That’s why he has launched StartUp Northwest (http://www.startupnw.com), a new social network and online resource that encourages greater interaction and information sharing among Washington state entrepreneurs.

“The Seattle startup scene is vibrant,” says Coles. “But, if your business is outside of Seattle or the Eastside, is not technology-related, or you are unable to regularly attend any of the numerous local events for entrepreneurs, you probably will end up feeling disconnected from the community.”

With the introduction of StartUp Northwest, Coles, a lifelong resident of Federal Way, hopes to bring all local entrepreneurs together, regardless of industry or location within the state. Though just launched, the site has attracted numerous startup founders and executives.

“What instantly grabbed our attention to StartUp Northwest was the ability to find one place to connect with other like-minded founders in the startup community,” said ZippyCart co-founder Nick Grant.

In a recent tweet, T. A. McCann, founder of Gist.com, noted there is “good stuff going on” at StartUp Northwest.

The site also has gained attention from service providers. 25 companies have pledged their support by offering discounts to local startups. Many more companies are listed in the local service provider directory on the StartUp Northwest website, enabling service providers to reach young, growing companies in need of products and services.

“By working with early stage companies, service providers have the potential of gaining long term clients,” says Coles.

Much of the content on StartUp Northwest is user generated. Users can submit articles they have written, post events, and participate in groups and forums. “It’s much more valuable to learn from your peers rather than from information provided by a single source,” says Coles. “Through crowdsourcing, one can tap the collective knowledge and experience of the community.”

“Improving interaction and knowledge sharing amongst people starting and growing their businesses is a very valuable service that StartUp Northwest provides to the local community,” says Joe Wallin, prominent Seattle attorney and partner with law firm Davis Wright Tremaine.

Entrepreneurs can employ free features on StartUp Northwest’s site for which other sites typically charge fees, such as posting job openings. “To a startup, every dollar counts,” Coles notes. Currently building his own startup called BaronBuilder.com, he is acutely aware of the budgetary constraints most startups must operate within.

“Most startups can’t afford to hire a full staff,” explains Coles. “Many founders must take on several different roles within the business, often learning as they go. By working together, sharing ideas and experiences, we can all benefit and, hopefully, all experience some measure of success.”

First, as you are just starting up it’s harder to get experienced people on board. I said this before, employees feel they take a risk when leaving other well established work places. But there are other factors to consider as well.

Think about the company culture. Right, you don’t have one yet, so establishing one with young employees is easier. And then there is the level of expectations: young employees don’t necessarily expect to have a company car, the latest PC nor the best payment in the industry.

After exiting my last company I’ve already started thinking about the next (if you are an entrepreneur, you know that once you have the entrepreneurship bug is hard to live without). Of course, one of the first things you have to consider when starting a company is the initial investment – in my case I’m one again thinking about an It company so I’m quite sure to say the biggest expense is the cost of the employees. So what can you do to control the expenses and reduce the initial investment? Hire young, it’s cheaper. Of course, on the long run I’ve said it before and I’m saying it again cutting costs on the human resources is not wise because the loss of productivity and results might eventually kill the business, but in the beginning you anyway don’t know if your business is going to hold water so why not hire young?

Then again, in the beginning for sure the office will not be a real office building, and probably some of the furniture will be old. The location however is important, as I want to hire young it should be next to an University. I’m putting my bet also on the young exuberance and willing to prove themselves. I will hire young, so why wouldn’t you?

I still look for one answer: what should be the new company doing?

Starting day 4 of my story, I’m going to document how we (the 3 partners, Tina, Simona and Cristian) are running our business with it’s two lines: Web design Energybyte and in progress a media shop and pr agency.

By looking back at our history, I can clearly see some strategic mistakes we did – they didn’t kill us, but slowed us down. If you are used to stories that only show how great a company is, well, you will see here some of the mistakes we did, because entrepreneurship is about mistakes and improvements, and other mistakes and other improvements.

