Every business in any industry depends on the ability of it's managing team to be able to make decisive and crucial decisions but there comes a time where a true leader has to put his/her feet down and make THE Final decision. The creative and innovative cycle of any product or service is never ending. You can always come up with a better idea, perfection is at infinite.

Executive Decision making is a quality true leaders are born with. It's the ability to say enough is enough lets make something happen with what we've got or else we're going to lose our chance.

The lack of Executive decision making is truly evident in web startups. They never run out of creative ideas to do with their web sites but what they mostly end up with is not just lost chances but totally wrong products for the wrong target market.

Tell if you've done this before:

You come up with an idea that a small team around you (or a few of your friends) label it "brilliant". You spend countless hours mapping all your ideas together. You start the development process but every other week another new idea hits you and with all excitement you add it to your production queue and push off the launch date by a few more weeks. It's been a year since you started, you were suppose to launch by now but because of all the things you've added you'd need another 6 months to develop. meanwhile you're on sites like mashable and techcrunch and they have just announced a site that is doing exactly what you originally thought of doing. you start crying. you keep telling youmeanwhile most of the blogs can't seem to get enough of the competitor site even though you think their glass is half empty.

Another year passes and you're site is finally done and you're ready to launch but you no longer have just one competitor but  4 other sites have joined the niche market. you contact all of the big blogs and any PR source you can get your hands on but they turn you down and label you as "Just another [blank]", you tell your self i came up with the idea first a little under 2 years ago but now it's prime time is long over, there are enough competitors dominating the market that no matter how much publicity you even get it won't help your cause.

you've wasted 2 years of your life, you've missed yet another opportunity wave and now you've have to go through the innovation process all over again for a totally new and unique idea. The question is "are you going to learn from your bitter experience?"

if this has not happened to you still the same type of question still applies. Are you going to learn from the mistakes many sites are making today?

Executive Decision Making is all about optimizing your opportunities instead of wasting them. It involves sacrifice, it's a hard and risky decision but at least you won't waste 2 years of your life and wonder about it after.r self this site only has half of the features you're going to have.

I don't care what people say but being optimistic at all times is the worst thing you can be. If you are optimistic at all times then you are in a state of fully daydreaming. In your mind the underdog always wins; web site traffic pours like thunderstorm; money grows on trees; and stock market always goes up and so on...

At the same time being Pessimistic at all times is equally worse. In your mind you have the worst luck; you can never win; there are too many other people better than you; everything you try to do the opposite happens. People who are pessimistic at all times tend to not do anything at all because they say to themselves "if i'm going to fail then why bother trying!" and my answer is always "but if you don't try, you never know!".

Here is where the balance comes in, both optimists and pessimists are only right about half of the things and in the real business world they fully compliment one another. since examples are the best way to convey a message here are a few of them:
 

1)

OPTIMIST would say:
"We have a web 2.0 idea and when we make it and launch it, within 1 year we'll be like google"

PESSIMIST Would say
"We can never beat or match google so why bother"

BALANCE of the two results:
"It's hard to beat google, but we still have a chance to make good grounds, and what if we never get the traffic we need to make decent money so what do we have to do? lets plan this to the smallest detail"
 

2)

OPTIMIST would say:
"We have an idea and millions of people would want it"

PESSIMIST Would say
"it's a stupid idea because nobody would want it"

BALANCE of the two results:
"What would make a million people want it? and what do we need to consider if nobody wants it? Either way lets put our target getting a 1,000 customers first then we can worry about the next 10,000 and the next 100,000 and eventual million target"

What is the BALANCE?

Balance allows you to see things in perspective, like seeing both sides of the coin, it helps you plan for the best and the worst. Knowing about the worst things allows you to be prepared in case they happen, also knowing there even worse things that could happen also gives you enough motivation to be optimistic about even the little gains. Balance allows you appreciate you gains, your efforts and your life. It's helps you avoid pitfalls and makes every mistake a step closer the ultimate success.
 

So go ahead and be pessimistic and optimistic at the same time. It's only good for you!

It is obvious that business is about managing money. You'd be surprised to know that majority of Online Businesses, web developers, designers, advertisers and bloggers cannot manage money. This is probably one of the biggest reasons why web 2.0 sites go after funding the VC firms look into management and want to see a manager with at least MBA running things.

Managing money is about what you can, cannot and should not buy. Just because you have money doesn't mean that you should spend right away. Sometimes the biggest mistake a starup makes revolves around spending money at the wrong time towards the wrong thing.

Managing Money is about being smart and thoughtful with money, here are a few ways to be smarter with money

Expenses

No matter who you are or what you do you've got expenses whether you like it or not. Being smart with money would allow you to analyze your expenses, take out the unnecessary ones or bargain for better deals. For example, there are hundreds of options for having a cell phone plan, but researching a little about you talking habits allows you select the most appropriate plan that over time saves you money. You can apply this to cars payments, office lease, Internet and tv bills, computers equipment, starbucks coffee, lunch and dinner.

