The ‘employee tips’ was especially sour – while good advice, it’s really up to the employer to keep the employees busy, creative and productive. Their creativity in terms of providing you with additional business won’t happen in a vacuum.

This post by Ryan was for us to wish luck to the 3 team members, NOT to criticise the way Ryan does business.

P.S. Ryan changing his Audi A6 WOULDNT save him tens of thousands would it, so chill out peeps.

Good luck with the future Elliot, Simon & Dom.

Good luck Ryan & all at Carsonified.

- Neil

For the majority of MDs an A6 is a modest vehicle so get over it.

Davester, with comments like yours I wouldn’t be surprised if the Carsonified team stop allowing people to post without it being vetted.

I always follow your blog with interest. You make a great contribution to all startup entrepreneurs by being so open and honest. Thanks.

From the sidelines I think you made the right moves, and I have had to do a similar thing in one of my businesses. As with you this was to avoid future problems way in advance, rather than in a panic because of hitting problems. And, as with you, the staff involved understood completely because they had been kept in the loop all the time, and appreciated the fact that because it happened so early the company could afford to give them really good payoffs etc.

Any entrepreneur worth their salt should be really tightening their belt right now. The best entrepreneurs are good at recognising the brutal truth way before anyone else, and acting on it immediately. The worst ones pretend it will all be okay, pretend they’ll be millionaires this time next year Rodney, and then hit a brick wall in a messy way – with no payouts to staff, debts to suppliers etc. Deal with reality and do it early.

Ryan, thanks for all your posts.

cheers
Steve

PS. To those going ballistic about company cars, this blog post etc etc – please just chill out a little. There’s nothing unusual/wrong about that. It’s Ryan and Gill’s company.

To me it’s a bit like reading a poor version of “a dummys guide to running a business”. For those of you that think Carsonified can do no wrong I would just say that to anyone who is more rational and who looks at the evidence there are some big holes in the Carsonified Ryan spins to us.

As others have said, we had no comment about the high staff turnover. More recently we heard that Carsonified was going to become a consultancy/design/dev company – well to me, that means I shan’t be going to any more of their conferences because I’d be indirectly financing my competitors.

Also, they say they’re going to build web apps. Excuse me, but you just fired your developer so how will that work? If you had confidence in that idea wouldn’t you have kept him on.

If Ryan was a successful businessman with a decent track record I feel I would take him more seriously but to be honest he comes across as someone looking out for any inch of publicity and not exactly in any position to give others advice on how to run a business or build a web application.

I would, however, take advice from him on running conferences because they do this really well.

Ideally, Ryan you should get someone who isn’t a sycophant to read your tips and just “reality check” them. You are after all, just a bloke who runs a small company; you have something to offer but lets face it dragons den aren’t exactly kicking down your door to get you to join them.

As someone once said, stick to what you know.

Whether it was Ryan’s intention or not, he comes across as a bit of a, what we English might call, plonker.

Not once does Ryan admit to making a mistake or error of judgement. The “recession” is a poor excuse in my book, unless Carsonified have lost some of their very major revenue streams in the past month or so (in which case, “eggs in one basket lesson learned” would have made for better reading). Instead he gives us a poorly bulleted, narrowly scoped, idiots guide to running a business – honestly, was it really necessary to patronise us with regurgitated GCSE business? I actually feel even more dumber having read it. I urge people to take Ryans view(s) on employee:profit ratio with a pinch of salt as MOST web development companies don’t work like this – I’m a Project Manager, my wife is a Finance Manager – so according to Ryan, we should be made redundant.

The crux for me is the way Ryan is naively trying to turn it into a positive – quite selfishly in my opinion. I think this will backfire mind you – “what goes around comes around” as they say!

Ryans defense will be that “Carsonified like to be open and honest” but seriously – re-draw the privacy line before it kills you. How can you expect prospective clients to trust you?

Fair play to the sacked individuals – they’ve taken it well and have shown a great deal of loyalty to Ryan. I don’t think they had anything to loose through the publishing of this article – but as someone above commented, employers might question their productivity, especially if they have read Ryan’s process of elimination.

I don’t know Ryan, I’m sure he’s a very nice bloke at the weekend (as most of the positive comments suggest) – but everyone knows how business/money can change people. Ryan comes across as someones who wears his heart on his sleeve – which is great.

So what’s next for Carsonified? How about a book titled “How not to run a business ‘Carsonified’”? I reckon it would sell quite well, given the PR this post has generated.

If anything, this article is a warning to us all that private matters should remain just that.

As for always being open – surely that’s just the things you choose to be open about? I don’t seem to remember you being as open when you had a high turnover of staff within a short period? To add to this, you’re even advising on how to reduce staff turnover – how can you be equipped for this advice when you’ve had high turnover?

