Ever since the start we’ve been confronted by ageism. People look at us and immediately dismiss us because we are young. This used to just be the way it was, and we expected it. To be quite honest, when we were just starting out at the age of 19, I would hope people would question us due to our age, I know I would.

That being said, first impressions are one thing, but once you’ve been successfully doing business with us for a period of time, I expect to treated with the same respect as any older colleague.

Time and time again, however, we see otherwise. In the past, we have had partnerships for 2+ years where we had successfully launched multiple projects for our partners largest clients, only to still be treated like children.

Recently, we have been trying to expand our office space only to be ignored and bullied by our building’s lease managers. We asked are “older” guy to talk to them and suddenly we have the lease signed and construction beginning a week later. And, when they need something they pretty much ignore the rest of us and go straight to him. This one really frustrates me. I’ve been paying the rent on time, every time for the last 16 months and I’m now looking to double my rent and they can’t take me seriously?

I just don’t understand it. Do we need to act more professionally? Do we need to perform better? Or is it a simple as us needing to age 10 years before this nonsense ends?

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.

Simply put, we are so very lucky to have an incredible advisory board.

As young entrepreneurs we don’t have all the answers, in fact we don’t even have half the answers. Decisions we make come from our sense of logic and the limited related experiences we do have. And though we are fairly intelligent young men and rapid learners, we still struggle with many business decisions: should we pursue this project or that one? When do we hire on additional staff? The list goes on.

Thankfully, we do have an excellent advisory board, a small panel of true business experts that are kind enough to sit down with us once a month and help us grow our company. These guys are more than just legit business minds, they are also trusted friends that care about our success.

I think that makes all the difference. We know that no matter how much one course of action makes sense, if these guys say otherwise, we should listen.

Recently, our board has helped us form a plan for future growth and has put us on the path. More on this later.

In brief, having knowledgeable, trusted advisors allows us to work with confidence toward the success of our business as a whole.

I came across an interesting article from 37 signals yesterday. It talks about how there is a very natural progression from side project to full time business that people often overlook.

The natural evolutions from side project to full-time business.

You don’t often hear about this side of the entrepreneur’s story. The popular story is about the pitch, the business plan, etc and perhaps VC is involved. You hear about taking off, full-steam ahead, living in the one-room office, and working 120 hours a week.

But, this idea of starting out with a side project and maturing it into a business while keeping your day job is nothing new to us. It’s how we did it. Sure, it helped that our “day job” was being students. But, as a couple of young guys bootstrapping a business, it made sense to us.

That is not to say that starting up was not a challenge, I mentioned basically living in a one-room office (yeah, we’ve done that) and working 120 hour weeks (check).

Now that we’re afloat we need to figure out how to turn this organic growth into strategic growth so we can really take off.

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.

As a Christmas gift last year, I received a 6 months subscription to Netflix. It’s perhaps the best thing ever. (I could end the post right here and feel good about it, but simple praise is not the real reason I’m writing).

I utilize the Netflix online streaming probably even more than I do DVDs by mail. It’s great, a huge library of online movies I can stream whenever I want. Well, two nights ago I went to throw on a movie and found that their streaming service was down. I was a bit disappointed, but Hulu filled my movie-watching void for that night.

What really makes Netflix special to me is the e-mail that I received this morning. It was a simple letter of apology attached to a 2% credit on my next bill. In a few short paragraphs they said, “I’m sorry we screwed up, let us compensate you for the loss in service.”

It’s not much, I know, but equate this to when your cable TV is out for a day or two (which has happened to me more often than I think it should, thank you Time Warner.) Does the cable company ever make an effort to apologize? Would they ever adjust your bill for loss of service? Simple answer: No.

Thank you, Netflix.

So, I got this crazy idea back in late March that for the summer I was going to do something fun, exciting, risky, scary, and cool all at once. That was, get a motorcycle. Most would agree the motorcycle does not exactly fit my personality. I’m typically quiet, reserved, and cautious. Nevertheless, I do have an adventurous side that yearns for excitement, he talked me into it.

When this idea first popped into my head, I had never been on a bike before, I had no idea how to ride, and the even thought of zipping down the road at 50+ mph had my stomach churning. It was not something that I had be waiting to do for a long time, the thought never crossed my mind in the past.

Long story short, I am proud of myself. When I came to the conclusion that riding a motorcycle would fulfill my criteria (fun, exciting, cool, risky, scary), I just did it. I got my temps, took and passed the Motorcycle Ohio course, purchased a bike, licensed the bike (and myself) and started riding to work, all within 6 weeks. I didn’t waste any time debating it, talking about it, thinking about it, musing over it, etc. I made the choice and then sprang right into action.

To often, I see people talk about some brilliant idea for the longest time and never take it anywhere. I’ve seen this in business on an occasional project where one will dote on an issue that is not all that important anyway thus hurting progress and blowing up timeline and budget. Sure, some critical thinking is essential, a little more can be beneficial as well, but after that, the quicker you can get to an action point, the better.

Luckily, the guys that I work with at dynamIt have a knack for finding that great balance between thought and action.

My advice: Do work. Get shit done.

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’.

Tonight, I attended the TechColumbus Innovation Awards. dynamIt was nominated in two distinct categories, Outstanding Service and Best Technology Team. We did not win either, but I never expected to win. In fact, I was honored just to be in the same room as groups like Ohio Health, Battelle, and The Ohio State University. There is no shame for dynamIt in losing to The Research Institute at Children’s Hospital under the topic of technological innovation.

The event was so-so. It certainly felt like a big deal as over 1000 guests filled The Grand Ballroom and the Columbus Convention Center, but it felt sort of glossed over, like it was more talk than anything. Sure, there was some impressive work on display, but there was also a lot that was rather dull and to me seemed common, not innovative. [Plus, the food sucked and at well over $100 a head I was disappointed in the lack of an open bar.]

So, is what we do really innovative? I think not. To me, innovation is dreaming up something that has never been done and executing. Innovation is game-changing, not to few, but to many. Innovative implies new, fresh, BIG.

We are certainly good problem solvers and we execute well, but how widely felt is our work? We often enact clever, creative solutions for our clients and in turn impact their businesses, but it’s nothing new.

So, what can we do in 2009 to push the limits farther than we have in the past? How can we actually be innovative?

I cannot sleep at all right now. It’s probably because I am so excited about tomorrow. Tomorrow marks another dynamIt Holiday Dinner, the 4th annual. And to me, it is the best night of the year.

Donning our finest suits, each member of the dynamIt team and a date attend the Holiday Party held each year at the original Hyde Park Prime Steakhouse in Upper Arlington.

It is always a wonderful evening. Great food, great drink, great conversation, but most of all great company…who could ask for more?