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I find it interesting how important the number 3 is in business. Sure, there are lots of other important numbers, but the number 3 has always had a special appeal to me. Maybe it’s because I’ve played jazz in so many trios over the years, or because with three people weighing in on a critical decision, you rarely have a stalemate, or because a triangle makes for such a stable design element. Over the years, I’ve come to respect the number 3.

Most businesses will need a team of three other professionals supporting them: a banker/investment professional, an accountant/CPA and a lawyer. There are many variations on the theme, but you will need those three basic areas of expertise at some point in your business’s growth. You might start out, like I did, with a credit card, a spreadsheet for tracking income and expenses and a homemade client contract you found online. At some point though, it’s generally considered wise to seek counsel with pros who specialize in these areas.

Ideally, your business should also have three sources of revenue. It’s been called the three-legged stool principle, in that eventually most one or two-legged stools tip over, so at least three legs are preferred. You might have income from web design/branding, web development, and software, or hosting, or consulting or some other web-related product or service, but it’s considered wise to have at least three.

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Interesting concept, the challenge may be if revenue is down, how to come up with an entirely new branch of revenue. New business/Sales is always one possibility, client retention another for services updating. Not sure I could pin down what it is my employer does into three groups. We have in-house, client work, hosting our big three.

If you wait until the revenue is down to ramp-up a new product or service, that’s likely too late in the game.

Like so many folks caught in the US Auto industry right now trying to ramp up with economy cars since gas prices are on the rise here. Most of (maybe all) the US Auto makers have economy models that will go farther on a tank of gas, but the companies don’t make much profit on them, so even if they can sell all they have, it may not be enough to keep the company afloat.

Maybe the equivalent in the web industry is those firms that do “some” hosting sort of on the side. Sure they could ramp up and sell more hosting during a web design/development down turn, but there might not be enough profit in it to sustain the company. So what is the perfect 3rd leg? I don’t know yet, but am on the look out for it.

I don’t have an answer, but I’ve been on the lookout for this as well. Publishing a book might be an option if you are an expert although I don’t know how lucrative that would be. We messed for awhile with selling icons and web templates and later figured out it wasn’t very practical. People are expecting those things for free nowadays.

I think the goal here, many could agree on is making EE site design/dev it’s own leg by all rights, static sites being a different bird.

For a while I ran an online advertising network (Brainiads) with about 80 sites (and a huge waiting list) but ultimately it overwhelmed the other business in terms of time and I had to choose - as ‘sexy’ as online advertising is I didn’t really like being in the ad world even though my thing was meant to be an aesthetic and topical alternative to operations like blogads. The two were complimentary though in that there was crossover in my clients and gave me interesting things to talk about with them (everyone wants to know about how to effectively place online ads) and it gave me some publicity. The original idea was, as you said, to create a ‘synergistic’ yet separate income flow. It wasn’t quite synergistic enough though.

Although I still have to get our site up and running so my story is a little abstract perhaps, I can say we do try to diversify our business but certainly want a logical cross-over or synergy between the various parts. In our case the client understand it very well, we offer architecture (building houses), interior architecture and garden design under one roof.

In Finland, where we live, the interior hype has almost come to an end and is now stabilized. Gardens are very popular and houses will be built anyway, some time more some times less. We are fortunate to have each year free advertising on one of the 2 the national TV channels as we host a interior design show and some times a garden show. Nothing glamorous and high budget as most of you know from TV, this is Finland where all is down to earth and low budget :-D

But is works. Garden design is seasonal, most of the work starts the end of the winter and runs through early summer. Interior design is all the year and houses is a winter job for us. Remember, we design and plan and do not build.

I am slowly adding a 4th leg and that is photography. My background is very much in the visual world and I like to get back into it. How this will work time will tell. The only thing I see now is that interior clients need pictures on the wall :-D

Hope to get my EE site running one day so my new photos can go online…sigh

Design/Dev, Marketing and Video.

Wish there there was 48 hours in a day!

Great article Kurt, keep them coming.

Well, I guess that’s why man has delved into “numerology” for hundreds of years, seems we can’t evade “math” in any way.
In German (Austrian) we have a saying “Aller Guten Dinge sind drei”, roughly translated “All positive things need 3 attempts”.
3 gives you a firm stand, but is not like putting a Mikado stack into the ground and exhaust your energy with the desperate quest for security.

I for example thought I would end up in the “digital business” after taking a 3 year media education..

But passion can’t be tricked, now I own 3 SBs in 3 european countries, of which 2 are located in areas I don’t speak the language.
While one could think that is challenging, which it is, I also chose to do 3 different, not even remotely connected things.

Without any offence meant, I believe that most people reading this are actually craftsmen but with modern tools.
I see the gap widening for “the rest of us”. Corporations do actually just hire our craftsmanship or buying it out, by having the capital needed to do so and profit on ideas they’d never have had. Because creative thinking is killed, when you are busy calculating your next settlement.
I wonder what would happen to mankind if we had the guts to rely on ourselves and concentrate on “our” 3 things and the 3 guys next to us.
Couldn’t make things worse, I believe.

In the end, when I look back I did what I wanted to do,
or was it “mini-me”?

Thanks, inspiring thoughts in this discussion!

In German (Austrian) we have a saying “Aller Guten Dinge sind drei”, roughly translated “All positive things need 3 attempts”.

Believe it or not, that saying exists in English as well, in various forms with slightly different meanings: “all good things come in threes”, “third time’s a charm”, “third timy lucky”... It’s a small world, after all 😊

Without any offence meant, I believe that most people reading this are actually craftsmen but with modern tools.

I think that is a somewhat moot point. Obviously, to succedd in business you need to have, or know, or be able to produce something that somebody else is willing to pay money for. In my case, and I am certainly not alone, that is very often knowledge; I am calling myself a consultant for that reason, too.

I don’t find being compared with a craftsman offensive, far from it, but the important difference is that I, as a rule, do not build tangible things: I offer a service.

Kurt, I couldn’t help but notice this!

http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.engadget.com/media/2008/06/wwdc-keynote_049.jpg

@ScottBruin - Thanks for sharing that link. It made my day!