Well, it seems like I’m in a touchy feely place after my vacation, so I’m going to talk about another soft skill that I have to improve on. Making sure you’re on the same page with expectations. Now, this applies to all aspects of your life, but I’m going to talk about it from the perspective of my business. If you’ve read my blog for any length of time, you realize that I have two sides of my business. Paper Street Enterprises, which is my consulting business and JaveLLin Solutions which is my software business. Right now, 90% of my revenue is from Paper Street. But my goal is to have 100% from JaveLLin in the next couple of years. In order to help me achieve that goal, I partnered up with a colleague and friend.
Now, I had been working the software aspect since 2006. And if you’ve noticed the title, I’ve been learning things the hard way ever since (well, to be honest, I’ve been doing it all my life. ha ha ha). When I partnered up, I thought my life would get easier and in certain aspects it has. For the first time I have someone to bounce ideas off of, someone to validate my crazy ideas and someone to share in the rather large expense of launching this endeavor. Now, the challenge has been that my partner doesn’t bring in a lot of the skillsets we need, rather he brings a lot of what I already have. This is a double edged sword. We are both engineers, so we have a great problem solving mindset, but neither of us have any experience in sales or marketing (with the exception of us both being independent consultants we know how to sell ourselves).
So, what does this mean? well, if you read my post yesterday, you know that I’m obsessive about this software business. It also means I expect to everyone to live up to this same ethic. My partner and I both have a family, both have young kids and both have a lot of stuff going on in life. So that means we need to use our time wisely. Any wasted effort can cost us weeks or even months in our dream to do JaveLLin full time. The problem that I realized is that we’ve been playing it too fast and loose in our scheduling and priorities.
Initially, I thought implementing a CRM system would help… but it really hasn’t. So it’s on to the next idea. I’ll talk again soon about how it’s going. But phase one will be to document all the irons we currently have in the fire. Once we have the list, we need to assign priorities, and approximate time/level of effort, and finally we need to divide up those tasks. I currently am the only developer, so it’s very hard for me to step away from the ABAP side of things, however, I’ve come to realize that we need marketing more than anything. Without the marketing, we don’t get leads, without leads, no sales, and without sales, all this effort is for nothing. So… that’s all for now. I’m sure I’ll be blogging again soon about this =)
As always, thanks for reading and don't forget to check out our SAP Service Management Products at my other company JaveLLin Solutions,
Mike