I am constantly thinking about what I love and what I hate when it comes to business.
Like any sane person, I try to limit the things I hate, and try to increase the things I like. For example, in the last year, I have:
- Started removing hosting services from our business model (and will continue to do so in 2008)
- I have started to reduce the number of clients while increase the number or recurring clients (mostly designers)
- I have shoved off more of the design work to other people, and taken on more of the coding (while still doing some design work)
- I begun turning down off-site clients (house calls) to reduce the number of times I have to leave the office.
Now to me, that sounds a lot in the negative column… Which is good because on a whole, most of growing pains JR was feeling came from trying to do to much at once.
However, like any good business, I am now looking to see what our next project is. The truth is: we haven’t started a project of our own in a LONG time (Mostly because of what I said above). It’s funny, because to some degree this used to be all we did. We would simply start a new idea because we had nothing else to do. Well, we still have plenty to do, but its starting to look like perhaps we will have some time to develop something or another. It won’t be overnight, but perhaps we can come up with something in the next 6 months.
The question is what.
I have a lot of great ideas. Some, I would like to think, are probably million dollar ideas with the right marketing and the right attention to usability. Others, are without a doubt for-fun ideas. Some, are just improvements on things that we aren’t all that good at doing now. The only question is which one to put time and money into.
Whatever the case, I’m up to something. Whatever the case, it’s coming. It’s always coming…