[ClickableBliss uptime] == 3 months
December 5, 2005 was the first “offical” day of business for Clickable Bliss and while doing my taxes this past weekend I had some time to take a few steps back and evaluate how the business has come along in its first three months. First the good news, I’m still in business! Which is an amazing feat every small business should celebrate once in a while. Secondly is my positive cash flow (which is probably the most important thing for small businesses). Overall I’m managing my cash flow as best as I can expect. I think there are some things I should look into to help encourage my clients to pay faster or in advance but at this point it’s not holding me back tremendously.
Now for the “areas of improvement.” One thing I want to improve over the next three months is time management. I currently could group up my time spent as the following categories:
- Client projects. —- Billable hours that make my bank account happy.
- Promotion. —- Time spent blogging, attending/presenting to user groups, getting my name out there.
- Self education. —- Keeping up-to-date with new technologies via books, blogs and experimentation.
- Application development. —- One of my side goals of Clickable Bliss is to build and sell commercial software on Mac OS X. These officially remain “side projects” for now, but I keep trying to push myself to make steady improvements.
- Running the company. —- Doing the bills, keeping track of expenses, invoicing, etc.
To date I have not done a good job of keeping an active record of how much time I’m devoting to each of these categories. That is, with the exception of “client projects” since I usually invoice based on time, thus making it a necessity. I really would gain a lot of insight if I did keep track and so it’s a goal moving forward. I want to come up with a target each week and then make sure I hit it. The idea for weekly targets being that allocation of time would differ depending on a number of factors, such as client needs.
On the topic of time, I also ordered Getting Things Done today. I know others who speak highly of the practice so I figured I’d give it a shot.
So that’s a simple evaluation at 3 months in. I’ll try to update the blog every so often to share my progress. I hope some of you find it worth while. Thanks again for reading the blog and your interest in Clickable Bliss.
Posted on: March 5, 2006 – 10:09 pm
2 Comments
You started on your own on 5 December and my LLC was formed on 5 Dec. Cool! I am happy about your success so far. I will do a short blog entry on a time tracker that I used a few years ago. It was VERY informational.
Keep up the good work! I hope to see you at WWDC again this year in August. I should have a troupe of developers there with me too!
Thanks for the kind words. Yeah I hope to be at WWDC this year as well.
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