You can never start too early!

This isn’t so much a technical post but more about how important it is to set goals and the amazing payoff there is in achieving them. For the first year or so running the business I was perfectly happy coasting through and picking up clients here and there and watching the revenue slowly increase. I did no active new business development. Pretty soon I realized that my numbers were kind of hovering and not really getting up to where I would need them to be to do this as a full time job. After reading a ton of books and business blogs, it was apparent that I needed a business plan and to set some goals within it. So in 2007 I decided to write down my business, and well as personal, goals in my business/life plan. I didn’t go the route of the traditional business plan but created more of a life plan with my business integrated into it. Once I set my goals I had something to strive for.

Setting Goals

• Double my client base in Harrisburg as well as the Lehigh Valley (achieved)
• Increase revenue AND profit by 25% a year until 2012 (achieved)
• Find subcontractors to lighten my work load (achieved)
• Improve quality of work and complexity of project (achieved)
• Become THE company to provide quality, standards-based, web sites (almost there)
• Drive my dream car (2006 Dodge Charger) that my business paid for (achieved, proof of the goal -scroll to the bottom)

Achieving Goals

Figure out all of the little milestones to reach your goal

For my financial goals, I figured out how many hours I needed to bill on average weekly to improve my numbers to what needed to be.

Successfully hit each milestone

Once I figured out these milestones, I watched my billable hours very closely. If it looked like I was going to be short I actively went looking for more work. This meant following up with current clients to see if we could improve or build on what they had as well as finding new clients and asking for referrals or partnerships.

Be Disciplined and Focused on Your Goals

It is easy to forget about your goals and push them away to do other things. To help with this I have a whiteboard right next to my desk that shows exactly how much I must bill on average weekly to hit the yearly revenue number. Along with this I have how many hours of billable time this would take as well as the average monthly revenue needed. I also have a list of open projects, late invoices, and end of contract dates. Having these metrics in front of me at all times keeps me very informed of my goals and what is necessary to accomplish them and how I am doing.

The Payoff

2006 Dodge Charger

This is the best part. Actually having your goals down in writing makes the payoff that much sweeter. I look at that article above where my personal goal of driving my dream car within 5 years and it was written in late 2007. I was able to buy the car in September of 2008. I was able to accomplish a 5 year goal in less than 1 year. The same goes for all the goals. The fact that I have been able to increase revenue (28%) and profit (43%) each year since I wrote the plan makes me feel like I have accomplished something great. Sometimes the goals don’t seem like great payoffs if money or objects are not involved but the lessons learned along the way in achieving the goals you set are invaluable.

Since CWS has extended its client base here in the Lehigh Valley, I will still have to return to work with some pretty high profile clients.  So my usual commute will still be necessary although I may find myself working in some different spaces.  I already have a few lined up where there is free wifi, a quiet atmosphere, and they don’t mind if you spends hours there even if you only bought a $2.00 coffee.  How about that for coworking?

Some other bits of technology that I failed to mentioned before were from the Google family.  I wrote a post on my company blog, Tools to Run Your Business Remotely – CWS from Costa Rica, going over some tools that you can use to help you run a business remotely but I realized I missed some important ones I take for granted.

1. Google Calendar – Amazing (while not the prettiest) web app.  It’s also able to sync bidirectionally with your Blackberry so if you schedule a meeting on the road, it’s showing on your Calendar when they sync.
2. Gmail (with Contacts Sync) – Where would we all be without Gmail?  You can now also sync your Blackberry contacts with your Gmail contacts making things super easy for contact management.
3. Google Chat Application – I mentioned Google Chat previously but there is an a mobile app that allows you to chat on your phone.  When you don’t have time to bust out the laptop, just fire up this app and check in your workers from your phone.
4. Google Voice – Now this isn’t out yet but it will be a game changer when it is.  See here

Now these are only some of the tools that I find myself using on the road but I must say they do make things much easier.   This weekend I will find myself working from a couple different locations (Erie, PA and Buffalo, NY) thanks to our first and last overnight roadtrip of the season with the Pennsylvania Stoners.  Wish me luck and stayed tuned for some more remote working tips.

If you have any bits of technology that making remotely please let me know as I am always trying to increase efficiency.

My Movable Office Costa Rica Recap

After 2 months of catching up and new work I thought I would do a recap on my time in Costa Rica.  In my 22 days I was able to learn more Spanish than I thought possible as well as line up new projects for when I returned.  I noticed a small decline in our cash flow in January but only because I did not have access to our accounts receivable until I returned in mid February.  I did a good job of lining up work before the trip so I was still actually able to bill more hours than usual (to make up for the office hours I missed because I was away).  The great thing was that our business development was not hurt whatsoever by the 3 week trip.  We generated as much new business in the time I was away as we had any other month of the year.

