Here's what I have to read yet.

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I'm finding myself dealing to much with internal operations, budgeting, forecasting, etc... while trying to do billable work and most importantly think of what's next.

So I'm taking next steps to reduce what I'd rather not do and hire someone who's core strengths are in the areas I don't have.

It's not that we have all this money at Elevator Up to hire all these people - we just need people to work in the areas they are experts in, everything else should ideally be done by someone else. Don't confuse that for not working hard and foolishly growing when you simply don't like taking on responsibilities/tasks.

So if you are an organized person and your first question to me isn't - "What's the pay?", head over to our job listing on Linkedin or email me directly at aaron AT elevatorup DOT COM.

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I'm not that organized but I will literally work for the shells of peanuts just to lick off the salt. Can I have a job?

Sweet - you're hired.

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The problem with developing websites/applications is that we're good at getting that kind of business and it pays pretty well. You work for a few weeks on a project, get paid enough to cover expenses and save some away to only move onto the next project. Depending on how good of a project/traffic manager you think you are - you can do a few of these projects at the same time and end up with a profitable month.

The thing for me is that I'd rather be working on web hosting, developing our own products, and following new ideas - not working on everyone else's new idea, or defining their online business objectives and strategy.

But that's just not reality now is it? You have to make a living and it's easy to continue doing things that are successful - I mean, why wouldn't you?

You're probably thinking - what is he complaining about? Either this guy should suck it up and be happy with his job, br proud that they're making some money -OR- just start doing the things that I want to do.

Wow - if it was only that easy. Developing websites/applications has allowed us to grow enough, and provided us enough money to start those additional things we really enjoy. If we just jump ship over to the things that interest us more, where will the money come from? Of course the idea is that these new ideas/ventures will bring us money but it's not going to happen overnight. It might be a few months or even a year before we start getting the desired revenue.

The other part of it is the cost of really doing the things you should do to be successful or set yourself a part from the competition. Doing Marketing and Advertising costs money, hosting events takes planning (and more money), keeping employees around so they can help you do these things costs money, building your infrastructure and tools takes time/money, etc...

I guess I could get a loan like so many people do when they start a business but it's been so gratifying to say that we haven't really needed to get a loan yet. Everything we have has come from hard stink'in work.

If you do borrow money - there's always the fear that something doesn't work out and you still need to pay that money back or depending how to get your money (VC, Angels, etc...) they might require a level of ownership in the company that you may not feel comfortable with. For me personally, I'm defiantly not interesting in handing over any shares of the company ownership. Call me a stubborn captain but I'll defiantly go down with the ship if that's where things end up.

I don't really have a good ending to this post other than, running a business is a heck of a lot of fun and wouldn't trade it for working for someone else.

In the same breath - it's tough and there's so many questions and so many things that I don't even know how to ask. I'm just hopeful in the "future" and constantly have my fingers crossed on the decisions I make in that they are helping us move forward - and not continuing to only do the things we may feel comfortable with.

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Good post -- honesty, can't beat that.

I would say find a niche, exploit it, make enough flow to hire someone to takeover the niche, you use the rest of the moeny to concentrate on what you like to do.

Easier said than done.

But I have an idea anda niche, I just need to do it -- maybe this comment was a self motivator.

PS: you have a small typo in VC paragraph. 'defiantly'

While you probably don't want government help, you may be able to get some free advice from one of the small business adminstration advisoray members. Some of these people have decades of experience in how best to finance and plan.

Yea - i've actually talked a few times with local SCORE groups and it did help a bit but it's a bit high level. It feels like they do a really good job with some issues that can be solved within an hour (direction wise) or so but those that take some further discussion or background, I haven't gotten anything that I don't already know.

Maybe there's some other organizations that may be able to help. I've also talked with places like Lakeshore Advantage that's been a bit more helpful.

Aaron, you're already half way there. You have 1.) flexibility with your daily schedule and 2.) a development shop that's up and running. What you need next is the right product idea.