First, I can say that we expanded way too slow. Survival Isn’t Good Enough For Entrepreneurs says Ben Yoskovitz, and I don’t think it was enough for us as well:

• going in survival mode in the first 2 years, make it look like just work and no real benefits
• we missed a lot of opportunities
• market has changed and competition used the time to develop

What we did:
Once we figured out that we can do more, a lot of interesting things have happened like opening the in progress business, Tina and Simona switched to full time jobs, we’ve got an office outside home (now looking for a better one), hired our first employee and now we just got a new designer on board.

We (Energybyte) didn’t have a focused target.
This is the capital sin of any entrepreneur. They want the whole World. If you have a look on the site www.energybyte.com you will see that is somehow generic as Web Design and Software and Corporate ID, and doesn’t have a particular target. This is bad because we can’t compete on such a large domain.

What we did: We actually managed to develop the entire Corporate ID thing into a separate business line called in progress and as the software part went under (see the entire story) now we can focus the entire site on offering Web design solutions for small businesses and have a link for the Corporate ID to in progress. This should include some content re-writing, to target the small business owners.

We didn’t update the site. We didn’t display our achievements. Actually the site content remained kind of unchanged from day one, this is really not so good if you are trying to attract your customers. We didn’t update our portfolio, no testimonials, no case studies, because we relied so much on word of mouth.
What to do: Rewrite the entire content. Update the portfolio, insert testimonials, make case studies, make news and press releases. This applies for both sites.

Sites not optimized for maximum visibility. Actually the sites engine are not very googlish and kind of hard to use to obtain a customized result
What to do:. Improve the engines to ease up things. This includes a complete rewrite for the Energybyte site.

Blog not paying benefits in bringing customers. So far, the blog wasn’t really connected to the stuff we did – it contained nice entrepreneurship experiences without giving visibility to the real thing.
What to do: Use the blog to showcase our major achievements, events and developments in general.

This is just a sample of what happens in a Small Business. You identify a problem and find solutions for it, accordingly to the resources you have. You will never be perfect, you will always find something to improve, to change or to implement.

Ok, so far I’ve established some things to do:

• Change the site engine, structure, content to make the most of it
• Write news, update the portfolio
• Focus everything to target small businesses needs

Oh, and just forgot, we should make in progress in English as well – our foreign customers can’t understand it…

If you want to know how we do that and what’s happening next, come back to the blog

Part time entrepreneur work day
I’m not sure if my schedule is typical for a part time entrepreneur, but my days are mostly passing like this:

• I usually get up at 7 in the morning, start the laptop, make some coffee. This gives me enough time until 8 to check my blog stats, read or write a few urgent e-mails, and think about the things I have to do in the evening. If there is something to be done by my partners during the day, I’m preparing and leave notes.
• 8 to 9 is dead time, I’m preparing to leave at my 9-to-6 job, and rushing through a horrible traffic with my Honda motorcycle
• 9-12 and 1-6 are strictly dedicated to my “official” job, this means complete silence from my own business. No e-mails, no phones, no nothing – sometimes is really tricky.
• From 12 to 1 I have lunch, and 2-3 times per month I go to the bank to make payments, etc, etc for my business
• I get home at around 7 in the evening. Although we have arranged an office for the business, I always (and have to) work from home – most of the communication with my partners is done through messenger, or late in the evening when Simona comes home.
• Depending on what I have to do, I either switch to work as soon as I get home, or I take a little nap or watch some useless TV until 9
• From 9 to at least 12 (or how long it takes) I work fully, writing e-mails, preparing contracts, making invoices, programing the sites I’m working on, blogging and everything else that needs to be done

There are 2 types of exceptions from this schedule:

• meetings with customers, with the accountant or anything else that requires me to get outside, including some personal stuff from time to time
• weekends, these are my full days of work, and the best time to handle the most complex things

Now, it’s very easy to guess that this type of program has it’s own challenges:

• I don’t really have a time when I can simply do … nothing
• I don’t really get evenings/weekends with friends
• It’s bad for the health – I’m always sitting in front of the computer

Not sure if I could ever explain the driving force that keep me going on this model, but it’s simply a strong desire to do more with my life than just being an employee. Of course, you have to balance, I space out completely from time to time, but it’s in a controlled non-harming the business way. I found 2 interesting articles on Dane Carson’s Business Opportunities Weblog:

• Weekend Entrepreneur @Work that talks about handling your dual life without harming your position at the 9 to 5 job

and

• Don’t Let Business Sap Your Energy about some techniques to reduce the constant, daily struggle.

