Steve and I met up over a GoToMeeting session. The main goal was to touch base and chat about options, ideas, and plans. It ended up being almost a two hour meeting. We started out looking at numbers, financials, and trends. We talked about gaps in our management style and how we could work on filling those gaps. Nobody is perfect and we are well aware of some of our shortcomings.

Lots of talk about R&D (research and development) and how we play that game all the time. We are virtually a huge R&D company. We build, we break, we rebuild, we rebreak. Over and over again. One of the accountants that Steve was talking to was saying that we might qualify for some R&D tax credits, due to what we do everyday. Interesting.

We are really happy with what Cory is doing and how much she brings to the table on the project coordination and project management side of things. We'd like to do the same thing (making improvements and progress) in a couple of other directions. Some of the other things that still need some help are servers, deployment, training, and overall communications.

One of the next major topics was servers and the impact of new systems and new software to that environment. It gets deep quickly and the new layers of complexity make it even more of an unknown. We would like to get ahold of those processes and figure out a true cost per server, with all of the extras, monitors, analytics, watchers, logging, reporting, and rollover options. This is still a tough spot and tough subject for us. We want to be involved but it gets super deep and crazy technical extremely fast. That makes it tough.

We were talking about some of our developers and how to get them all transferred over to paying or funded projects. We tend to do a number of big lifts (improving our own product) but that costs us and taxes us as far as cash flow. Our goal is to make it 3/4 funded projects and 1/4 core updates and maintenance. That would be awesome.

We ended up getting into some planning and talking about ways of getting better communication and better levels of responsibility for what is going on and what is happening. It is constantly a moving target. We talked about billing for everything that we do. Currently, we take a bunch of it right on the chin, that works to a certain level, then it just becomes crushing. We are planning on charging $65/hour for deployment, training, and setup. We will stick with $100/hour for development and custom code work. We also talked about picking up other services that we could offer and/or charge for. There are clients standing in line with money, but we have been too busy to pick up those pieces. We need to make a switch there.

Steve and I made a small 3 month plan and will be making and taking steps to put that plan into action. That is awesome. Our current goal is - Work the plan! Shooting for an MVP (minimal viable product) type approach.