In vacation mode and cold mode. Basically, the whole morning was wiped out with the cold and although I wanted to take of some admin things I didn’t get to it. But, finally, looks like the Thailand sun took the cold away, so now back into energy mode.
So, will spend a couple hours this evening going over emails and arranging next week schedule. Next week is already fully booked, so shuffling now day and evening plans. One thing I realized is that I’m not using quite a bit of my evenings for catching up with friends – ie. pushing business development things into dinners and late drinks as opposed to daytime. Seems to make sense, since its giving me more ‘daytime’ time – but also hard to balance personal life when evenings are so booked. But, hey, better more friends than less, so I should not be crying about being out in the evenings. The people I’m meeting are interesting, conversations are stimulating, so although it feels busy, it actually is pleasure.
On PO side, looks like we sold a $40K piece last day – so its nice to see that economy is not so bad for everyone.
Had new PPC/SEO person start today – and will have a merchandising manager start next week. I think we also hired one or two programmers (actually sadly not sure how many! 🙂 , so our R&D is going to move faster also.
So, getting things really revved up. Not actually with Germany in mind, but with RedStores – however, when Germany comes on board it will be nice to have everyone on board and and redeploy them from RedStores projects to Germany project. Missing two key players now – CFO and Marketing VP (CMO?) – CFO is in the works – so should be getting someone on board within weeks, and some strong possibilities for the CMO as well. Once I have those two posts filled, its only going to be a very short time before we start taking off like a rocket. Now, I’m bottlenecking the organization, since with new growth, there is still small details that are coming to me that I’m not able to delegate out.
Thinking that we will soon need to get a bigger office, and I think this time round I will need to invest a bit into making it more ‘sales’ friendly since we will have suppliers coming in – so the need to give the office a ‘pro’ feel is now necessary. I actually quite enjoyed the lower key approach, but our suppliers will be our customers, so need to make the office ‘customer’ friendly ie. give it an impressive feel. I’m probably going to follow the Valmet model, and have site signs hanging, show the sites we are working on, and our progress to finish. Cool stuff ahead! 🙂