Good. Now we are all set for the day four of my start-up story where I’m going to talk about some current challenges for my small business, and what I’m planing to do on the short term.

For the ones that don’t know this is day three from a true story of a small business start-up. I managed to compress the first 2 years in the first 2 articles (and yes, this is a shortened story, to answer some questions that I received), which kind of leaves us to the current year, and very close to write about my plans and the steps I’m taking, to show how things are working in a small business.

Before getting in the third day, I must add something that I forgot in day two, and that is that by the end of the year we found another business niche. Sometimes during October we’ve got two long term customers from UK for whom we did (and still do) some kind of outsourcing work, for which we got a freelancer working.

In December, Simona decided that it should make Energybyte her full time job, and develop (mostly on her own) a media agency called in progress which targets only the Romanian market. By focusing only on the Romanian market we avoided what I think was a mistake in the main company case, and that is targeting a too wide market.

Now, as the company already existed from 2 years and as we already had some good profit at the end of year two, it was quite easy to start the new thing. We had all the legal aspects in place, a current customer database and all the necessary logistic. Together with our savings and the company money in the bank, switching to a full time Energybyte experience was probably easier for Simona.

We actually started very strong and by the end of February we hired our first employee – you can check to see how we decided and chose. In the same time, we realized we need to get out from our home office and get some space; as a temporary solution, we’ve got a room at my mom’s office (and that’s the part where I should say that family support was really important all the way here).

And surprise, in March, Tina (our third owner) decided to switch to a full time job at the company (which true, kind of leaves me the only one left as a part time entrepreneur). Also, some very important decisions have been taken, like hiring another graphical designer and moving to an office space of our own.

With this very fast developments we got also some downsides as well, mainly stress and risks. Stress comes from many sources now, including impossible delivery times, non-paying customers, few mistakes here and there and what’s probably the hardest part the need to keep up the speed. I mean once you grow you will get commitments you can’t refuse, costs that add up and you have to cover each months. Moreover, if you have employees, you have an extra responsibility, and that is, keeping them happy, keeping them doing productive things and keep all the processes at a level to be able to pay them by the end of the month.

I believe you can imagine the momentum that “in progress” got by this time – this made me to get a secondary role with my Web Design and site building activities. This gets me to the day four of our story which sets us in the future – I will be sharing my thoughts, actions and decisions as they happen in what I hope it will be growing Energybyte further.

This is where the things will really get interesting. Continued day 4.

See, I’m now writing 2 days into one for the small business story. So, I’ve got to tell you about our first entrepreneurship year in day one, now it’s time to pass to the more challenging second year.

Strangely enough, the second year started with me changing 9-to-5 jobs again. This was challenging enough, I had to find an employer that will understand, agree and sign that I can run my business as a part time job. Once this transition period was over, my two partners, Simona and Tina got more involved into the business. Simona got us the first “bigger” customers with her direct involvement into sales (I was still learning my way into Web programing and Tina was doing the creatives) and we’ve got our first PR event (which later evolved into a new business line, in progress a pr and media agency, but I will talk about this later).

This second year was really good in testing our capabilities, finding our strengths and growing as a business. We saved any penny in the process, waiting for the right moment to expand (which happened in the third year – I will tell you later in day three).

About half year, I got my first interview with an USA journalist and blogger about my entrepreneurship experience (Shawn Hessinger from www.bootstrapme.com) which actually was the moment when I’ve decided that I really have to keep on going no matter how hard it was. Also got some exposure over my own blog – one more reason to have my pride and make it work.

As we kept our 9-to-5 jobs – we hit some critical spots when we had really a lot going on, but no matter how hard it was, we felt that the things were starting to move in the right direction. We had a lot of customers (taking into consideration that we were only working by night), all of them coming by word of mouth. We never advertised, even our own site remained unchanged (and not updated) – I will say something about it later.

Our first customer (the one I’ve got from my previous job) kept coming back with more work (we are still working for him right now). I think he was our first fan. We did some stationary and advertising materials for a conference he was organizing, and that was the first time when we got to deal with real suppliers (a printing house) and went to all that stress about delivering on time, collaborating with more companies and getting involved in serious stuff. We’ve also got involved in some non-profit activities to sustain young artists.

