As I mentioned in the last post, Spindustry was going pretty well with 3 contractors at the State of Iowa.  I had 2 business partners, neither really active in the business.  To take the next step it was time for that to change.  Stephen Fry, one of the two partners, had recently decided not to pursue a different business opportunity and thought he was ready to join Spindustry in an active role.  He would be in business development and seek out new clients for web development, while the three of us developers continued our day jobs as contract programmers.  Given the revenue from the three contracts, we could afford to pay Steve something.  I will always be grateful to Steve for seeing the vision and taking a chance on this venture.  Without his help the next successful years, and upcoming interesting blog posts, would never have been possible.

So, Steve came aboard and the next decision was where to exist as a company.  We had the option to run things out of our homes, but as we have done many times since, we decided instead to try to be who we wanted to become vs. who we were, and go ahead and get an office.  Now, we were also practical – which is another quality that has saved us over the years.  We got a very small office with a shared reception area which was smaller than my current personal office, but right for the time.  It allowed us to feel like we were “going to work” and gave us a little leg up over a freelancer in many potential clients’ eyes.

So with a small office, a business development person in place, we were ready to go.  Over the next few months, Steve was successful in landing our first few web development clients and the three developers we had worked on those projects at night.  It was a fun time and all good work was followed up with pizza and mountain dew.  Okay, maybe some mountain dew showed up while working too

I will talk more about these relationships later, but it should be mentioned that we formed two long-standing relationships in this time period.  One, with Lightedge, then Lighthouse, who has worked with us since we both had offices the size of a broom closet.  It was also very interesting to watch them grow, but in a completely different way than us over the years.  The other was with Austin Palmer, who formed Palmer Search Group.  Palmer had the small office cube next to ours and we had a great time growing our businesses together and have enjoyed watching their success over the years.

As this started to work, the next big decision was how to extricate myself from being a day-to-day contractor and get more involved in the growing project based web development side of things.  We also needed to think about adding a graphic designer. Stay tuned…