As a microbusiness, I don’t expect to compete head-on with the other consultants in the same boat.

On the heels of hell freezing over (Apple moving to Intel processors), I figured it would be time to write a little about my business philosophy (and pigs shall fly)…

First, read “Small is the new Big”:http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/0… and “More on Small”:http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/0… over at Seth Godin’s blog. He sums up nicely some of the ideas I’ve been thinking about pertaining to how to run icongarden.

When I formed icongarden back in ‘96, two types of web agencies dominated: the ’my cousin Jims’ and the large VC-invested companies. The large agencies charged hundreds of thousands of dollars for sites; the cousins charged hundreds of dollars. But I knew what I was doing – I’d learned to code HTML before the advent of FrontPage, Dreamweaver, Cyberstudio, before Javascript, when we only had one graphical browser – way back when was the rage.

I’d gone through the cousin stage early on, worked in a few agencies where I learned how important maintainability and good practices were to the success of a site. But I also saw how many companies clamored for Flash intros and useless features, and how – in the pursuit of money – many agencies indulged the senseless MTV-ification of the web. I longed for some sort of middle ground – attention to simplicity & ease of use (discarded in the rush to flickering lights) while effectively using the technologies available to us.

About the same time I launched icongarden and the idea of ‘integrated experience design’ (“clear focus on the information your customers want”), information architecture and usability reviews had just begun to infiltrate the agencies.

Obviously, as a one person shop, I couldn’t compete for sites that required teams of programmers to develop, but neither did I want to resign myself to the low end. The only way to differentiate back then was to seem larger than icongarden really was.

These days, simplicity is in and a whole generation of excellent designers and developers have struck out on their own as consultants. My friend “Michal”:http://sabren.com/ even “runs his own one-man hosting company”:http://cornerhost.com/. So I’m finally able to position icongarden the way I’d like, as a micro-business: a one man consultancy that provides services directly to small business and to other micro-businesses.

The upside:

• I can choose my projects
• I can choose with whom I work
• I can turn on a dime
• the biz doesn’t suck money when inactive

The downside:

• Possible isolation
• Possibly unstable periods of work

Starting today, I’m positioning both icongarden.com and goodwords (now defunct -ed.) as microbusinesses, with primary focus on delivering fast, effective and efficient a la carte services to other consultancies and full-solution services to small business.

This includes – for other consultants – copyediting and copywriting services, web design for developers and web development for designers, and usability reviews. I’ll be rolling out systems to handle submitting work requests online within the next few months (e.g. submit copy, give me a few hours or days, and receive your edited copy back, all through an online interface) This includes full-stack web development – from brainstorming and design to implementation and hosting – for small businesses.

As a microbusiness, I don’t expect to compete head-on with the other consultants in the same boat. I believe that there’s fundamentally plenty of web work to support all of us microbusinesses for years to come, and so I hope to use the services of some of those incredible designers and developers on larger projects, just as I hope they will use mine.

Time to stop writing and start working!