I thought I would give you a rundown of the expenses (outside of my typical company expenses) so you can see if working remotely might be a good fit for you some day.

Cost of Flight: $376 Roundtrip from BWI to Liberia, Costa Rica
Cost of Apartment *: $575
Cash taken down: $450 
Volcano & Hotsprings Tour: $160
Money Spent on Food, Travel, and Souvenirs: $170
Cash Remaining on Return: $120

Total Necessary Expenses: $1121 (for  22 days….maybe $1200 for the full month)

* 1 Month, included utilities even basic cable and dedicated high-speed internet

I only went out to eat for a couple meals but the numbers speak for themselves.  It is very feasible to live and work remotely on a reasonable budget.  I spent about the same amount of money on food (maybe less) as I would have back home in the States.  Since I rode my bicycle (provided in my apartment) I didn’t have the gas costs I usually do in my commutes to the Harrisburg office (usually $175/month).  I still had to pay my rent in the Lehigh Valley but when you think that $1121 can get you 22 days of vacation (while still working at your leisure) in one of the most gorgeous places on earth and no cares in the world it’s not a bad plan. 

The popular phrase used by all of the Tico’s in Costa Rica is Pura Vida.  It means a handful of things but I like to think that it reflects their laid back culture and lifestyle meaning “This is living!”.  Not once when I was done there did I see someone rushing about or screaming into their cellphone or moving at anything faster than a casual walk.  It was nice to get away to a lifestyle that is basically opposite from what we are used to in the States.  I think I scheduled a few phone calls when I know I would be in the room but outside of that I had no set times for anything.  I would wake up around 9, write a few emails, and then head to the beach for a few hours to snorkel or read.  I would return for a late lunch and then get a few hours of work done.  Great lifestyle to get used to.

All this being I said I would 100% return to Costa Rica in the future.  It was cheap to get there and cheap to stay as well as most places having internet included.  Now the fun part is trying to find out where My Movable Office will take me in 2010.  I have been throwing around the idea of Honduras or Peru but I am still looking.  If any of you have any suggestions on destinations I would love to know.  Stay tuned for updates in the next few weeks.

2 newest additions to my jersey collection

Hey everyone.  I have been a bit lazy about posting but I wanted to enjoy the last few days of my trip.  Honestly nothing super crazy or interesting has happened in the last 4 days either.  It has mainly been catching up on work and continuing my exploration of the Rails framework.

I attempted to get to the beach a few days ago for last sunny day down there.  I made my sandcastle chair in the sand so I could read comfortably.  It wasn’t more than 5 minutes before I was sandblasted.  Even with my sunglasses on I couldn’t see a thing and sand was basically stuck all over me.  I think I am still finding sand behind my  ears and in my feet multiple showers later.  My copy of The Sandman was FILLED with…um sand.  Weird.

Nothing fun was accomplished yesterday other than watching Underworld with Spanish subs (amazing way to learn more Spanish) and getting a sweet sunburn under my eyebrows.  I closed my eyes by the pool in the sun listening to a Diggnation episode for 30 minutes or so and now my eyelids and up to about my eyebrows are  burnt.  I never thought to put sunblock on my eye sockets.  Word to all you other pale people out there.

Today I rode into Coco to get some soccer jerseys and my Spanish was put to the test.  I got to do colors, directions, buying things, and more.  I ended up spending a combined $18 for a Coco jersey and LDA La Liga jersey.  Now these are both terrible knock-offs but for $18 to have some Costa Rican soccer jerseys it was totally worth it.

Now things are coming to a close and I must clean up and begin packing.  Check back in a couple days to hear if the trip was beneficial or detrimental to the company.  I’ll go over revenue changes, pros/cons, business development, and more.  Now it’s time to find my next movable office location.  Peru is looking like a good option.  Others include Mexico, Honduras, and Argentina.  Anybody have any ideas out there on the Internets?

Having a tail to hang from would be cool

I woke up at a reasonable hour (10:15am) and began to prepare for my little bike ride.  I had my water all set, my towel, sunblock on and packed, money and keys all ready.  Around 11 I decided it was time to head for Playa Hermosa.  Little did I realize that Hermosa was about 15km from Ocotal.  Oops.  I didn’t realize there was such a huge elevation increase.  Not easy on a 1 speed beach-comber bike. a  There were multiple times I thought about turning around and just heading home.  Thankfully the competitive part of my brain told the reasoning part to shut up and stop being a wuss.  So after 1 hour and 15 minutes of biking/walking with my bike, I made it to Playa Hermosa.  Wow, what a waste of time and energy.  The beach was nicer than Coco but not as nice as Ocotal.  I plopped down in the sand and just rested for about an hour.

