Housecarers.com

Thursday 1 July 2010

Canada Day

June finally warmed up and my poppies opened in the garden.  Its the first year for my poppies and now I know why they are called "poppies".  The flower buds look all tightly closed one day, and then overnight they POP open in full bloom.

Mike and Andy spent 10 days in West Palm Beach on the first part of a new consulting gig for a large utility company.  Now they are home and working remotely, which also allows them to work on other stuff fortunately.  I was freaking out a bit about work stalling on software development.  No takers on investment yet.  I have come to realize that although we have 3 companies, and I was beginning to think that maybe we should focus on one of them instead of spreading the resources around, they really are all inter-connected and inter-dependent.

I was thinking that consulting, especially this new job, while necessary for revenue, was diverting attention away from software development, which is the ultimate goal of all our efforts because the success of one or the other software companies will allow us to retire in comfort.  Consulting is labour and time intensive and Mike can only bill for his own time at a maximum of 40 hours a week unless we subcontract work out.  Mike's a specialist though, and there aren't many people who can do what he does.

Then, during the course of meetings and discussions with the client in Florida, it turns out they have a burning need for our software products. Both of them. In conjunction with each other.  Although Mike and Andy have to remain focused on their consulting for now, and shouldn't be seen to be trying to "sell" anything else yet, this gives the impetus to keep developing and fine-tuning the software for demonstration in Sept. when the consulting job is finishing up.

And, since Mike got back, several other leads have cropped up.  A partner in the Middle East has been developing an add-on to Qtility specifically to be able to present a demo to a large government agency.  That is going ahead on July 5.  A technology company in Germany that is in a similar field to ours responded to my inquiry about potential partnership since they have partners all over the world but not in Canada.  They are extremely interested in our software and also Mike's expertise on the consulting side.  It all compliments their products and services.  An online meeting has been scheduled for next week.  Another technology company in Calgary wants to see OneFileEverywhere as a potential add-on service to her clients.

It all tells me that while we might think we should narrow our focus in order to succeed at one thing, sometimes the path to success is organic - you never know what will sprout up or from where.

1 comment:

  1. Hi Susan and Mike: Sounds like you two are keeping VERY busy with business. Good luck with all these exciting new leads you've developed. Dan and I are both very happy to be out of the workplace during these terrible economic times. Thank goodness for our government jobs that are providing us with an income in our sunset years.

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