Ah, the trill of doing something you've never done before. With the launch of Winnovate 3.0 in early October 2007, I decided it was finally time to join the blogosphere before that train had forever left the station.  As a recovering perfectionist, I've put off doing this for fear that I wouldn't be able to provide content that was useful and unique enough for people to want to read.  I've learned that you can't really know what you can do in a particular area until you give it an honest try, so here goes.  For fear of turning this blog into a Stewart Smalley therapy session, lets move on to the meat & potatoes of this post, where Winnovates been and how it has evolved up to this point...

 

I started Winnovate as a side business with a good friend back in early 2001.  Like most people who start a business, we had the crazy idea that we could do the work we were currently doing (building web applications) for our corporate behemoth employer, MCI/WorldCON, better and cheaper for small businesses.  I had apparently suffered from an entrepreneurial seizure that forever changed the course of my life for the better.  I bought out my friend's share of Winnovate in early 2003 and continued building it on the side while working for a couple other companies doing similar work for the next several years.  Winnovate continued to grow and grow, almost completely by word of mouth. It basically doubling in revenues every year until it couldn't grow any more.  Winnovate had outgrown it's business model.  I had to change or die, quite literally.

 

In the fall of 2006,  I finally got the chance to step away and gain some perspective on where Winnovate was headed.  Thankfully, my dad had started to observe signs of overwhelm that were threatening to sink my ship for good.  He graciously invited me to take a couple days away with him from Winnovate, my family, and pretty much everything to just un-plug, rest, and recreate.   That was the turning point.  During that get away, I discovered some blind spots in my life and made some tough decisions.  Needless to say, from that point forward, I did something unprecedented in Winnovate's history...I turned down new business and even fired a high maintenance problem client so I could better focused on servicing my existing client base and on improving Winnovate's business model.  I'm forever grateful to my dad for stepping in when he did.  Thanks Dad.

 

In the next post, I will talk about what happened after I made those changes last fall and where I see Winnovate going now. 

 

This blog thing is surprisingly fun.  I'm excited to do the next one. Thanks for reading.