To avoid outside financing, you'll need to develop your product in parallel with your customer work, which needs to continue to pay the bills. But I think your biggest challenge, the one that's REALLY keeping you from your dream, is that you haven't settled on the right idea.

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Going to a conference is a great way of getting out of moving furniture.

Oh man Aaron, that's a nice lookin' office!

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So a wiki has been introduced into the company. It's something that has always made sense but it's a tool that I (1) didn't really know how to manage and (2) didn't like the lack of good organization that I was seeing while we began to enter information into it.

So, tonight I made it my mission to figure out how to best organize some things on our internal wiki. I started by adding some of our web clients but then quickly realized it was going to take awhile to keep these organized.

I'd like to introduce WIKI Categories. This is an awesome little feature that I am now taking FULL advantage of. All you need to do is put the following tags at the bottom of your page.

[[Category:Web Clients|Mast Heating]]

This places all of our web clients into a category called "Web Clients" and then organizes it under "M" because I said "Metro Health".

[[Category:Hosting Clients|Mast Heating]]

This does the same thing as above but also places it within the "Hosting Clients"

The results of this creates a nicely organized list of pages in a category (example on MediaWIKI

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In my younger days I would have walked away from projects like this but I'm beginning to realize there's more to life than a certain language. It's the ability to solve problems for people in inspiring ways. At least that's what I find myself dreaming about.

One thing I decided to do while waiting for the conference to start was do a little viral marketing (to steal a phase from the buzzword bucket). I always figure out what session to attend right before it begins and often need to make a decision fast. One of the things I've really liked while attending other conferences is that random guy that spends time converting the schedule into an iCal (calendar) format and offering it up to everyone for a free download.

The results of this is easy integration with your favorite calendar tool and the ability to sync that information with your phone. Once it's on the phone, it's easy to review all the information you need to make those quick decisions.

The viral part comes in when (after you've made it for yourself), you offering it up to everyone else at the conference - giving them the same convenience without the pain staking 45minutes of data entry you went through.

I also emailed some of the folks that are running the conference and hoping they will link to my recent development or maybe even make a comment/thanks to me while on stage (I can dream).

Now it's off to figure out how to feed myself.

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From Cousin

My name is Isaac Micheals and I am going to be teaching with Wycliffe Bible Translators at Black Forest Academy in Kandern, Germany. The school serves the needs of over three hundred students grades K-12, most of whom are missionary kids whose parents serve in locations around Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.

Many of the students have to board near the school because their parents work in countries that have few educational options avaliable to them. In order to make the school aforadable for the missionaries, all teachers and support staff are committed to raising their own support to come and work at BFA.

The work I will be doing will help keep the missionaries on the field and doing the work that God called them to do. I am currently seeking people who are willing to partner with me financially and prayerfully as I plan to be in Germany by early August.

If you are interested in partnering with me in anyway please feel free to email me at isaac_micheals@yahoo.com, or call me at 616-566-4449. Thanks, and God Bless.

What Next?

Cousin has 60% of what he needs to raise, but needs to get the remaining 40% before he is able to leave.

The idea situation would be for him to get:

• 8 more partners committing $100/month, or
• 16 more partners committing $50/month, or
• 32 more partners committing $25/month

If you're able to help - you can donate online. If you want more information before you decide to make a donation, feel free to give me a call or contact Cousin with the information above.

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Update - Cousin moved to Germany this weekend - he raised 95% of the total and got the go ahead to buy his plane ticket. Very exciting.

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It's primarily audience (from what I can tell) is, a lot of sales people, managers and CEOs. Not necessarily the everyday sysadmins and developers. I could be completely wrong about this but that's what I've noticed so far. The other group of people are just small 1-3 man teams that are just getting into web hosting but don't necessarily have a lot of business or web experience outside of servers.

One thing the conference has made me realize is how important it is for me to take my own advice. I spend so much of my time working on other people's brands and projects to make them successful and almost no time doing the same thing for myself. Why is that? Well, it's hard to look at yourself in the mirror and it's even harder to work on non-billable work.

