One year of Good Work

One year ago today I sat down at my home office in Houston, Texas for day one of Good Work. The few months before were spent hunting down digital projects outside of a full-time job, with the first to start on March 3rd, the first Monday of March in 2014.

It’s been a wild ride, to say the least. 18 new project launches, 10 others improved, a move to Dallas, a new office and we even brought the Erskine Design brand into the family.

I took yesterday afternoon to sit back and document a quick summary of the first 12 months.

For the first 4 or so months, the focus was to have no focus. I wanted the specialization to naturally happen based on what projects were the most enjoyable and that we did the best work on. Taking on anything and everything as long as there was a reasonable budget for digital services. This isn't a very traditional route, but I do recommend it. It's an easy way to quickly figure out what projects you are and are not suited for, while still bringing home the bacon.

It’s worth noting that at this point, aside from a few ideas in the form of WhatsApp messages between Phil and me, the company was still nameless. It wasn't until somewhere around month four that we got a name and a website!.

About halfway through the year, the work started to naturally fall pretty evenly into two primary buckets: custom software projects like registration systems and intranets, and production work like content management system integrations and front-end development. At any given time one side of the business could be working on a custom internal communications hub for an enterprise client while the other is doing front-end development for a few marketing websites where we were handed over design files.

This is where we’ve been for the last 6 months or so, and it’s obvious that there’s a future in modern software design and development for Good Work, so we’re gonna stick to it. This year I’d like to get serious about the software side of the business, both for clients as well as creating products of our own. On the production side, I’ll be a lot pickier about the projects we take on, but I’d like to keep it around -- it’s a nice change of pace from the stresses that come with building business-critical software.

So, that’s where we are.

There’s a sales pipeline, there are projects on the table, most clients pay on time and there have been more green months than red. I can’t complain.

Happy Anniversary, Good Work. Here’s to another year of keeping this ship afloat.