2015 – Success or Failure?

2015 Goals

This is the perfect time at the end of 2015 to really define your goals. Likely this will be a combination of business and personal goals. Write down your goals. I know you have heard that before, but most still don’t.

Revisit your goals each quarter or more frequently. Writing them down and forgetting about them will not get them accomplished.

I’ll share a couple of my 2015 goals from early January, 2015.

• Determine if personal assistant needed and hire if so.
• Streamline our product offering and eliminate anything that wasted our resources or did not fit our core business.

#1 Finding An Assistant

I started the year off making a list of everything work related I spent time on that someone else could do. This included the amount of time that I spent on it.

It was clear I should get a personal assistant and right away. I am happy to share that I found an amazing assistant that has allowed me to better focus on the proper issues.

#2 Streamlining The Product Offering

I evaluated every product offering. Nothing was sacred. At first it felt strange eliminating products, and/or letting a customer know that we were eliminating their product.

This was done in a couple of steps.

Streamlining Products – Step #1

Determine what product(s) actually “costs” us. If you’re losing money on something, you probably shouldn’t offer it. Common sense, but too often businesses don’t take the time to analyze and determine if they are making money or losing money on a per product basis.

Streamlining Products – Step #2

Eliminate products that did not fit our Core business. In your business, it’s good to make sure you don’t get sidetracked trying to please everyone. This can take you away from successfully providing your Core business.

We have been guilty of that in the past, but have taken the steps this year to eliminate those products. An example of a few products we eliminated:

a) site builder

b) site design and site changes

c) unlimited domain shared/reseller packages

None of those fit our Core offering which is providing the best in personalized VPS hosting solutions.

By leveraging our server expertise, whether that be Windows Servers, cPanel Servers or ColdFusion Servers, our years of expertise in these areas allows us to not just provide you with hardware, but to provide you with server assistance, management, etc. so that you can focus on what you are best at.

Better Focus

A renewed focused effort on making sure customers and potential customers are getting everything they need has been a key point for Hostek.com this year. By listening to customer suggestions we have made many Control Panel changes and are in the process of rewriting the Control Panel so many more changes can be implemented.

With our experience, we know how to think & plan for growth. Most business people wouldn’t know how to approach this. Unless you have a full time 24/7 IT staff, I urge you not to get just a hardware solution at Amazon, Azure, etc. We often get new customers that have tried that route first, so I am just encouraging you to try us first. Save yourself that trouble and develop a partnership you can grow into.

Success or Failure

I have to say that 2015 was a real success for many reasons. The goals mentioned above were timely completed. Both combined allowed us to be more efficient in many areas.

Another goal for 2015 was to get SSD added into our infrastructure. This was completed a few months ago and is now available for our Business level VPS plans.

Success comes in many different forms

Some think of success in pure financial terms. It may seem odd, but I like to mostly think of success in non financial terms. What’s really important in life? A few things on my list of “really important” in life is enjoying time with family and work.

I’ve been blessed with a great family and just became a grandpa, so we have a new support tech in training 🙂

I thoroughly enjoy my work. The team here at Hostek.com is awesome. My team is more like family and I constantly try to make sure they are enjoying what they do and are challenged.

2015 was a success! Are there things we could have done differently or better? Yes! Learning and building from past experience is an important part of the process too.

2105 Wrap Up

I sincerely appreciate all of our customers and employees. Thank you for your commitment, and loyalty. Without you we couldn’t achieve our goals. We wish you the very best new year!

Brian Anderson, CEO

P.S.

For any new server projects you or someone you know has, think about us.

Whether you need a single server, want to learn about load balancing your application or setup a multiple server configuration with a private vlan. We can help you prepare and proceed with confidence whether it’s with us or someone else.

Obviously we hope it’s with Hostek.com but we will not pressure you; I promise. Here’s a link to our ZERO pressure consultation, just incase.

Categories: Business Tips, Hosting