Whether the conference had this agenda or not - I need to figure out how to have the team do more of the billable work and I need to focus more on the business and not only growing the brand but being more articulate on what we can do and making sure that falls inline with the business objectives of the people we support. Whether that be through hosting or consulting.

Another thing I think the conference has been doing a good job at is telling people to think about hosting outside of just "web" hosting. You can host images, you can host videos, you can host company collaboration. There's quite a bit to explore in this area. This is also where applications are being either developed or people are partnering with other software vendors. For example, hosting images is Flickr's job. Are they a hosting company? Quite possibly. What about video (YouTube) or company collaboration (Microsoft Exchange, Zimbra, Google Docs, etc...). Are these companies really just hosting companies specializing in hosting specific data?

It wasn't the part of the original focus for Eventable to be a place to host your event but maybe it is? Or maybe we partner with other people like Upcoming.org or Eventful to fulfill our overall service or offering. Something interesting to think about and how we can provide virtual real estate for people and companies in niche areas.

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Philosophical questions pertaining to hosting? Is Google a hosting company for keeping my search history, storing my emails, and their Google Apps stuff?

I went back to the latest Business 2.0 this morning and read up a little more on the semantic web. How will that be incorporated into hosting?

Is Google a hosting company? Well, parts of them are and parts of them aren't. It's a long discussion and (you're correct) a bit of it is philosophical.

A few things to point out though are - Google is a ICANN-accredited registrar, They provide sitebuilders, email and collaboration tools, etc...

I don't want to push Google into the traditional hosting view. I'm more saying that the hosting view is changing. Hosting how we originally know it is changing to be infrastructure and content delivery providers. If you think of it a bit more like that, then yes, Google is a hosting company.

As for the Semantic Web. It's a tricky thing to answer because it means different things to different people. I think the main point is to provide standards in distribution or references of your standards so that systems and tools can be built to use data in a variety of different ways. Taking data out of there silos and letting everyone (if appropriate) use them and mash it up.

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I did this for a few days thinking it was just some oversight on some door makers part but then yesterday it hit me. They weren't stupid, they were ingenious. You see, what they were doing was making sure I had my key before I left the room.

If I had my key, I'd be able to place it within the door key pad and proceed to close and lock the door. If I didn't have my key, I was able to get right back into my room and figure out where I left it. More than likely in my wallet which is something else I would have really needed if I was heading out for the day.

So brilliant idea W Hotels.

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I had the same damn problem moving from locking my car with the key FOB to locking it manually.

I never locked myself out of the car if I had the FOB in my hand while locking, however since we bought an older car, I've had to use my wife's keys more than a few times to unlock it.

I can see fringes of this concept being applied to the IT industry. Like using your email as a login. I wonder what other interesting ideas could be attributed to "keeping the user one set further from the idiot ledge.", especially in IT / Software

Donald Norman approved.

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For me - reading different magazines like Business 2.0 and HBR, along with keeping track of various blogs have told me way more about the where the industry is going and what people want, than what was being announced from panel experts today.

All this being said, there are some extremely intelligent people here. People that do understand where the market is going and have thought far beyond the shared hosting arena. These are people that also run a majority of the companies that many of us envy.

What's weird is the divide (it seems) is pretty dramatic from people in the know and people just starting to think beyond shared hosting. After a few of sessions that announced old world news (compared to what I've heard a few years ago at sxsw), I'd hear various people chattering and saying things like, "Wow, just think of the potential" or "Yea, he (the speaker) is right, we should be doing that". One presenter even debated on recommending hosting companies to blog as it could be a bit risky.

The day was not all lost, Richard Rosenblatt (guy who made MySpace) did a brief talk called "Next Generation Web: What Lies Ahead for Hosting" that was pretty forward thinking. Carson Daily was there as well for a few minutes as he's an investor in Rosenblatt's new venture and helping lead up the entertainment portion.

Maybe I just went to the wrong sessions but I'm hopeful for tomorrow.

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