Wednesday, May 21, 2008, 7:09pm
Snowdrop is running into a pretty cool problem: too much work. I never really gave much thought to the idea that Snowdrop could eventually have too much work spread over too many projects, but after putting in 98 and 107 hours each of the last two weeks, respectively, I realized it’s time to start managing growth a little better.
To do this I’ll actively try two new things:
- Value My Time A Little More - Colleagues at work always ride me for charging too little, so from now on I will make a better effort to charge for value, not for time. Through this I’ll probably piss off a few more people, but the clients I do take will be much more valuable.
- Ask For Help - If there are several interesting or profitable projects running in parallel, I’ll turn to colleagues, outsourcing websites, and other outlets to offload and share work. I’ve already started to do this and it has worked out well so far.
May will be Snowdrop’s biggest month ever in terms of profit and revenue. Since the beginning of the year, business has grown almost 300%, but to maintain that type of growth we need to be smart about our decisions.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008, 8:25pm
I’m about 75% finished putting together the brand new home office, anchored by the IKEA Mikael office set, and I’m pretty pleased how things are coming out considering the entire room cost less than $500. In fact, I’m so happy with my purchases I don’t understand why anyone would want to spend thousands of dollars on their home office unless it was to buy a new computer, printer, and speaker system.
Hopefully with this dedicated office space I’ll be able to separate my work from my sleeping and relaxing spaces. That’s always been a problem for me - I would sit up in my bed late at night doing work before going to sleep, but I never could fall asleep right away. Now I have a room for work, a room for play, and a room for sleep. Perfect.
Thursday, May 8, 2008, 7:56pm
Somewhere in-between moving, learning about homeownership, and working I’ve managed to let this blog slip for almost a month. Frankly I can’t believe that it’s already May and that I’ve been in this house for over two months.
Anyway, today I got the go-ahead on a very large project over at Snowdrop so I’m pretty excited. Although I’ll be booked up pretty much solid for the next two months, I hope to make more of an effort on this blog and maybe even use it as a little vent when work starts to pile.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008, 10:12pm
Just like I promised, the black/white/red theme was, in fact, temporary, and has been replaced with an updated version of my favorite theme of the past. To celebrate the new look, I went ahead and purchased MarsEdit to take care of all my blog posting needs. I love the clean UI and the Markdown support, so I finally caved and bought it. Yep, I consider it a business expense.
I really like this design because it’s more personal. The image at the top was taken at sunrise in Wildwood, NJ, where I’ve vacationed with my parents practically since birth. The color scheme is better suited to a website with the word “sunrise” in it, which I also like.
Thursday, April 10, 2008, 9:02pm
Sometimes it’s hard to sell a business - especially a small business - on the concept of search engine optimization. Despite having concrete numbers to analyze ROI, I think many business owners are less willing to go into something when they don’t quite understand how it works.
For example, would you pay someone a huge chunk of change to take your existing website, rework the underlying code (which you don’t understand), and then put it back online, only to have it look more or less identical to the previous version? Would you pay someone to rewrite the content on your website to better match what people search for on the Internet? Believe me, it can be a tough sell.
This afternoon, however, I had a Snowdrop client who was originally skeptical about an SEO evaluation call me to say that sales are up by roughly 40% since February 15, the day we launched the newly optimized site. Being an online content provider, search engine visitors are absolutely critical to the success of his business. Needless to say I was very happy to receive the feedback and the kind words, and it gave me even more faith in the rising SEO industry.
Once feedback like this makes its way down to small business owners and business at the local level, I think we’ll have much less difficulty finding local SEO work.
