SohoDojo
Type of business: An online business hub for microbusinesses
Location: Raleigh, NC
Launched: April 1999

Jim Salmons, 48
Timlynn Babitsky, mid-40s

Jim Salmons and Timlynn Babitsky are corporate dropouts. As "road warriors" for IBM, they spent their lives trying to meet in airports for coffee. They made a lot of money and devoted their free time to spending it. Today, this married couple is more interested in how healthy and happy they are. They have built JFS Consulting, a home-based business that provides business development services to Internet firms. It encompasses the SohoDojo (http://sohodojo.com), a virtual community for nanocorps -- ruthlessly small businesses whose owners know how to live. The site’s motto is "Work global virtually, live local fully."

Jim Salmons: The SohoDojo is our community, our Web. We use it to say, "these are the things we’re interested in and the things we’re looking for in customers, vendors and product providers." Our resume is, in a large sense, the SohoDojo. We go out and find companies that would be interesting to work with in a traditional contractor-type relationship. But instead we partner with them in a business-to-business relationship.

Timlynn Babitsky: The SohoDojo is also a community for other nanocorps, or ruthlessly small companies. We feature a newsletter, book reviews and various forums. You can have a great idea and vision but you need to have set of folks that share that vision in order for it to catch fire. There’s a growing proportion of our society that wants to be independent, to shape its own future. I think that trend will continue to explode. There’s also another group of people saying, "I want to do something that’s meaningful to me, important to me, that makes a difference in some way." I think that’s where you’re going to get these communities of people who say, "I do these things. Who wants to join in on this vision with me?" We’re all independent, but together we are pushing this community forward. The community is vital, and I think people will search for it. The SohoDojo is one outlet.

JS: Fundamentally a nanocorp is a very small company that’s focused on the health and happiness of its owners. It takes conventional wisdom concerning how we approach our relationship to work and turns it upside down. We think of a nanocorp as the smallest, almost an atomic-level business. Everything to us is business-to-business. We don’t go out and look to be hired onto a project where someone else has a vision and dream that they’re pursuing. We look for partners because we have a vision and we’re looking for people to help us get there. We’re on a par with the folks we work with, as opposed to being a resource hired for their purposes.

JS: This gets at one of the core ideas of the nanocorp. As a nanocorp, the focus is on the only employees, the founders. You never hire any other employees. Everything is done through business-to-business relationships or traditional outsourcing or through a kind of teaming. A nanocorp doesn’t grow by hiring employees. There are more and more examples of significant businesses that have no more than a couple of people in terms of the core company. But through business-to-business, transient relationships, you can do big things without being a big company.

JS: One of our nanocorps is a company called Squirrelfeeders. We run it ourselves. Bird feeding is big. Once you have a lot of people feeding birds, you can't help but feed squirrels. We intend to sell a lot of squirrel feeders and have a lot of fun doing it. We'll get there by partnering with other companies in order to bring the technologies together to make that site interesting and fun to visit.

TB: We may need a fabricator: someone who has a woodworking site and would like to partner with us. A delivery or shipping service. Kind of like this elastic network of very small businesses or independent contractors that come together for a larger agenda, from which everybody gets a little piece of the action.

JS: The Internet is the enabler that makes it possible for very small businesses to succeed and compete in the larger marketplace. The beauty of the Web is you can hang out your shingle, create a hub and say, "I’m going to bring customers together." There’s no better way to be considered a peer in your community than to have a site where people can say, "Hey, these folks are moving and shaking in my area. These are folks that I want to do business with." We approach the world differently now than we did when we were consultants. We created SohoDojo and said, "Let the work come to us."

TB: Without the Internet we couldn’t be doing what we’re doing today. Years ago when we were doing independent consulting you were limited by how many meetings you could go to. It was what can I physically accomplish in face-to-face meetings and mail. Now we have people from South Africa and France writing to us. We couldn’t have that kind of exposure and ability to get our message out before the Internet.

JS: There are going to be two basic worlds in the future: great big companies that sell commodity-type products that are very affordable for wide numbers of people and these very focused, small businesses where service and specialization are important. That’s what we’re focusing on. We’re not going to try to be the next eBay or Lands’ End. We don’t have to be a big giant company like that to succeed on the Internet. We think there’s going to be lots of similar small businesses like that. The world of work isn’t going to be made up of big enterprise companies. There’s going to be a lot of interesting work done in the next century when the best and brightest people get together and collaborate for the same ends.