So after my hour of resting with a bittersweet taste of accomplishment in my mouth I decided I would stop for some food on my way back.  I wanted to relax to break up my trip so 15 minutes into the ride I stopped at Nano’s pizza.  Since I was the only one in his shop I sparked up a conversation and we spoke in spanglish for about an hour.  Talking about soccer, the economy, Costa Rica, and all sorts of stuff.  The conversation was definitely worth the bike ride.  It’s rare that I can speak that much spanish with someone around my age and not feel judged.  As soon as I told him I used to play pro soccer it was an instant connection.  He grew up in the Saprissa youth academy and loved the game.  It’s funny how something that simple can bring people together.  And he didn’t like Beckham.  Weird.

How They Sell Soda...3 liters...Awesome

Anyways another 30 minutes after lunch I see people driving past and pointing up ahead.   I can’t really see what they see yet but I figured oh it’s a bird, a plane,  Superman, whatever.  IT WAS MONKEYS!!!!  Yes this was the second time I’ve seen monkeys in wild but the first time they were just sleeping.  This time they were swinging all over and I saw a baby trying to jump from tree to tree and nearly falling out.  It was hilarious.  I must have watched for a good 10 minutes.  If they didn’t fling their feces everywhere they would be cool pets.

Eventually I made it home safely and have done nothing but relax and watch movie with spanish subtitles.  I am currently watching Spiderman 2 with subs and it’s a great way to learn.  A word of advice.  When you think something is close by bike, double check on google maps.

Super Windy

First of all if anyone tried to call me today between the hours of 3 and 11PM I am sorry but the Internet was out. Here in Costa Rica a strong gust of wind can cause a power surge and knock out power. It is usually only a couple minutes but last night it went out for about 15 minutes. This morning it went out a couple times just resetting everything but then around 2pm the Internet disappeared. Power was on but no Internet. Apparently the ISP here just can’t handle these types of things. So right when I was in the thick of my work, I was forced to stop. It is crazy to think how much I needed it. It is my only source of communication. My email, my phone, my chatting. I even tried to use my cell phone quickly but all I could manage were a few texts. I can only imagine how much that is going to cost me.

Since Becky left mid-day yesterday I have been working like a maniac to get caught up on everything I have been putting on the backburner. I decided to take a couple days out of the sun as well to rest my skin. Being 50% English my skin can’t handle too much of it. I have almost fully caught up on client work. I was even able to write a company blog post over at Connected Web Solutions, Tools to Run Your Business Remotely.

Why am I always pointing at something?

Time to geek out a little bit.  After delving a little bit more into Rails  development I can now almost fully understand the capabilities of the MVC architecture and how easy Rails makes this.  What would take a handful of code and time to do in PHP or ASP.NET can be easily accomplished in MINUTES of Ruby on Rails.  I hope to transition some of our future projects over to this platform to increase speed of development.

Do you guys out there use Twitter?  I know a lot of you are on Facebook and LinkedIn and what not but I thought I would throw Twitter out there.  Twitter is basically a microblogging site.  Think of the Facebook status updates.  This is similar but you are restricted to 140 characters.  You can link it to your Facebook status as well so if you change one it will change the other (I have since disabled this after my sister said “Don’t be one of those losers that updates their status all the time”).  I’m sure a lot of you have heard of Twitter as of late on the news as well.  The best picture of that plane in the Hudson came from someone’s “tweet” from their phone to Twitter.  Just thought I would throw that out there for everyone and you can follow me at http://twitter.com/sambishopCWS.  I guess it’s a form of uber-stalking but at conferences it’s great to use to meet up with people.

Ok enough geeking out.  Tomorrow is my last day out of the sun (maybe sit by the pool) but Saturday is going to be my bike ride to Playa Hermosa.  More pictures to come after that journey.  Anyone want to help me learn Spanish?  Yo estoy aprendiendo pero quiero aprender con ustedes!

I saw something

So over the last two days not much has been accomplished.  Becky and I went to Coco yesterday and had lunch at a nice sports bar where I was able to watch a Chelsea Liverpool match.  I also found some Costa Rican Saprissa jerseys for $9.  I’m going to go back next week and see if I can find one that isn’t fluorescent orange.  I also found the local soccer field but I am not sure when they play.

