or a certain property of a specific brand), you’ll pay what it’s worth, even if the opportunity is there to get it free. For example, I ran over my 40 hours of Pandora for this month. I could have switched to Grooveshark.com, or hell, even signed up for another Pandora account and had 40 more for free. On the contrary, because I value the service provided, I paid for the unlimited hours.

Lesson: Expect no different from our clients and only get into relationships where the work we do is truly valued.

Recently, I added the following tag line to my blog: thoughts and experiences in starting a career as an entrepreneur. (I thought by placing the focus of my blog on the single thing that consumes nearly 80% of my waking hours I would be encouraged to post more frequently while still capturing things that are important to me, but that’s neither here nor there).

I think the spin I am puting on things is an interesting one. It’s not just about being an entrepreneur, it’s not just about being a first-time entrepreneur. Rather, it’s about being an entrepreneur at the very start of my career, which, if you think about it, is an interesting problem.

You may have heard something along the lines of, “academics are important, but there is no substitute for experience.” [Explitive deleted]! This is so [explitive deleted] true!

I’ve found that in all businesses, but in marketing and interactive especially, the common path for the entrepreneur is to spend a good chunk at one or more big agencies, build some good relationships, work on some cool projects, and sooner or later spin off an agency of their own.

And this makes perfect sense. It’s much easier to do something after you’ve watched someone else do it first. It’s even easier if you’ve assisted that someone in the task. All of that base business-running knowledge that you get by working at different businesses surely helps a great deal when building your own.

So what about us?

Well, the one thing we lack is any real experience. The core at dynamIt are not only first-time entrepreneurs, but we are first time professionals. This lack of experience has put us in some tough situations before, there have certainly been a lot of “wow” moments along the way.

Take for example the concept of pricing. What is an appropriate hourly rate for the type and quality of work we do? This is a tricky question, price yourself too high and be precieved as a rip-off, price yourself too low and do not expect to be taken seriously. Now, imagine trying to answer this question when you’ve never worked in the industry and never purchased from the market.

So, how do we do it? How do we get up to speed? Answer: we imbibe, we soak it all in. Nick spends at least four mornings a week getting coffee or breakfast with various professionals both industry related and not. We’ve got an outstanding advisory board (yeah, they’re good). We surround ourselves with excellent mentors at every chance we get. And, if that doesn’t quite do the trick we try, fail, try again.

When people talk about the importance of (industry) experience, believe me, they’re not making it up. We’ve come a long way already, but those “Ah ha!” moments never cease.

Being a young entrepreneur I am often faced with the question of my age. Is he for real? Can he get the job done right? On time and on budget? And, it does not help that I look like I am about 5 years younger than I actually am.

I was recently featured in an article in Xavier Alumni Magazine on the subject. See it here.

Allow me to reiterate. Yes, we are young, but we do have experience. We have released numerous sites, many working with big brands. We let the portfolio speak for us.

In fact, our youth is actually an advantage. Web is a fickle beast. Being in this industry, we have seen many shifts. For example, when we started out, there really wasn’t much in the area of social media. There was no Facebook API to develop for because there was no such thing as Facebook. It’s things like this in which our youth actually enables us to be on the forefront of our industry.

We’ve seen design trends change along way. We’ve seen the rise of various web services and web platforms, many of which we’ve leveraged to our clients’ benefit.

We get web. We really don’t know what it is like to live without it. Honestly, for these reasons I’d be wary of a firm whose every member is over 35. Just sayin’.