Far and away the biggest unprepared for challenge of growing Dogster to a million dollar business has been building a great team of coworkers and keeping them challenged, happy and motivated.

John Vars, co-founder and Chief Product Officer has proposed a panel to SXSW Interactive on this topic which we think is a far too overlooked in today’s entrepreneurial fervor.

If you agree or want to learn more, please take the time to vote 5 stars for his panel - Start-Up Management 2.0 — Keeping Teams Motivated, Productive, Happy.

We knew when we started this that we wanted it to be a respectful, better company then others we had worked in before. Once we got to about 10 employees we realized that simply doing what we thought was the right way and the actually right way as desired by our team were actually quite different.

In reality your employees are even more important than your customers. If you think of all the things you do to go the extra mile for your customers is the same approach you should take for your employees. Of course you could go the “churn and burn” or “intern and oversees” route, but the way we see it, life’s too short to not aspire for something better than the bottom of the barrel.

You can vote for it now.

Also, I’d highly recommend exploring the whole panel picker. SXSW has gone further then any event I know to get panels on stage that are really the ones that people want to see.