From Twiddling to Spinning

So for anyone who didn't know, I own my own business. I should post some time about how it got its start, how our first year went, etc. Since I haven't posted in a while, I think posting about my business is a good way to get back into it.

It's interesting when you're hired as an employee, how easy it is to realize that work must be acquired. It was easy to forget that when I worked at US Steel as an intern. In fact, it could have been easily forgotten that we even made steel. I answered the phone and tried to help people fix their computer problems. Nothing related to steel at all.

At any rate, if a business is at the point of hiring employees, it likely means that they have so much business, they can't do it on their own. But getting to that point isn't easy. There are a lot of times here when we have nothing billable to work on.

We build custom software. It's a good line of work for the most part. There's very little competition. Most people who are good at building software are terrible at marketing. There are few overhead costs. We don't have to buy supplies very often. We just need our computers and our servers running. It was a good business to get into.

The biggest challenge that we face is finding work. Finding people to pay us to build them software. It isn't the easiest task, but we welcome the challenge.

Now back to last week. We have 3-4 projects coming down the pipeline, but they are taking a good bit of time to get going. Getting clients to sign a sales contract and commit to paying us is often an issue. So we were filling the time with whatever we could. Internal stuff, catching up on accounting stuff, it got boring. Plus with every bill I paid, I knew that the bank account was shrinking ever so slowly.

This week, Tuesday morning came as usual for us. Nothing really to do. But then at 1:00 we got a phone call. It turns out someone had a rush job that they needed quoted for a price by 4:00, and completed by 6:00 Friday. Now this project we quoted at 72 hours of work. That's a lot to get done in 3 days time. We quoted them, they signed a contract the next day, and we got to work.

Not only did that happen, but we had a request we'd be waiting for 2 weeks to get, come in the same afternoon. We had two other phone calls from a web design firm looking for a quote on some work for their customers. And I had been trying to setup meetings for the week, assuming that we had nothing to do.

In other words, 5:00 rolled around on Tuesday, and I looked back at the last 4 hours, and thought "WTF just happened.".

I'm not complaining about getting business finally. But I will say, it would have been nice for it to have spread itself out. Now, at least we've pushed enough stuff until next week to guarantee that we won't be bored then.

My dad told me last week, a lot of the times it's feast or famine. I guess I got a taste of starving in the Sahara and being picked up for Thanksgiving dinner at my grandparents. ("Are you sure you're full? Have some more!" my grandmother says.)

Hope everyone's doing well. I'll try to post more often with some more of my life's annals.