One more thing: Fire people. Do not suffer with a problem employee. Screw up your courage and take care of the problem, do not let it fester. That does not mean you have to be an ass about it. Things you can say:
It is just not working out, sorry. I will give you a letter of recommendation. I am inviting you to find your happiness elsewhere. We are eliminating your position (chicken-shit way to do things but sometimes it is somewhat true). Once in a while: Here is a box, pack your stuff and leave. John will escort you to the door. From: Chuck McCown Sent: Wednesday, January 07, 2015 8:39 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [AFMUG] New WISP Things to do: Pick the right radio the first time. I am partial to Cambium products. This is like getting married and having a bunch of kids and having a bunch of inlaws move in with you. Don’t screw it up. You have to live with it 24/7/365. Get into fiber as soon as you can. Take fiber feeds from your upstream provider if you can. Take fiber to your tower sites if you can. Pick the right billing system and right bookkeeping system. Quickbooks is good for accounting, but it is not so good for billing for a WISP. It can do it, but there are better systems out there. It will get you by initially. Stay the right size. If you are a very small operation you can make good money. If you are a large operation you can make good money. There is middle ground where you are continually broke but need to grow. Try to avoid that. A one man operation can make more money than a 5 man operation in this business. Try to avoid hiring anyone for as long as possible. (That does not include an accountant. You must have a good accountant). Keep the company always in your political control. If you bring in partners or gift stock to employees, make sure that your ownership percentage is always the majority. Don’t count on ANYONE siding with you during a dispute. Morals, ethics, honesty, loyalty, religion all go out the window when things turn ugly. Sad to see. Things not to do: Do not do a flat network. Feed each access point from a router port or a VLAN. Do not allow APs to even know of the existence of other APs on the same tower. Do not scrimp on CAT 5 cable. Use quality cable. Shielded at all AP sites. Do not scrimp on backhaul capacity or quality. If/when you can justify it, put in licensed radios for backhaul. Do not hire friends or relatives. Do not scrimp on backup power. Make sure everything can run for at least 12 hours without external power. Do not futz around with being an email provider. Don’t even do any hosting right at first. I would not do paper bills. Keep it all online. ACH /Credit card payment receipt is a must. Do not do installs in marginal locations. One marginal customer can eat up all of your time and they will give you a black eye in the marketplace.
