Welcome to my weird world!

Ups and Downs

Ellen Glasgow said: “The key to everything is patience. You get the chicken by hatching the egg - not by smashing it.”

Anyone who has ever tried to get a new innovation accepted in the marketplace will know just what an abundance of patience you need sometimes in business. Having spent two-and-a-half years and hundreds of thousands of pounds developing and testing a new product, we've certainly needed patience in the past year.

This year has been trying - financial worries never very far away, and the bank manager 'checking up on us' on a regular basis. I came into the company last August and while everyone else was having their budgets cut, I seem to have done nothing but spend money. Re-branding, advertising, telemarketing, networking, trade shows... all costly, but something was needed if we were to turn the company around.

Finally, it seems that all of my spending is starting to pay off: we're number one on Google for our key search term, with none of our competitors even within the top 100 pages; we've got two trials already in place from my telemarketing campaign, a roll-out starting and some very promising leads on the way. We've also got a pipeline of potentially half-a-million-pounds-worth of business from the telemarketing campaign. Less than ten thousand of investment for that return would be very nice... if it ever happens. We also got our second online sign-up today, and I made my first sale this week - 18 new sites.

Dad's away on holiday, and I would love nothing better than to have a nice set of sales lined up for when he returns. The way this week is going, it looks like we might just do it too. What a relief it would be to be able to take some of that stress away from him. Wouldn't do me any harm, either - I might actually be able to get home before 6 some nights, and could maybe even start thinking about a holiday. Maybe.

I've also found out today that the second biggest player in our industry purchased the fourth-largest earlier this week. That's one more competitor out of the market, but more-to-the-point, its the other company who really gave good customer service. With them now owned by one of the less caring ones, we should have little problem in capturing their old clients. I feel slightly sorry for the bloke whose company it was - having built his company up over almost the same duration that ours has been, I can well imagine what it must feel like to have to let it go. It does, however, open up some nice opportunities for us, so I can't feel that sorry for him!

Every good day has its bad points, though, and coming in from the garden tonight to find that one of my cats had pissed on the kitchen floor, wasn't exactly wonderful. Neither was then having a tiff with my partner over what to have for tea. I'm on a diet, and between us we'd screwed up what was left for me to have for tea. I said that I didn't mind if I had to break the diet for tonight and he got in a strop about how it's pointless paying a subscription for something if you're not going to stick to it....

Anyway, we're going to break the diet, and he's just shouted four minutes, so I'd better go and help in the kitchen. Have a good evening everyone.