Ivan stayed up half the night working out all of the intangibles of his business until he fell asleep on his sofa.

IN THE MORNING, Ivan wrote a checklist of the things he needed to do over the next few days to work his business plans. He booked lunch hours all that week for face-to-face meetings at the Subway sandwich store that was five minutes away from the Hutch & Mitchell office building.

First he hired Edward Kennison, a forty-two-year-old white man who was a fifteen-year advertising veteran from the San Diego Union Tribune, as his advertising sales manager. “Eddie K.” was a real money getter who was excited by a change of pace. He was a recent divorcee, and his only son had received a full academic scholarship to attend college at the University of Southern California that fall. Eddie used this opportunity to quit the newspaper business and jump headfirst into the website game with a 25 percent new ad commission, plus a 10 percent management purse of all ads instead of a salary.

Ivan had to trust someone to collect and deposit all of the ad revenue, while he continued to spend the majority of his workdays as an accountant. He realized that Ida would be too gun-shy to quit her day job for the heavy responsibility of the position. And Eddie was already experienced at putting together ad pitch tools for the sales staff. So Ivan introduced his new ad sales manager to Jeff and Paul and told them all to get familiar with each other.

“AT THIS POINT, the four of us make up the four corners of this website: the ad management, the general management, the ongoing creation, and the overall promotion,” Ivan told them over another dinner meeting in the university area. He said, “Next, I’ll need to hire a content editor to make our pages more client driven. That means the majority of our content and the spotlights that we post will surround the businesses that advertise with us.”

He said, “We can’t afford to keep posting random information like we do now. Everything we decide to post has to help us to make this website more profitable.”

Paul grimaced. He said, “Ivan, you don’t want your viewers to start feeling like the site is all business. That tends to turn people off. I mean, website viewers like random information. That’s what the Information Age is all about. But if we make the site too structured around businesses, we’ll start to lose a lot of the curious new traffic that we get.”

Jeff said, “Not only that, but you’ll set up a situation where the advertising businesses will become far more aggressive about when they receive their spotlights. And if we run their spotlights before we get their ads, they may not advertise with us at all. We’ll be creating our own mess.”