Employees

If you are working on your own then you are your own employee and not your own boss. If you are in the online business and you're making money then the chances are that there multiple employees working in that company. Most startups, as soon as they come in contact with money they go crazy with hiring thinking that the same money they're making this is going to continue to next year and year after that. Not so fast, in the online work you can be on top one months and at the bottom by years end. Never estimate or speculate when it comes to online. Keep you team small, and hold on tight to your money.

Hosting

Hosting can be very cheap or very expensive, but did you know that it doesn't matter what kind of hosting you start with for as long as it is flexible enough to grow as you grow. If you have a blog, or thinking of starting one, think for a second what is your blog going to be, if it's a hobby blog then a cheap shared hosting with $5-10/month hosting is good enough, but if you intend to really promote the site and make a bit of income on the side while holding your day job then stay away from shared hosting and go with a small Virtual Server for $30-50/month and as the traffic to your site grow so can your server resources this way you don't have to spend more that you need.

I know a few startups that before they even had a decent application on their hand they were going around shopping for servers and co-location options. As a startup stick with small, go with a small Virtual Server, this way if you hit big you can easily upgrade to fully dedicated servers and multi server with load balancing options but don't blow the money you don't have right from the get go, what if you're doesn't pick up at all, all that money wasted!!!

Marketing

Every business, website or blogs needs to be marketed otherwise how would people find out about it. But did you know that in this day and age the most effective marketing doesn't actually cost a penny? all it costs it time! in the next article i will be talking a great deal about this.

Today Internet is extremely crowded and polluted, and day by day it doesn't get any better. Many applications and blogs start and die everyday. A project you think is brilliant is already being thought and developed by several other groups and any day now they are going to beat you to the launch platform. But don't worry too much about being the second or third site arriving to the starting lineup, the road ahead is extremely bumpy and difficult. The faith of your online project is not defined by who launches first but by who gets it right!

By getting it "right" i don't mean the perfectly designed and developed site, nothing will ever be perfect, but "Right" as in what people wanted all along; "Right" as in efficient, beneficial, reliant and easy. Getting right is a guessing game because it's hard to predict who want what and if you can fit it within that need category, but is it?

Getting it "Right" requires lots of research, asking the right group of people the right type of questions, considering their well being ahead of your greedy demands. It is about understanding that if you give people what they want they will probably give you want you've been daydreaming about during all those long hardworking hours. But there are a few other ways as well...

So How can you get it "Right"?

1- Dummy proof everything!

The purpose of your site and topic of discussion MUST be visible. If you have a blog and you're constantly writing on your blog but no one can figure what you're site is about then that's a huge problem. There are millions of blogs that seem to be talking about everything, they announce news, business mergers, parenting, child care, beauty, cars and videos and podcasts, all in one little blog with a naive notion that the larger the broadness of the topic the larger audience they are going to attract to their site. CNN and BBC can do that but then again they have billions of dollars to make sure that they can, you don't!!!
Design of the layout of a site is one those areas that MUST be dummy proof. Making it clear where navigations are located, where each menu is suppose to take you, and how people can get around your site with ease. You must make registration forms something people would want to fill out rather than something you're doing because everybody else seems to be doing it as well.

Make content easy to read, whether it's the headlines, body of the content, static pages, and etc... everything must be identifiable and understandable. The easier you can read content the more engaged people will become in your site. Content is all about typography, from line spacing, size of fonts, choice of fonts to colors and what have you. Here are a few sites that talk a great deal about design and typography:  Link1  link2   link3

2- There are so many other things you probably have not considered yet!

I've read in many blogs that they didn't make the right choice when choosing a hosting company. they started with a cheap host or an unreliable one and as soon as they saw some nice traffic their  site went offline. This has happened to many blogs and it keeps happening to many more so before you jump on web business make sure to chose the right host, there are several cheap and reliable hostings out there, 1and1 or dreamhost are the two that come into my mind. if you're seeing a healthy dose of traffic you can upgrade to more performance known hosting companies like MediaTemple, Peer1, Voxel, and etc.

Load time is just as important as anything else. New visitors to your site have 5 seconds or less patience time. Meaning, your site should load under 5 seconds. Several things attribute to this cause. I don't want to become too technical, but the major factors are heavy use of graphics, a large number of database calls or queries, slow web hosts, heavy use of Java-scripts,  large home page size, large number of DNS calls, and the list goes on. You would need a technical help from a professional or freelance developer to solve many of these issues, so if you have somebody that is designing your site you can ask them to take care of the above issues as well.

If you're starting your own blog then there are a few choices you're probably considering, you can go with free blog apps like Typad, Blogger and BlogSpot or Open source CMS like Wordpress or MovableType or Drupal which sit on your own domain and server, or a CMS that costs money like another version of MovableType, and several others. Let me make it clear right here that unless you're trying to do extra stuff with your site, all of the above option basically do the same thing and if you can generate traffic then you are probably able to make money as well. Typad and BlogSpot live on some server off some where you'll never know, you don't own your domain and migration is hard not to mention that you can't customize all that much. Wordpress, MovableType and Drupal can be download, customized, and installed on your own domain and server, they are also expandable by adding plugins and other features. Though Wordpress, MT and drupal are free and open source but customizing costs money, you may need to hire a developer and design familiar with the program to be able to do everything you want the site to be. The costs are not that high but be prepared and do extra research.

