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Playing Catch Up

Playing catch up

After the mad rush in December and most of January, things have got pretty quiet. This isn’t a bad thing because of the insane hours we’ve been working; Joe uses Harvest more regularly than I do and has been clocking up 80 hour weeks more often than not – and that doesn’t count the hours we spend talking about the business, planning things, etc.

It being quiet on the hosting front always worries me (I say quiet – we surpassed December’s income, our best to date, days ago), but actually it’s nice to have a bit of a break from the mad rush and we’ve definitely earned some down time. Today we went to the cinema to see The Commuter. It was amazing to just go in the day when it’s quiet and there are no queues and we have endless seating options (yay for reclining cinema chairs), and the movie was great too. It’s a small taste of The Future, when we can work fewer hours and relax a bit more.

The downside is that my body goes into collapse mode when there’s even a hint of time off, so I’ve been feeling a bit under the weather and generally tired today. It’s been a light day of social media posting, this blog post, reading, and drafting homepage changes.

I finally got around to designing our business planner for the year last week. We bought a printable one last year, but to be honest it just wasn’t very good (although it was pretty), and we didn’t end up using it as much as I’d have liked. The new one has a bunch of different sections, far more spaces for listing necessary analytics stats, and less of the airy fairy stuff.

There are already some changes I want to make to the one I’ve designed for this year, but for the most part it’s much more practical for us.

I’m considering trying to make it more generic and having spiral bond printed copies made to sell, but that’s definitely A Project I Shouldn’t Even Consider For A Long Time Yet. (I have so many ideas in my head of things I want to do, and I want to have started them all yesterday haha. I’m trying to be restrained!)

Having a new business planner meant catching up on semi-neglected tasks, like finances and deciding what tools to trash and what to keep. We’re getting rid of Illustrator (we just don’t use it that much), a couple of stock photo memberships (we cycle through different services regularly), HotJar (we’ve got the things we wanted from it), and my personal paid Buffer account (which gets no use now). We’re introducing a couple of new tools, I’m semi-toying with the idea of Tailwind, but I’m not sure we have enough blog content to make it worthwhile yet, and Pinterest isn’t a top priority right now.

What else? Oh, I changed the theme for this blog. I still love the old one and will go back to it at some point, but I needed a fresh look here and I wanted to pull the personal brand feel together. There’s still a lot of broken and not updated stuff (like the margins!), but it’s a start (Lyrical Host is my main focus so my time is all going into that). There are SO. MANY. things we want to do this year, so it’s exciting but a little overwhelming. One of our biggest challenges was to figure out what new products and services we could add without them being hosting upsells (since everything people need is included in their hosting package anyway, and we don’t want to sell junk), and we have strong plans in place for those now so that’s all good. The only thing holding us back is coding the affiliate program, which is taking much longer than expected due to being so busy.

Generally though, everything is ticking along well. I’m obsessed with the business in the same way that new parents are obsessed with their babies, and I love every day. Even the most tiring days and most stressful days are better than some of my good days in past jobs, especially in the 2008-2009 era. Freedom is everything, but it’s been a necessary journey to get to today and I don’t regret any of it

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2 Comments

  • Reply Georgie

    I’ve just been catching up on your posts and I really love the vision behind your business. Not to mention, I’ve been reading your blog for some time and I just feel, through your writing, that you are so much happier with what you are doing now with your business especially because it is something you are so passionate about. Really liking the background colour of this theme too!

    25/01/2018 at 5:35 am
    • Reply Jenni

      Ahh thank you so much!

      15/02/2018 at 5:15 pm

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