By the end of the year we were quite set to change a little the focus from Web Design to PR and more offline stuff, which was the second change in the business plan and a Spin-off called in progress – sorry, Romanian only. Also, the involvement in the company changed a little, I switched to a secondary role, while Simona and Tina were developing most of the things.

At the end of the second year we were already doing good, we had profit and money in the bank, steady customers and more to come soon.

Continues day three.

Let’s start the day one of telling a small business story with a little history. So, how does a start-up start? (Note: actual names and some small details are left out for the sake of the story and maybe some legal implications)

First of all, I’m your host for the Journey, Cristian Dorobantescu, a part time entrepreneur from Eastern Europe. That’s the story of my small business and of my other 2 partners in the company.

Back in 2005 I’ve decided to change jobs, from Project Management to Sales, which ended up as changing Employers as well. Taking out the reasons to change jobs, somewhere in the process I’ve came to realize that no matter how many jobs and employers I will change, I will never probably become really rich (or at least rich enough) as an employee only – I needed to start a business. Later I’ve discovered that having a business doesn’t necessarily and automatically make you rich, but it gives you the opportunity to be rich. Anyway, until I wrote that post about “Entrepreneurship as an Opportunity enhancement” I was really sure I’ve started a business to become rich.

Ok, let’s stick with the story. Once the idea about starting a new business lurked from somewhere, I tried to “sell” my idea to 2 of my best friends – both programmers. We set our goals to make and sell software products, Web Design and other Internet related things, while keeping our day jobs. We created our site in English – we wanted to conquer the World as any Entrepreneur does when it gets past the Entrepreneurship fear- .

Making the site in English proved to be a mistake later as this set us in a very competitive market, where we didn’t actually have any chance – Web design (more about this in day three).

Anyway, we’ve got to do what proved later to be a successful free product, which brought us some attention. We also got our first customer from Austria, which helped us partially to pay for 2 laptops – first big investment, which we paid about 70% from our pockets.
Around this moment, I’ve decided to switch hosting for our site and for our customer from a cheap USA solution to a much more expensive and reliable one. This was the moment when I realized I should make a company policy in getting the best tools for the job – which I try to keep even today.

Unfortunately about this time, the other 2 partners in the company decided to leave their shares (one to his wife, Tina, which by the way is the sister of my girlfriend) and the other to me – we weren’t making any profit back then anyway. With their leave, they also took the free product with them – I wasn’t able to sustain it from the technical point of view.

This was probably one of the worse times, the company got no products, no programmers and no nothing. The entire business plan (yes, I wrote a business plan) went to trash, while one third of the company went to my girlfriend (Simona).

I’m not ashamed to say that the salvation came from my previous job: they actually sent me the first paying customer and offered me their Web Design tools. Thank you! This way (and based on my previous experience as Project Manger) I’ve started learning some programing, Tina did the creatives – just enough to make the first Websites for the first paying customers.

The first year ended up with virtually no profit. I had my first doubts about entrepreneurship and we seemed to go nowhere, but as we all kept our 9-5 jobs, things weren’t so bad after all.

Continued day two.

• One, just by looking at the blog stats I can say that most people are looking for entrepreneurship stories, as a way of verifying if their idea will work and fight against what is called “Entrepreneurship fear”
• And second, I reached an important and crucial conclusion for my business, and that is that I’m not making the most out of it (although is going strong an well)

So let me take you to a journey, where I will write about my plans and the steps I’m taking. Although it will be a day one to day x story, it won’t be the classical Web experiment as in “let’s see if I can monetize a blog in 30 days” or something like that, mostly because I won’t be posting every day as some things are going to take longer or simply because I will take my time into developing things. But yes, for the sake of the story, it will be a day 1 to day x journey.

So if you want to know how things are working in a small business, what can be done and what can’t, brilliant ideas or failures told as they happen in a real entrepreneur life, tune up your rss readers to http://www.energybyte.com/blogs/index.php?tempskin=_rss2
and bookmark the “A start-up story” category.

Let the journey begin with…day one.