Happy New Year

Tim Rees — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 14:12:36 +0000

OK – so I am a couple of days late with this, but I hope everyone saw the new year in with style and are having a good one so far?

This year I’ve decided not to make any specific resolutions, because lets face it, they get broken very quickly! Instead I’ll just be keeping things simple. I hope to do a little more exercise and have fun whenever I can…. but I am making no promises.

I did have very high hopes for 2009 with regards to growing Real Interactive. If I look back at my first post of last year: http://www.timrees.net/2009-and-onwards/2009/01/02/ it’s fairly obvious I did not achieve all I set out to in the last 12 months. Quite frankly I did not grow the business anything like planned, monthly revenues are actually lower now than 12 months ago across the majority of sites, with overheads being higher.

This sounds like bad news, but I’ll explain why I am not worried:

2009 was not about growth and marketing, in fact next to zero marketing was done. It was instead very much about development. I migrated from one office and development team to another and now have a very economical development centre in Kharkov, Ukraine. We frustratingly shelved 12 months work and developed a whole new platform for Besinful.

The work in 2009 has led to us having very solid foundations for a profitable network of websites, some live, some still mid-development. 2010 will be very much about making money from all these websites. Besinful has already taking off even without some of the features which will set it apart from competition in the same market – such as live webcam chat. I expect to see a similar sales growth trend with the addition of new sites and features, all of which require no further increase in operating costs. Any cost increases in the short term are purely about adding to the bottom line.

So there we have it. 2009 was great. Lots of time and effort put in to technology development and the set up of an office in Kharkov. 2010 is about growing brands and making money.

I also had another daughter, Madeleine, in 2009 which of course makes it a very special year for me.

Peace out people. Have a happy 2010!

Tim Rees » New Year

Happy New Year