Long story short, three hours or so later I was the president of our newly formed company. Mark would be vice president and Sylvie would be our secretary. No one wanted to be the treasurer so we asked Sylvie to pull double duty and she agreed to it until we hired a controller/CFO type to do the books.
Once we had an accountant on board we would route all sales through the company with compensation based on 92% of collected monies to the app writer. The balance would be used to pay for the controller/CFO, taxes, marketing and out of pocket expenses. Until then, we would continue to send out our billings ourselves and handle our own collections. It would be up to us to properly declare our billings and collections and to remit the 8%. The idea was that potential clients wouldn’t need to search too far to find the resources that they needed.
We ended the meeting with everyone excited about the prospects of our collective brain-trust. One of our website designers was a marketing oriented guy so he volunteered to put an informational e-flyer together and send it around for comments. We would individually add our respective strengths and types of assignments that we would consider. Pricing would be up to the party that got the assignment. And in our neck of the woods, this was all by way of responding to RFP and inquiries. Our reputations and credibility also helped a lot to give us a lot of negotiating strength with pricing.
The more I thought about this new arrangement the more excited I got about the potential that we now had. There had to be a lot of trust and respect amongst us or this wouldn’t work. So one of the things I insisted upon during our meeting was a conflict of interest agreement as well as a new business policy.
The conflict of interest agreement was very simple; if you were involved with the other party of interest, you didn’t participate in any decision making regarding the other party. If it was a new business opportunity, you brought it before the group and recommended who should help the client if you weren’t able to. All new business would be funneled through the company so that billings and collections could be handled for each member, and we could then concentrate on what we did best; write code and develop apps.
What a way to end the year as well as start the new year. It would be an exciting new chapter in everyone’s lives.
And, if I was being truthful with myself, there was also a possibility of a job for Renee. I probably should give a little more thought to this possibility. The challenge would be two fold; getting the others to agree, and also having Renee not think of this as being a handout.
The next morning I called a meeting of all of the partners to discuss the possibility of having Renee be our CFO.
“I’ve given a little thought to the CFO position and have a suggestion. But before I say anything, I want to disclose that I have a personal relationship with this person. She’s my neighbor.”
“Does she have the credentials to be a CFO?”
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