You shouldn't start your online project with advertising and ad focused content and services. If you have a new blog or a web app and already you're site is bombarded with ads, it is a big turn off to the new users. Since you're site is very new and your traffic is very low your ad dollars don't kick in anyways, so save some face and remove those ads so the content and the substance of your site can breath and build you some reputation. Ads make sites really ugly, specially the google ones, not having ads at the beginning tells your users that you value and appreciate their willingness to visit your site and you're not just working on the site to make a quick buck but to help them in one way or the other. As your sites starts to grow and traffic is coming to your site in bunches (more than 1000 hits per day) then start adding ads, but still very slowly.

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Above is a brief overview of what you need to do to be prepared to launch your website. It's basically what this site is all about. I've done many project and have built many websites and the above issues keep repeating themselves over and over when working with new clients. In early meetings i spend many hours explaining why it costs them so much to build or consult them on their web project and when i explain the factors involved then they slowly start to come around. i hope this helps you guys with your own projects.

I've been talking a lot about "everything is a process" and how you should incorporate this mentality into your every project, if you want to become successful! This article is to prepare you for the challenges a project might have, sort of like "what you should know before jumping into building you business"

Goals are a great thing have, they give you a target to achieve and motivation to achieve them but most often we disregard the challenges that we might have to face in favor of the sweetness of the outcome. The truth of the matter is if your goal is to make a $1,000,000 (1 million dollars) you won't wake up one day and have that in your bank account, the fact is you have to first make a $100, then $1,000 and over come more challenges, innovate more solutions to get to $10,000 then $100,000 and if everything works out then you achieve your first goal. It takes time and a lot of work, consistency and efficency are the absolute requirements.

But before you set a Million Dollar goal for your self, there are a few things you should know:

1- How well do you know your self?

• if you want to get into business you should NOT wake up later than 7am. I'm practicing to move my current wake up time from 6:30am to 5am. The Earlier you wake, the longer day time you would have to work. Contribute the early hours to answering emails, reading the news, making comments, discovering new sites and working on your blog if you have one.
   
• We all need to have routines, we need to be disciplined that way. Try to make plans for your entire day, hour by hour and stick to it. If everyday you tend to do different things that do not relate to each other then you are very confused. Organize you time and manage it within your abilities. After a while your routine will become natural to you and as a result your productivity will increase.
   
• Measure how long it takes to do the basic humans needs, like how long it takes you to eat lunch, commute to work, shower, shopping, and etc. When you are aware of the minutes you spend  doing everything you have to do everyday then you you can find better more efficient ways to increase your working times. Don't over kill your self, what i mean is taking a shower should take about 10 to 15 minutes at max but if you're spending an hour in shower then here is an opportunity to save 45 minutes and put it towards working on your blog, making phone calls, making new connections and finding more ways of making your business better.

2- Do you REALLY know what you're doing?

• if you're going to start a blog, are you familiar with the blogging world. Regardless what the topic of your blog is about there are several key blogs working in that category already, familiarize your self with them and everything they do, the last thing you want to do is to have a blog that has the exact same topic and discussion, what you want to do is to find out where these key blogs are lacking and start your blog knowing that you're filling a gap and contributing to the well being of the category. Having a complimentary blog grows much faster than a copy blog, over time when you have a lot of traffic then you can move into other blogs' category.
   
• if you starting your own web app (web 2.0 or semantic) project, then how well do you know the industry, you need to know how it works and how you're going to make it big. Promoting a web app has its own set of challenges and before you jumping into programming you need to consider all the roadblocks. Getting traffic is a big issue and before you assume that you're going to get a lot of traffic consider why people would want to use it and why it should become a part of their routine. The worst thing you can do when building a web app is to assume everything will workout on its own, trust me it doesn't. Always prepare with the worst case scenario in mind!
   
• Know everything about your competition (small or large). for example, If you're going to make something that compliments DIGG but you don't know about MIXX then that's a huge problem because if you don't know what everybody in the category is doing and how they are doing it then you probably won't be able to come up with a solution that solves big problems. You also don't want to be compared to other websites, avoid "YET ANOTHER WEB APP" attribute at all cost!

3- How well do you know BUSINESS?

• Business is a game, a dog eat dog world. Just because you can make a great site doesn't mean you can make a big business out of it. In business you have to know how to manage people, employees, PR people, your network and etc. If you can't manage people then you cannot attract talented people to do the tricky parts of your business, they just won't stick around. If you don't know how to make deals or negotiate to get maximum benefits then you're business won't have a chance to grow. Managing innovation, money, growth, revenues streams are a few of the other things you need to be very familiar with.

I'm not trying to scare you, but i'm trying to prepare you. remember if it way easy everybody would have done it, it's difficult and that's what makes it interesting and appealing. Now i only mentioned a few things you should know before jumping into muddy waters, there are many other things you need to consider such as choosing the right business partners, knowing your audience, optimum design, naming and branding, strategy, and last but not least knowing when you want to launch, how you're going to do it, and what you need to do to promote it. The list goes on and on, the more you know the better you will do.