Becky leaves tomorrow so I might actually be able to able to accomplish some things now.  I also realized that I did not bring enough books to read on the beach.  I have my technical books still to work through but I have finished all of my business books, magazines, and even my casual reading.  I only have half of my current graphic novel left and then I’m done.  Yes I still read comic books.  Don’t knock it until you try…same with anime.

Ok I’ll check back in a day or two with some progress of other things down here.  Still to come…winging it with a bus to Tamarindo, biking to Playa Hermosa and more.

Sleepy Cat

So we were picked up at 8 on Saturday morning to head out to the animal refuge and volcano.  The first stop was the animal refuge and that was pretty awesome.  We got to see a handful of birds and cats.  Some of the cats were absolutely enormous and we were very close to them.  There is a small fence between you and the animals but it’s way better than a zoo where they keep you far away.  I was about 3 feet from that huge leopard and the monkeys.  From the refuge we took off towards the rain forest and volcano.  We drove through “Windy Town” on the way which name lived up to the experience.  It felt like we were driving through a hurricane.   We finally arrived at the volcano but unfortunately it was so foggy that we couldn’t see a thing.  Three and half hours of driving to a volcano and we couldn’t see squat.  Our guide asked if we wanted to hike in the rainforest but we wouldn’t be able to see anything so he said we could go to the hot springs early.

There a handful of natural hot springs near the volcano and they are pretty awesome.  It was basically 4 pools set up with increasing heated water in each one.  They were all heated naturally and ranged from bathwater to water so warm they had a sprinkler shooting out cold water to cool you down.  After 2 hours in the hot springs we were super pruny and hoped to catch a view of the volcano on the way out at dinner.

There is supposedly a volcano back there

We arrived at the restaurant hoping some of the fog will have lifted but again no luck.  We could see about 1/3 of the way up the volcano but we couldn’t really see anything that didn’t look like the rainforest.  It had the potential to be pretty amazing if the visibility was better because it is an active volcano that shoots lava but I guess we just had bad luck.

So yesterday we woke up and had a light day in Ocotal beach but guess what!?  I finally saw some howler monkeys in the wild!  There were about 10 of these little guys up in a tree where we were sitting.  They were just sleeping for the most part but every few minutes you were reminded why they are called Howler monkeys.  They are not quiet what so ever.

For the Super Bowl a few of the other residents here pulled their TVs and chairs out to the general lawn.  There were probably a good 15-20 people out there during the game.  As usual I enjoyed the commercials more than the game but I thought this year I wasn’t too impressed with them.  My favorites were the Doritos commercial with the crystal ball, the Bud Light Meeting, and the trailer for the GI Joe movie.

Just outside my condo...BULL ON THE LOOSE!

Again I was woken up unexpectedly today.  It turns out a local broke his quad outside of our room and decided to fix it…AT 6AM!  He felt the need to bang it with a wrench and test the gas for 10 minutes.  Not cool.

Becky and I decided to just stay at Ocotal today and I would show her around.  We began walking to the beach and suddenly see cattle roaming the streets.  We both had no idea what was going on.   I spotted the bull, WITH HORNS, a mere 30 yards away.  Becky had a red beach towel.  Things did not look good.  It turns out the bull was more worried about the grass at the side of the road but I must say it caused quite a scare at first.  We ended up making it to the beach safely.

I saw something out there

We trekked all over the north and south sides of the beach.  I wanted to show her the snorkeling  spots.  We bumped into a local who told us there were a ton of jellyfish and showed us where he got stung.  He also told us about the “tortuga” (turtle) shells he dives for.  They make bracelets and necklaces because when the sun shines through them the light dispurses and they do look pretty nice.  He also said they used them for pick guards.   Apparently they go for quite a bit of money as well.   I was able to understand the majority of the conversation but unfortunately couldn’t say much back.  A few “Aqui?” questions and “Donde?” questions kept the conversation going.  He didn’t care that we didn’t speak Spanish and neither did we.  It was like a fun game of charades.

We made it back to the condo ok and basically relaxed for the rest of the day.  Thankfully the cattle was brought back into the grazing area.  I finally did my laundry so I have clean sheets and clean clothes for this next week.  Tomorrow we leave for Arenal to do a day tour.  We will go to a wildlife reserve, a hot spring, and see the volcano.  Since we will be picked up at 7:30AM and return at 10:30mPM I’ll leave the post at this.  Be prepared to see a TON of pictures in tomorrow’s post.