Sometimes being an entrepreneur sucks, but only sometimes.

Unless you start a company with partners, you are the sole person that is responsible for everything. The company sinks or swims based on your actions. You wear many hats – sales, marketing, strategy, finance, operations, production, etc. You don’t get much sleep, and you don’t do much else other than work. And you take on all the risk.

Being an entrepreneur is not for the faint of heart.

You need to be risk averse, highly positive all the time, be able to self-manage and self-motivate, and be insanely driven by what you believe in. You need continuously learn about how to be better and how to make your company better. You need to be out there hitting the street, and as Gary Vaynerchuk always says, “crushing it.” You need to keep the faith.

My faith lapsed.

For anyone following this blog, you will have seen a number of months ago that I posted about the company moving to San Francisco. You will also have read about my looking for a full-time job and handing over the reigns to Justin.

I had fear, and I let it control my actions.

That fear is no longer there.

When we first started developing Ruby on Rails applications 6 years ago, there was very little competition. I was able to steadily grow Atlantic Dominion Solutions by contracting out most of the production to contractors, and managing the projects myself. As time went on and the popularity of Rails grew, we got extremely busy, and I began hiring full-time employees. In 2008 we grew from one employee (myself) to a team of 9. To be frank, the business came rather easily. We had advertising in place that worked very well, we had a great reputation, and an excellent portfolio of clients.

At the same time as I was building the company, I finished by bachelor’s degree (computer science) at Rollins, and in September of 2008 began the MBA program, which I finished this past August. Because of school, I was unable to travel much, save my talk at Ruby Hoedown 2008 and my talk at RailsConf 2009 , and do many of the other things I needed to do to respond to the growing competition in the Rails space. Ultimately, we shrank from a team of 9 to a team of 2, Justin (now CTO and partial owner) and myself.

A few months ago I let my fear get the best of me and started looking for a full-time job. I figured that what had happened to my company was due to some lack of knowledge on my part, that I didn’t know enough. I determined that the best course of action was to hand over operations to Justin, and to get a full-time job. I looked west to San Francisco, a tech hub of our country, and a fantastic city (where some of our contractor and clients are). I had a few interviews with companies including Salesforce.com (Agile coach) and Skype (ScrumMaster). I’m still here in Orlando so we know how those turned out.

Things always work out as they are supposed to.

I’ve been thinking for quite some time about what is next for Atlantic Dominion Solutions. I’ve spoken with many people, read many books and blogs, and looked at what the successful companies are doing now. The biggest question I had to answer, as any company does, is how can we differentiate ourselves in a more crowded space?

When I first started Atlantic Dominion Solutions as an IT services firm in 2000, I was told by a great client that I was too nice to be in business. I say this not to say that I’m a nice guy, but to make a point. Business is vicious. Every week I hear about people I know bad mouthing other people I know so they can get a job. I know for a fact that my competition told one of my clients that we wouldn’t be around in a year. That was over a year ago.

Our tagline is, “Collaborate. Enable. Succeed.” This isn’t a mere tag line, this is my personal philosophy, the way I live my life. This post is an example of one of my core beliefs – transparency. I don’t think that it’s crazy to believe that I can successfully grow a company while maintaining my ethics, not resorting to bullshit marketing tactics to get people in the door or low-balling on price to get a contract, only for a client to discover that it costs more than they were told. I can’t count the companies on one hand that came back to us after being low-balled by a competitor, only to have decimated their budget and thus not being able to work with us. I don’t want to be treated like that, and I won’t treat our clients like that. People deserve a lot better.

We aren’t going anywhere.

As long as there are companies who need an application custom built so they don’t need to change their business to fit a piece of software, and desire to work with people who operate with integrity, honesty, and transparency, we will be here. I’m finished with my MBA, I learned a lot from my peers in the MBA program, here at the Inc. 500 Conference (which isn’t over yet) and in the industry, and I’m not going it alone.

For more than 6 years we have been building custom Ruby on Rails applications for clients from non-profits like socialmarkets, to enterprise-level companies like Chrysler. We are experienced, lean, agile, and hungry. And, we aren’t going anywhere.