I dunno. It doesn't sound like a "lifestyle business" to me it sounds like a slightly enlightened 9-5. A "lifestyle business" is when you can support yourself cashing AdSense checks and paying your server bills and you don't have the bother of managing people.
There's something to say for work/life balance, but personally I don't like working for job shops -- and for me specialization around a particular client-side technology is also a red flag.
My experience with places like that is often you have to explain to client B why their project is late, and often the real answer is "I was working on a project for client A." Client B never wants to hear this, and if you tell the truth you might lose the client and you'll certainly get in trouble with your boss. The safest thing to say to the client is nothing, but then they get antsy and they start to wonder if your company hired a dumbass who can't code his way out of a paper bag.
At some point I joined the project management institute and signed on to a code of ethics that explicitly forbids this kind of stupidity.
Job shops have other project management problems too. If you're good you can probably do 4 out of 5 fixed price projects successfully, but in about 1 out of 5 you've got a customer who can't accept that changes in the spec imply changes in the budget. Hypothetically you could negotiate these guys into a win-win situation, but it doesn't work this way in real life because you can burn up endless hours from your most expensive people just communicating with your client. 1 out of 5 projects going this way can eat up the profit you make from the other 4 and then some.
Another issue is that job shops are often an unstable business. One of the more prominent job shops in my town started making web sites in 1994 and fluctuated between 2 and 25 employees before finally going under in 2008. Funny, they didn't get hurt by the .bust, but rather by fluctuations in the local market. They came to an end largely because some other people started a better job shop that took away their high-end work and a whole bunch of people were doing very cheap work they couldn't compete with on the low end.
A "slightly enlightened 9-5" is close, but I think falls a bit short of what I was trying to communicate. I was an entrepreneur working to build something that I hoped would pay off big. I was working for the future, not the present.
I woke up, realized that it wasn't worth it, and decided to change.
In doing so, we discovered that by working with like minded people, building honest relationships and banding together with the same goal, we got the best of both worlds.
To your point about "job shops", I would agree that as a business model they have certain pitfalls. However, there are "job shops" that do run well, and we're one of them. The focus here isn't on the business model, but on what we deliver to our employees. That's what matters.
Perhaps it's because I know nothing of this organization (appendTo) or author, but this post flew right over my head. All I picked up were several generalizations and loose ends with very few hard facts, resulting in a jumpy article that was difficult to follow as well as several looming questions in my head.
I think the basis of this post may have been the acceptance of a lifestyle business, and that's great, but I fail to see any correlation to "Hacking the American Dream" or the 2011 BigOmaha conference, etc.
Having a team as Mike describes will make all the difference when it comes to work/life balance and ability to deliver to their clients consistently. It sounds as through their culture is one where each team member is passionate about their core focus, and more importantly, has each others back. My read is that this team is very self motivated, reducing the overhead for managing it, and thus reducing a lot of the typical problems with "job shops".
I can't say I go for the completely "virtual" company, but I doubt you will find 11 people that fit a core culture in one geographical location, so I get that.
There's something to say for work/life balance, but personally I don't like working for job shops -- and for me specialization around a particular client-side technology is also a red flag.
My experience with places like that is often you have to explain to client B why their project is late, and often the real answer is "I was working on a project for client A." Client B never wants to hear this, and if you tell the truth you might lose the client and you'll certainly get in trouble with your boss. The safest thing to say to the client is nothing, but then they get antsy and they start to wonder if your company hired a dumbass who can't code his way out of a paper bag.
At some point I joined the project management institute and signed on to a code of ethics that explicitly forbids this kind of stupidity.
Job shops have other project management problems too. If you're good you can probably do 4 out of 5 fixed price projects successfully, but in about 1 out of 5 you've got a customer who can't accept that changes in the spec imply changes in the budget. Hypothetically you could negotiate these guys into a win-win situation, but it doesn't work this way in real life because you can burn up endless hours from your most expensive people just communicating with your client. 1 out of 5 projects going this way can eat up the profit you make from the other 4 and then some.
Another issue is that job shops are often an unstable business. One of the more prominent job shops in my town started making web sites in 1994 and fluctuated between 2 and 25 employees before finally going under in 2008. Funny, they didn't get hurt by the .bust, but rather by fluctuations in the local market. They came to an end largely because some other people started a better job shop that took away their high-end work and a whole bunch of people were doing very cheap work they couldn't compete with on the low end.