Amanda Gome

And looking ahead for SmartCompany, obviously we’re a company that’s grown very quickly, what’s the outlook for us?

We’ve come up with some good products that we think subscribers might pay for so we’re very typical of that whole new wave of providing a free product and then maybe creating products that we will sell off the side. Of course, we’ll continue our great content and constantly look for new ways to surprise and delight our readers. I think our eBooks have just been extraordinarily successful. The last eBook we had, we quickly had distributed 6,000. So that side of the business is going extremely well. Of course we do a bit of custom publishing as well and our webinar side of the business is going extremely well. We pretty much do a webinar once a week. So spreading our news and information out into other means, whether it’s eBooks or webinars I think will grow. And we’re also looking at launching new publications.

And just talk about SmartCompany’s structure, for those who don’t know we share a floor with the people at Business Spectator and Eureka Report and Crikey and that’s providing some opportunities for growth too.

I think for anyone who’s listening who’s doing a start up, one of the best things we did was to start with a like business. So when I walked in on my first day three and half years ago, because it took six months to get the business up ready to launch, I walked in with my laptop and sat in the office of Crikey at a little desk right up near the kitchen, the smelly kitchen. It just meant as we started, the thing about online is that it’s much more expensive than you think.

We were able to share some back end resources, share this, share knowledge and that saved costs initially and was also a great source of being able to learn quickly. And now of course we are getting up to being a medium-sized business and it’s very hard to make that leap and we have actually merged with Crikey and both are now owned by Private Media and I’m the CEO of Private Media, so I’m running both Crikey and SmartCompany and what that means is we’ve been able to again build a base on which we can launch new products much faster and we’ve got some great ideas for some new publications coming your way. And also share staff across projects so you can really bring in a person from Crikey who’s got that knowledge to work with a person from SmartCompany who’s got this knowledge and that’s a terrific thing.

And three years or three and a half years later, what’s the best thing about being an entrepreneur? Is it now being able to sleep at night?

Yes, we do know that from all the research we’ve done that the first two years are hell and they were very hard. I always knew that you had to have good work life balance, that it’s very important to see that as a competitive edge.

Many people in publishing burn out, they burn their health and they burn their relationships, so lasting the distance was always a goal of mine and I had many people at the start saying you’ll last two years, putting a timeline on it, you can not last longer than that. I did cap my days at 10 hours. I always made sure I got to the gym, that I kept my family relationships intact. That’s a very important side and I have. I’m still married and my children are still talking to me and I think understanding that that’s the goal for the next three years I feel easily able to take that kind of pressure.

The most exciting thing is definitely the variety, the constantly progressing day by day a number of things at once, from getting the finance department ready for what’s going to have to do in the next few years, the sales department up to scratch, the marketing department, the subscription department. It’s very challenging but I wouldn’t swap a day of if for anything else in the world.

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