theParagon.ORG

Catching up w/tabs

It's been a few months since I've really been able to sit down and catch up on some blogs. Being awake until (it's going to be) well after 2am, I'm starting to actually see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Here's what I have to read yet.

Hiring Organized People

When you first start a business, you think you know everything that's needed to run a business and don't need anyone's help. This is primarily because you have a lot of energy and you don't actually know (at that time) what things will be asked of you. For me - that's lasted for a few years but now that we have a few employees and we're getting busier and busier - I just don't have the time to keep up with it all.

I'm finding myself dealing to much with internal operations, budgeting, forecasting, etc... while trying to do billable work and most importantly think of what's next.

So I'm taking next steps to reduce what I'd rather not do and hire someone who's core strengths are in the areas I don't have.

It's not that we have all this money at Elevator Up to hire all these people - we just need people to work in the areas they are experts in, everything else should ideally be done by someone else. Don't confuse that for not working hard and foolishly growing when you simply don't like taking on responsibilities/tasks.

So if you are an organized person and your first question to me isn't - "What's the pay?", head over to our job listing on Linkedin or email me directly at aaron AT elevatorup DOT COM.

We're Good - but is that ok?

I'm in a sticky spot right now at Elevator Up in that I know I need to make some changes in what we do, how many (new) people we have on staff and the types of projects we focus on. The crux of it all is knowing how to make those next steps.

The problem with developing websites/applications is that we're good at getting that kind of business and it pays pretty well. You work for a few weeks on a project, get paid enough to cover expenses and save some away to only move onto the next project. Depending on how good of a project/traffic manager you think you are - you can do a few of these projects at the same time and end up with a profitable month.

The thing for me is that I'd rather be working on web hosting, developing our own products, and following new ideas - not working on everyone else's new idea, or defining their online business objectives and strategy.

But that's just not reality now is it? You have to make a living and it's easy to continue doing things that are successful - I mean, why wouldn't you?

You're probably thinking - what is he complaining about? Either this guy should suck it up and be happy with his job, br proud that they're making some money -OR- just start doing the things that I want to do.

Wow - if it was only that easy. Developing websites/applications has allowed us to grow enough, and provided us enough money to start those additional things we really enjoy. If we just jump ship over to the things that interest us more, where will the money come from? Of course the idea is that these new ideas/ventures will bring us money but it's not going to happen overnight. It might be a few months or even a year before we start getting the desired revenue.

The other part of it is the cost of really doing the things you should do to be successful or set yourself a part from the competition. Doing Marketing and Advertising costs money, hosting events takes planning (and more money), keeping employees around so they can help you do these things costs money, building your infrastructure and tools takes time/money, etc...

I guess I could get a loan like so many people do when they start a business but it's been so gratifying to say that we haven't really needed to get a loan yet. Everything we have has come from hard stink'in work.

If you do borrow money - there's always the fear that something doesn't work out and you still need to pay that money back or depending how to get your money (VC, Angels, etc...) they might require a level of ownership in the company that you may not feel comfortable with. For me personally, I'm defiantly not interesting in handing over any shares of the company ownership. Call me a stubborn captain but I'll defiantly go down with the ship if that's where things end up.

I don't really have a good ending to this post other than, running a business is a heck of a lot of fun and wouldn't trade it for working for someone else.

In the same breath - it's tough and there's so many questions and so many things that I don't even know how to ask. I'm just hopeful in the "future" and constantly have my fingers crossed on the decisions I make in that they are helping us move forward - and not continuing to only do the things we may feel comfortable with.

Office with Walls

After months of being in office space limbo - our office is finally finished. Janson and I got everything moved in last Friday.

Wiki Categories

At Elevator Up, we have quite a bit of information that we need to constantly organize. Not only does this information need to stay organized but managed by a multiple people.

So a wiki has been introduced into the company. It's something that has always made sense but it's a tool that I (1) didn't really know how to manage and (2) didn't like the lack of good organization that I was seeing while we began to enter information into it.

So, tonight I made it my mission to figure out how to best organize some things on our internal wiki. I started by adding some of our web clients but then quickly realized it was going to take awhile to keep these organized.

I'd like to introduce WIKI Categories. This is an awesome little feature that I am now taking FULL advantage of. All you need to do is put the following tags at the bottom of your page.

[[Category:Web Clients|Mast Heating]]

This places all of our web clients into a category called "Web Clients" and then organizes it under "M" because I said "Metro Health".

[[Category:Hosting Clients|Mast Heating]]

This does the same thing as above but also places it within the "Hosting Clients"

The results of this creates a nicely organized list of pages in a category (example on MediaWIKI