WulPack

Congratulations on the launch! It's exciting to see another community start up, especially for such a fun topic as dogs.  I appreciate the personal reflection and insights you share based on your background as a primary school teacher.  Those skills can translate very well into a community manager.  
You offer some solid advice on encouraging all feedback, bulk mails, keeping track of your activities, asking for help, and being passionate.  We look forward to more doggy updates! 

With all due respect, but if you guys told us that you would be introducing a media manager where we could reuse images for articles etc, then I would be inclined to get a bit more excited.
God knows how much server space I have wasted uploading the same images over and over again, when I could have uploaded it once and reused it over and over again.

I definitely agree that community management is a practice that requires it's own education.  I've become a certified community manager and there are some amazing concepts grounded in social theory, behavioral analysis, and organizational theory that I never would have known if not for those courses.  
I'm hoping IPS might think about offering something like an IPS University as a place of learning for admins who are looking to professionalize their communities.  
Thanks for sharing your best practice! I definitely agree that having a team and being accountable is important to the well functioning of your community and making measured progress.   
More broadly, I think its all about discipline.  For the beginning years of my community, I did everything myself (because I only needed one person).  But you have to be organized and disciplined.  I keep a "website diary" of all the important changes that I made, my thoughts, and links for things I'd like to investigate in the future.  It's helped me so many rimes to go back and see what I was working on.  

Another great article Joel! You should have your own column by now. 😁
This is the type of content I love reading about. I love that I can find it here. I love that IPS finds it useful enough to post here.
Being an admin/owner of a board is hard enough. It's time consuming.
The more time you put in the more ROI right?
That's not the case with most admins.
What I recommend...
You don't have to do this alone. It's impossible to know everything that is going on. 
Every board admin has a team. They could be paid or volunteer staff. It doesn't matter.
Start having weekly/monthyly team meetings.
Each team member has their own task. Talk about them ... 
What is the progress? 
What news do you have to share?
How is the project coming along?
Etc.
By doing this..
You will find that you will learn from your staff.
You will find that you are getting things done on time. 
You will start creating new opportunities.
More importantly, you will start reacting opportunistically to changes that you may not have been aware of.
(Yeah, that's often the case for many admins - they didn't know about ABC/XYZ until it's too late.)
For small board admins, ask questions. There is no such thing as a stupid question. 
I've been doing this for 20 years, I still ask stupid questions. I still make mistakes.
I'm still learning.

Thanks for posting my blog post.
I want to emphasize the point about reacting opportunistically, and taking advantage of changes that happen in your industry or field.  Part of that requires being aware of what's going on in your industry to begin with.  It's important to apportion part of your time to understanding what's happening to other websites, forums, communities, and brands that are in your space.  You don't have to keep up with everything all the time - but it's important to step away from your own community for a bit to see what everyone else is doing.