Back to work now – exciting times!

I had decided to hold off for a while. I’ll probably still upgrade my daily drive late this year to somethign like a Porshe or Aston.

BUT

I got bored, and realised I needed a car. So back to the drawing board. In the end the choice was obvious. Go for a car I desired most, and that meant going with a car which I wanted since 8 or 9 years old.

Not a Lamborghini Countach (Though it is on the list)

A Lotus Turbo Esprit.
An old, but very very very cool car.

I’ll take some photos and post them very soon. This one was taken by the previous owner.

Over the past few days I have been faced with a pretty tough choice: To go out and buy myself a a big, fast, sexy and really very silly car…. or not!

I have been doing some financial planning and sadly it looks like it might be in my interest to put this dream car on hold for a few more months.

This is not because the I’m struggling. I could easily keep overheads low and cream off a very healthy profit each month. But knowing the true potential of the business, and supposedly doing my best to build some kind of reputable long term company I know this approach isn’t sensible. The money that could be going on a supercar shall instead be put to better use in employing someone to help grow the company. Clearly a much wiser investment.

I am actually putting the company in a position where the balance sheet will show a loss over the next few months, normally a somewhat risky decision. As 100% shareholder I don’t have to justify this to anyone. Though if I did, it would still be easy.

The sites my company runs bring in a huge percentage of revenues from recurring and re-initiated payments every month. These are existing customers that we have already swallowed the acquisition costs on. These members are automatically paying a subscription every month, or re-subscribing. At any point I can massively reduce overheads, stop marketing, and still see the same income for a few months, before it slowly starts to tail off, and easily pay back any small losses. I have the added benefit that we do not have a long list of suppliers, and those that we do are not directly linked to our member acquisitions, so any future money we make from existing members need not leave the company.

My plan is naturally to grow revenues so future profits swallow these losses without the need for any cutbacks. My projections look good for this to happen, and I have quite a good track record when it comes to realistic projections!

That’s it. No car for me for a few more months then . The trade off is a bigger and more stable company. A sacrifice worth taking.

Maybe we’ll have an Indian summer and I can have my mid-life crisis a little later in the year.

Business
Got some new accountants that have helped me sort out structure and set up for my company going forward. Which has made things a lot simpler for me. I really struggled for a long time to find accountants who understood online business, international trading and advice me properly.

Revenue wise things are good, pretty certain that it’ll be another record month, again!
Marketing is gaining some traction, numbers picking up and CPA’s dropping. Just need to do some monitoring to make sure the traffic we are buying is converting in to the right number of sales.

Development continues to go well. Doing a lot of tweaking to www.besinful.com. This involves some changes to commission structure for affiliates and models, some design changes, additional features, improvements to the existing ones and full integration of our mailing system in to it. The mailing is going to be the most exciting part driving most of the conversions on it, with highly targeted and automated alerts and notifications.

Have just taken on a further 2 developers and will be adding a designer to the team to steam roll forward with this and begin some new projects. These will involve taking the existing platform which has been designed to be adaptable, and developing new sites and applications for it. We also have a Video Chat API module planned which will need integrating in to our sites, and might explore providing this as a solution for websites to plug in.

I’ll soon start looking for a business development/brand manager. Ideally a young, ambitious and very adaptable individual who can take over and assist me with much of the day-to-day planning and running of the company. Particularly on the marketing and affiliate management side. As this is a very unique business and position I doubt there is anyone who ticks all the boxes, it will simply have to be someone with the potential to grow in to the role and make it theirs. Oh, clearly they will have to be very open minded too!

Personal stuff
About to start on a serious hunt for my car. Have a good idea of what it will be though as there is not many of the exact model I want about I might end up making an impulse buy!

Hoping to do a bit of landscaping in the garden, putting in a summerhouse at the bottom. This will become my new home office. Though with a pool table, dart board and beer fridge in there it might not become the most productive of work places!

I am also bored of this site – will probably get someone to update it, to make it, and me, look sexier. Quite a task I know.