Today was quite a strategic day.   The focus was on two things:

1. Ecommerce platform technology
2. Budgeting and growth for 2010

Basically, we have looked at moving the existing ecommerce platform forward from existing version to a new version, that is more scalable.  The goal is NOT to add new features BUT to move to a scalable infrastructure.   To this end, we have agreed with all the ‘owners’ that they would review their respective sections of the platform and see if they can still do their jobs with the new system.      I think its nice to get the whole team involved, since they actually now know best what they use, what is needed and what would be nice to have.   

For the budgeting for 2010, we quickly looked at what is involved to get us to 10 more ‘streams’ (40 more sites) open in 2010.   Basically – to ensure that growth is controlled, I need to keep staff level increase to less than 50% of growth.  Another words, to ensure that the organization keeps functioning, no more that 50% increase in staff level.

Given this, we have identified some very low laying fruit on the – and hopefully we can capture it easily.

Its nice to get the team involved in the process!