Posts by Marcus Blankenship

No matter what business you’re in or what position you hold, there’s one guarantee.

Let me tell you a story. Bob the Coder is a great guy. He shows up on time, turns in quality work, and is reliably positive and easy to work with. You’re very glad he’s on your team. But there’s a problem. You like your employees to turn in a weekly report summarizing their work…

It’s a fairly routine deployment, but this time, it’s not full of victories. Something goes wrong—seriously wrong—and when the dust settles, you discover the problem centers on a basic mistake from one of your programmers. To add to the pain, this particular programmer just happened to leave work early that day and miss all of…

In these days of open office arrangements, Agile project management, and a flood of fast-and-light startup practices, the idea of sit-down weekly meetings seems almost quaint, like chalkboards and rotary phones. Even Hewlett Packard abandoned the practice of weekly meetings years ago in favor of “management by walking around”. Managers were encouraged to get out…

Delegation. You’ve heard the legends. You’ve maybe even seen this miracle management technique in action. You know that absolutely everyone sings its praises even as they struggle to implement it. But as an agency owner, how do you make the magic of delegation work for you? I’m not here to blow sunshine at you. Even…

Operating an agency is an experience that falls somewhere between elation and enduring the business end of a fire hose. In either case, those comfortable days of answering for the quality for your work–and only your work–are gone. You are now the point person for scheduling, deadlines, workflow, quality, team relationships, and a whole lot…

One of the toughest parts of managing a tech team is adjusting to the reality that other people are depend on you–for direction, for validation, for encouragement. And while you can feel their expectations as soon as you walk in the door, no one talks about them. Sure, they’re probably the same expectations that you…

Congratulations on your new business! Was it announced with fanfare and confetti? Did you set up a fantastic new office space and with a front row parking space? Did your team immediately follow you into the workweek like Braveheart’s legions into battle? Yeah… me neither. In fact, when I first went out on my own,…

New tech agency owners make all sorts of mistakes. Some are small and private, some are very public–and embarrassing. But there’s one mistake all managers make during their first year, and it’s this: they don’t put down the tools. The problem is that when the principals insist on trying to be programmers as well as…

Yes, we’ve all done it. I’ve done it. My previous managers have done it. And most likely, it’s the default setting for many battle-worn team leads. In those crisis moments when expectations are high, everything is going off the rails, and the deadline was yesterday, all new tech agency owners will utter one fateful sentence.…