Inner Circle Media

In this 8 minute segment (download iPod compatible, 42MB), Carrie discusses how she wants Inner Circle Media to evolve over the next twelve months. Her first goal is to develop additional productized services like their content management system that they can lease. Lease revenue from these services is an important aide in smoothing out their cyclical service revenue.

Further out, she is considering establishing a second office, possibly in New England. An office there would allow them to remain in better contact with a growing customer base and also reduce the cost of servicing that market.

In this 7 minute segment (download iPod compatible, 38MB), Carrie Hensel describes Inner Circle Media's staffing model. Currently, they have six core employees beyond the founding partners and frequently hire in contractors. Contractors typically engage in coding and other back-end work that does not involve client contact. Design and project management are front-end activities, and Inner Circle does not outsource these positions.

When I asked Carrie about offshoring, she went on to further describe the work environment. Much of the office is open, and communication between people working on a project is tight and easy. Offshoring a project would require tight specifications that might not meet what the client needs as their views on the project evolves. However, if Carrie had a project with components that could be tightly specified in advance, she would offshore.

In this 11 minute segment (download iPod compatible, 57MB), Carrie describes how she and Catherine Hayes founded Inner Circle Media, a web design and marketing firm, in 2001 when it was abundantly clear that the dot-com bubble had burst. It was a process of finding their place in the market. They originally thought they would target bioscience startups but soon found that that market was not going to sustain them, and traditional ecommerce jobs (install a web site to sell things) was already dominated by larger players. However, they found themselves frequently matching well with foundations and non-profits which still had budget, and this is the segment Inner Circle Media focuses on today.

Other highlights from the interview:

• Carrie has undergraduate degrees in both biology and fine arts.
• After undergrad, she cut her teeth in the corporate world at Parke-Davis, in part to build a nest egg.
• She financed the firm with savings and a home refinancing. It was imperative that she sell from the start.

In this segment (download iPod compatible, xMB) Carrie describes Inner Circle Media's reasons for creating a content management system (CMS). CMS's allow people to manage websites without having to know the many detailed technologies involved in making them work. The CMS acts a sort of semi-finished product that Inner Circle can then customize for its customers. Some highlights:

• Inner Circle will lease the software or sell it to their clients.
• Leasing software in this way is often referred to as "software as a service", and Inner Circle got the idea from one of the pioneers in the field, 37 Signals.
• Clients have generally warmed to the leasing option.
• However, some have the sophistication to manage the required infrastructure and want the rights of outright ownership.