The changeover from the end of one year to the beginning of the next is a time for me to reflect and plan. It’s a time when I force myself to step back from the day-to-day tactical grind of pumping out software and networking with potential clients and reevaluate the “big picture”.
One purpose of this year end evaluation is to identify those things that get less attention than they should – activities that get a lot of attention at the last minute as a situation turns desperate, when a little constant attention would have averted a last minute crisis management drill. I’m proud to say that “reflection and planning” has been one of my targets for improvement, so my planning effort this year was less about a soul-searching determination of what the future should look like, and more about planning how to make it so.
One of the key points to come out of my 2010 planning process to is the importance of communicating those goals to others. So here’s the 30,000 foot view of what to expect from me and SPAINB Development in 2010:
SPAINB Development will grow. Without getting into the gory details, despite the economy, 2009 sales were up, and I’m looking for 2010 to be even better. We achieved this growth because we improved the whole sales-and-marketing process – more networking, more prospects, more customers, and we continued to provide quality product and great customer support at competitive prices. 2010 should see even more advances in our sales and marketing processes, and more customer opportunities based on broader technical offerings.
More of our business will come from Web-based applications. Today, most of the software we develop runs on Windows desktop computers. We’ve sat on the sidelines of the web market, waiting for tools that allow us to leverage our desktop software knowledge to develop rich user interface applications on the web. The wait is over and we’re embracing Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, which allows us to create visually attractive, high performance web applications using the same .Net expertise and application models we use to efficiently develop desktop and mobile applications. Desktop applications will continue to be a major focus, but we expect more of our 2010 growth to come from Silverlight-based web applications.
We will expand the size of our team to support our growth. I’ve already started to grow the “team” beyond just myself, leveraging the skills of other trusted professionals to expand the bandwidth of the “software development” department, and adding professional graphic design services. At the beginning of the year, my wife Bobbi came on board full time to help with operations, sales and marketing. All of this internal growth will be backed by processes and controls to make sure that the product quality and customer support that has helped us grow so far is at least unchanged, and hopefully even better.
I will run a half marathon in 2010. I slip this personal goal in here to push myself to make this happen. I’ve registered for the Lehigh Valley half marathon at the end of April, although based on training progress so far, there’s no guarantee that I can get in shape in time for that race, but I’ve still got time to work on it.
Goals – defined and communicated. Now, back to the tactical grind of achieving them….
