Is 18 TH/s Enough to Start My Own Pool? I'm thinking of developing a mining pool for myself and close friends.  I realize that there are large pools like BTC Guild, Slush, etc. that we could join, but I like the idea of creating my own.

I'm taking delivery of 6 Neptune miners from KnC in Q2 that will give me 18 TH/s.  I know that's not a great deal, but it's a start...and my friends will add their own computing power as well.    

To be honest, I'm not a "technical" kinda guy; I'm a business man.  So here's my question(s):

1) How would I go about developing a pool and handle automatic payouts?
2) How could I create a dashboard that allows my friends (and maybe one day the public) to see their mining activity?

I appreciate and look forward to your responses.
Setting up a mining pool will require some programming, so based on your self-identification as a business man, I would suggest to start with asking yourself how much this will be worth to you. Many would say that running a bitcoin pool is likely a bit of an altruistic endeavour: If you want to attract people to join your pool, you are competing with others. This competition drives pool payouts close to 100% payout of block reward plus earned transaction fees plus free insurance against the stochastic nature of actually finding a block, and possibly against the pool making a mistake such as losing bitcoin temporarily stored for participants.

However, if you are a business man through and through, there might yet be a profit motive to be found: Successfully running a pool certainly will gain you credentials in the bitcoin world, which could be valuable for doing other bitcoin business. Then hypothetically having a large pool could help in offering future services like enabling bitcoin businesses to more quickly accept bitcoin payments by insuring against double spending. Finally, I have been wondering about pairing a mining pool with a bingo-like gambling element, where customers could bet on when the pool will next find a block (for the combined effect of extra revenue and helping to insure the pool operator against not finding a block for a prolonged time). Note that both the payment insurance and the gambling idea is likely to raise legal issues and may be expensive to start in a law-abiding way due to legal/licensing overhead.

Whether running a pool is worth it to you depends on the value you attach to all of that. To help you make an estimate, consider that with your hashrate of 18 TH/s you'd contribute 0.15% of the total hashrate today (and less tomorrow), see e.g. the stats page bitcoincharts.com/bitcoin. That means you need to wait, on average, about 670 blocks or approximately five days until you find a block, with actual values fluctuating wildly according to the Poisson distribution, provided none of your miners maliciously cheats and withholds blocks found. Hence you will either need tremendous tolerance about actual block rewards and payouts possibly diverging purely by chance, or more hash power. Or a vain or altruistic outlook on this project, or a side business associated with running the mining pool.