In the last three and a half years we have scaled up a number of times.
1. The first scale up decision was when we hired our first two employees. My payroll cost went from zero to a few hundred dollars. It doesn't sound like much right now, but in February 2003, it was a scary decision. It was made easier by Erum's (employee number one) flexibility and once I got used to making payroll end of the month, hiring the next three employees wasn't the involved decision hiring number one was.
2. The second scale up happened when we decided to move to our own independent office. Rent was free (because of the deal Mujtaba had cut) but we still had to worry about overhead (utilities, office staff and security). 25 December 2003 was just under a year after our date of founding. We scaled up because it was about time and it brought Mujtaba and Arif into the fold.
3. Scale up number three happened six month later. Three employees dedicated to taking Alchemy Risk Manager forward and finally a 64K DSL connection. This time it was 600 dollars per month, more than double the payroll at that point. We were lucky enough to find a customer who would partially fund DSL as well as the three employees for the next four months.
4. Number four, two months later in the form of our first in house project manager. Another 1000 dollars a month to begin with with no funding except projected cash flows
5. Number five, almost 2 years later as we move into a 3000 sqft facility with our 20 KVA backup power generator, ample parking, our own conference room and room to exapand to double our current size.
6. Between number five and number four we have grown from 8 employees to 24 (tripled in size), from no implementations to three implementations, from a payroll that could be funded by short term borrowing from friends and family to more than 15,000 dollars a month. But once we did number four, the incremental decisions to add servers, resources, equipment was no longer big decisions. Number five was.