Evan – I take on your point that Ryan is human and everyone makes mistakes. The difference here is that Ryan never admits to his. Instead, he holds himself in this position of power advising to other people how they should run their businesses. One things for sure, I certainly wouldn’t be using him for consultancy.

Take or leave my comments, I’m not calling you a bad person or Carsonified a bad place, but I think there are a number of things that don’t add up.

I’ve come to know Ryan in recent years and to admire him. When I have been in need of advice or contacts he has always been more than generous with his time — and this contrasts with other high-profile people who are often too busy to stop and help out. Ryan is never too busy.

I know how important it has been to Ryan to build a great culture at his company and I think he’s done that very successfully. I also know how much he values the principle of honesty and transparency of which this blog post is one example. I know how much it genuinely troubled Ryan to have to consider making these layoffs.

In spite of Ryan’s high profile he is really running a small business. I run one too, and I understand how challenging the current economic climate can be. We all must think about sustainability and survival at a time when things are very unpredictable and uncertain. Ryan is no different.

The difference between Ryan and many other people is that he has built his business in the public eye — blogging about it and sharing his highs and lows. That’s part of what makes Ryan who he is and why he has achieved his success.

Ryan is only human and he will make mistakes as we all do. Because Ryan has been so public over time, it is of course much easier to catch him in seeming contradictions or inconsistencies. Anyone who chooses to be in the public eye will have to live with that. But knowing Ryan personally, I can say that his integrity is not even slightly in doubt.

Evan

In order to run a long-term business, you *must* make many decisions based on something other than what you “want” or “wish,” and that something is usually financial. This is the way the business world works, like it or not — throwing your bitterness about this reality at Ryan isn’t going to change the world, and it just makes you ranters look incredibly petty and short-sighted.

As far as Ryan being guilty of not seeing today’s troubles several months ago, gee, I wish I had your magic 8 ball. I’m glad you all knew today’s financial headlines. I didn’t. Sure, we all saw signs of trouble, but we also saw some signs that showed the opposite. Nobody knows the future — you react as fast as possible, pay attention to the market conditions, but sometimes you’re going to invest when you should be saving or save when you should be investing. It sounds like Carsonified made the best *business* decisions they could, both with hiring and with firing. The entire Carsonified team (including the three folks now jobless) deserve a round of applause for facing reality and dealing with it rather than whining about it.

Ryan, your comment “it’s time to lay off staff who aren’t directly generating revenue” is somewhat out of place. But, I think you know that and it has been commented on enough so far.

It makes me laugh (Ryan, I am sure you aren’t laughing) when people become so judgemental about someone else’s business. Whilst I personally wouldn’t advertise the fact I have laid off staff, Ryan has explained his reasons.

It is probably worth us all leaving this now and working on our own businesses to ensure it survives the crunch. Still loving the Carsonified brand and the culture you guys have.

If you needed and could afford a company car then I don’t see a problem with it – your advice that has been quoted was for businesses starting out and you guys had been around for a while.

People just love to snatch an opportunity to bash up on those with success…..stop bashing, get on and run your own business. I hope you don’t have to make changes to survive the recession yourselves ;)

Its always good to look at both sides, and thats it. Two sides have been presented and we can learn from it, and use it in our own situations. We all know and love Carsonified at the end of the day and they bring rockin’ conferences for us all and thats what we will all think about.

Timing of the post WAS bad. But ya, its over now, back to our lives.

Now I worked for Ryan on the Future of Mobile event for six months and then was made redundant. I am immensely grateful for the opportunity to get paid a wage to produce such a successful and important event for Carsonified, go look up the blog posts. I am very proud of the work I did on this.

I don’t always agree with Ryan as I’m sure either of us will tell you. I do however have a huge amount of respect for the way he opens himself up and publicly talks about the difficult decisions he has to make a then action.

Yes I am jobless a fortnight before Christmas, Ryan has ensured that I can pay my bills for the next couple of months whilst I sort out another revenue stream. This has been a very difficult time for Ryan and the team really have their work cut out for them in 2009 producing the next series of events with reduced manpower.
I for one will look forward to making suggestions for next years Future of Mobile.

The Audi everyone is getting upset about was a non ostentatious diesel model, nice, but hardly showy.

The really important thing here is that Ryan has made a really tough decision to ensure the competitive edge of Carsonified next year. He had to do this. This blog post and the tweets have been of huge benefit to myself and have generated contact from industry luminaries who want to talk to me about mobile in 2009. I know that Simon and Elliott have a similar experience this week.

Thank you Ryan for standing up and generating the shitstorm. Everyone’s a winner. See you for a coffee in January.