I started a blog for the same reason as so many other internet greats before me — I need to unload my weighty wealth of knowledge on you so I can make the world a better place and assuredly gain massive wealth as an all powerful internet influencer. Ah shit, I just jinxed myself. All is not lost though because I’m also starting this blog for myself as a place to work through my side projects, ponder deep thoughts, and collect interesting, maybe even useful, things I find around the internet. And if this site miraculously blossoms into a community that I can bounce ideas off of, get feedback from, provide life changing content to (technically, saving you 5 minutes with some handy hack or pointing you in the direction of a cool new app changes your life, especially if you consider the butterfly effect), and just maybe create things of value for, that’d be a pretty sweet bonus. OK, back to reality.
Most of what I share will probably be related to self-development, product development, internet businesses, non-internet businesses, SaaS products, and other general technology stuff. (Establish a concise niche for my audience. Check!)
– Me
The sheer amount of content on the internet is overwhelming and this is a place where I can add a bit of organization to my little corner of it. I spend a lot of time mulling over business ideas and deciding what I want to do or learn next, often jumping from one idea to the next idea too quickly before too quickly jumping back into the process of “what am I gonna do next!?”
Speaking of jumping around, let’s jump into some background on me. I’m 34 years old, married, with a 2 year old son, and enjoy long mountain bike rides and powdery ski runs when I’m not working. Wait — since I treasure a work-life balance — let me reword that to when I’m not enjoying long mountain bike rides and powdery ski runs, I spend some of my spare time working jovially on a multitude of self-fulfilling career-building tasks. Now that you know I’m an outdoorsy family man, let’s move onto the juicy stuff, my super important career-related street creds.
I guess I would call myself an entrepreneur despite not having founded
– Mea whole bunch ofreally any hugely successful businesses. I try not to takemy careerwork stuff too seriously but there’s a constant question bouncing around my poorly wired brain: “What project-that-might-turn-into-a-business are you gonna try next?” It’s honestly pretty annoying.
I ran a handful of small “businesses” starting in middle school (a multi-layered empire of newspaper delivery, landscaping, boat cleaning, and computer building services). Then I went to college for Computer Science, but ended up switching to Business Management because I really didn’t want to take all the required math and physics classes. (I sometimes wish I had stuck it out on the Computer Science path, but oh well.) Then 4 years and a few extra weeks later I graduated. Then I moved to Utah to ski and not do any sort of serious work for a few years. It was 2008 and the job market was shit anyways.
Since graduating, I’ve dabbled in a bunch of web-based projects and taught learned myself some additional coding and business skills. And for the past 7ish years, I’ve been working for a small software company (let’s call it Super Great Software Company or SGSC). SGSC had 12ish employees at its peak but has since shrunk to just me and another contractor who helps with customer support. We sell a fairly complex SaaS product and I run everything from sales, marketing, and accounting to designing, coding and implementing the product for our customers. The job is a bit of a juggling act, but I do have a lot of autonomy, flexibility, and variety in to my day-to-day work. The company has been growing steadily for the past few years (dipping recently due to COVID-19) but we are in a market that is slow to adopt new software and I’m also not highly motivated to grow SGSC at a faster pace. Plus, I often have other projects cooking on the side, some related to SGSC and some personal, that I want to spend time on.
In my current position at SGSC as Shadow CEO / Developer / Marketing Manager / Sales Manager / IT Manager / Accounting Contact (my email signature says something like “Sales and Product Expert”), I’ve learned a ton about software and business development, including what’s possible and what’s not possible with very limited resources. And to my surprise, a lot is possible. I’ve learned how a small company can use its size as an asset (We’re so agile, though!), change direction quickly, shorten feedback loops with clients, and implement “creative” solutions like using email aliases to represent entire mythical departments (i.e. accounting@sgsc.com and sales@sgsc.com). And through the consulting services we provide to our customers on how to use our software and how to implement it within their unique company, I’ve learned about the importance of establishing clear workflows, building cohesive software stacks, creating realistic employee adoption strategies, and designing easily accessible data-driven reports.
Having been bloodied and scarred from many years in the trenches of business, I rise before you today to declare myself a titan of industry. With my newly established clout and the resource wasting atrocities I’ve witnessed in my someday-maybe-storied career, I finally have the necessary credentials to share constructive criticism, hopefully above average stories, and other useful tidbits of wisdom with the world’s most elite community — the internet.
– Me
In working with many different companies over the years, I’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly of business development. Often times I’ll see all three within a single company. While I do appreciate and commend the good, I’m amazed at how many businesses are just bad and ugly from a workflow and technology perspective. This of course creates massive inefficiencies, avoidable mistakes, wasted resources, poor client experiences, and loss of time and money. (In the unlikely event any customer of ours happens to stumble across this, you’d probably be the first to admit that you’re more focused on running other aspects of your business than the nerdy workflow and technology aspects. It’s the ol’ “working on your business vs. working in your business” conundrum. And in your defense, if running a business was easy, a lot more people would do it.) On a positive note, the bad and the ugly also create opportunity. Maybe for me, maybe for you, and maybe (but hopefully not) for the already-super-successful titans of industry out there.
Anywho, I spend a lot of time thinking about how current software or new software can be used to run businesses better, especially small and medium sized ones since SMBs represent the vast majority of businesses I’ve worked with. So many businesses, regardless of what they do, have huge gaps in their workflows that are wasting time, money, and other resources. Companies have an overwhelming and ever-growing catalog of extremely powerful software to choose from these days. But putting together a software stack is just part of the puzzle; you also have to figure out how to make your software stack work harmoniously and how your team should best use it.
Crappy, under-optimized software stacks and business workflows present an obvious opportunity for consulting services and software solutions, from basic apps to comprehensive SaaS products. I’ve pondered starting some form of consulting service for this opportunity, whether it be an in-person or self-guided web-based service, and I’ve thought about software (SaaS) solutions, too. I’ve got a few things in the works and hopefully this blog will push me to complete at least one of those things. Or spark some other cool idea for me. Or spark something for you. Or push me to connect with other people who then directly or indirectly spark some other cool idea. I’m getting ahead of myself, though. Before all these sparks fly, I need to go add “wrote about how I once thought about starting a consulting service and SaaS company” to my LinkedIn profile.