Great Day at Work

When you wake up in the morning, you never know what kind of a day you're going to have. Yesterday morning, I had the feeling that my day was going to be really bad. I woke up at 6:45 (2 hours earlier than I usually do) because I had two early morning meetings to go to. Then I knew it would be a long day, because I had a BASH (Business After Scheduled Hours) for our local Chamber of Commerce, and I told Jeff, a colleague of mine, that I would be meeting with him after the BASH to work on helping each other's businesses out. So I knew it was going to be about a 14 hour day. Nothing to look forward to.

For about the last month or so, we've been barely making it by. I guess I should explain for anyone who doesn't know...when you own your own business, you don't get a paycheck. We get money by getting people to pay us for what we do. So if we don't get any work, we don't get paid.

We build software for businesses. My analogy for this is, say you have two blocks of wood connected by a screw. And you need to get that screw out. You can use any number of tools to get that screw out. A penny will work. A screwdriver will work. And a power drill will work. Which is the best solution? As this relates to software, most people who sell software are trying to sell a product. They will tell you that you should buy their penny. Or you should buy their drill. All of them will work, but perhaps they aren't the best tool for the situation. We actually look at what you're doing. We ask questions, like "how many times will you need to get that screw out?" And "how long will you be doing this? for a year?" Then we figure out what the best software to use would be, and either build it, help you implement it, or whatever.

OK, back on track to my point. We've had some really big quotes for some really big jobs out there. In early February we quoted a job for about $125,000. (Yes, that many zeroes!) Another job we quoted at $30,000 early March, and finally a third at $15,000 around late February. We expected to have had at least one of these jobs by not. Not so. We have still been waiting to hear back from everyone.

In the meantime, we've picked up some smaller jobs. A $3,000 job here, a $1,000 job there. But those don't quite pay the bills. So we've been holding our breath for a long time on a lot of these.

Wednesday morning's meeting was a volunteer meeting for the Monroeville Chamber of Commerce...I'm on their marketing committee to help them figure out how best to market their projects and events. During that time, they mentioned a need for their website to have customer logins. Perfect job for us, so we'll be talking with them about that. It will be small, but filler work is great. Then I met a designer and an IT person....two great places for referrals since they often work with people needing what we do.

Got back to the office, and actually worked on a project that was at a standstill. I finally fixed the problem that I'd been having, so I made a lot of progress.

The day still was kinda long, so off I went to the BASH. There I was introduced to a woman whose husband's company is getting raped by their software vendor. Apparently they pay $250 for a phone call to tech support. How ridiculous is that? So we'll be talking with them about fixing up their circumstance. Definitely a good lead.

After that I met with Jeff, who had a really ingenius idea for software. So when I discussed it with him, it seemed that he had the right mindset to build a software program from the ground up. If he really wants to do that, then power to him. I guarantee that he'll want us to be involved at the very least, if not programming the software ourselves.

So I went back to the office, feeling pretty good about the day. When I got back, I got an email from a colleague who had been in contact with the woman in charge of the $125,000 project. She said that we'd have to wait about 2 weeks, but it seems that we have a really REALLY good shot at getting the project. Then I found out from Nick that we had two other phone calls. One saying that we are just about guaranteed the $15,000 job that I mentioned before, and one saying that a friend of ours has another client who needs some work done.

What a whopper of a day. I sat in my chair for a good 5 minutes and just tried to take it all in. I know that I don't usually post about our projects, and things that we're up to. Most people don't care to know about the tools that we found to help our clients, and solutions to problems that we've encountered. I'm a friggin programmer! But I had to share this day, because this makes days like last Thursday (where we had to scramble to make payroll) very much worth it. On days like yesterday, it's good to be a business owner.

And if anyone is interested in some of the projects that we do, I'd be more than happy to talk about them here. Just be honest though....does anyone really care that we found a program that allows you to run a WAMP stack (Apache, MySQL, and PHP) locally without needing a web server? Probably not. But let me know, because I'll be happy to share the kinds of things that we do.

As a footnote, I've been playing Titanquest and a little bit of Baldur's Gate II. Once I feel more comfortable with them, I'll post some reviews.