A New Direction

As 2014 arrived, I welcomed it with a mix of excitement and anxiousness.  Because in 2014, the small company I work for, turns over a new leaf. Things are changing. And we all know change is scary, right? What is changing, is that our company has updated / reinvented itself once more, as a result of our experiences in the past year(s)

In 2014, we’re going to devote more time, energy and resources to “Cloud Solutions.” We’ve taken a good look around, and decided that it’s time for people to stop overpaying for things they don’t need. Exchange Server for three mailboxes? Logging in with the password “katy1984” which is also written down on a pink post-it? Noooooh, Small and Medium Business owner, stop wasting your money!

Of the new products we’re offering, I’m (for now) the most excited by the Yubikey(s). Our company is now the official partner for Yubico in Belgium and Luxemburg, which is great news. Two-factor authentication is becoming more and more popular (and important) and we’ll be able to provide people a simple tool to implement it. I personally got familiar with the Yubico offering through Twitter (and the Akeeba Backup) website. Twitter, of all places, hah!

We are also going to be offering other products and services, of course, but this is not a sales pitch but a personal blog post.

With new products, services and systems to get familiar with, you’ve also got to make some room, as well.  Part of our plan to do so is to no longer chase clients looking for a “simple and affordable site”. Experience has thought us that these clients, who have a small budget but a lot of ideas, end up costing a lot of time and resources with little coin in exchange.

By chasing these clients in the past, we set a standard which bit us in the back-side on a few occasions. They’re hesitant to pay for support, they run off to someone who “can do it cheaper” first chance they get, or one day just “vanish” without notifying us.  By aiming low, you set a certain expectation of yourselves. After we changed our pricing (this happened somewhere in Q4 of 2013) one client literally told us they were “dissapointed by our quote” since we “had always been so cheap.” Lesson learned!

To pursue this market further we’d have to seriously cut back on quality. That is not a sacrifice we want to make, or are planning to make. Joomla, our flagship solution for web sites , is a product you’ve got to spend time on. You’ve got to show it some love. But we can’t do that for free, now can we? (That almost sounds wrong)

As a consequence we’ll likely be making fewer Joomla sites. Which, in one way, is a bit sad as that’s how the company grew. Plus, it’s great blog material. But on the upside we’ll likely be working on more interesting Joomla websites. Even better blog material? Time will tell.

If you’re still reading this post, you should know that I didn’t intend for it to become this long. It’s because of the change, man. I can only wait and see how things will work out in 2014. Which is a bit scary. And also exciting. Change is good, right?