ragingFX

A decade ago I started a web design company. We grew and grew, and after ten years of hard work, I’ve finally been able to get rid of it.

Don’t get me wrong – we were successful, had fun and did good work. At our peak we had over 200 clients and 15 full time staff, making us the largest such company in our city. We’ve worked on great projects for some big name clients and we even made some money too.

Little by little however, the years ate away at my soul. This year we finally left it all behind and moved onto our own products, and I’ve never been happier.

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Not a great business

It’s not easy to make a lot of money in web design. It’s decent sustenance, but a poor investment.

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So what did we do?

For at least 5 years I knew I’d need to leave web design behind eventually. 4 years ago we started to split Silktide into a web design division and a software division – and gave them separate brands. We had our first product – originally called SiteScore – and our first clients.

The mistake I made was continuing to feed the web design monster, whilst trying to get our product side up and running in my spare time. In reality, despite ultimately delegating command of the agency to others, the web design business always consumed 90% of my attention.

When the recession came our web design sales were severely hit, and it took all our efforts just to dig ourselves out of the financial hole that put us in. Ironically our products were keeping us afloat, but our web design was consuming all of our time.

A year ago I set a 12 month deadline to get us out of web design; in the end it took us 9 months. It cost us a fair slice of income, but we gained a monstrous amount of our time. And finally our products – now SiteBeam and SiteRay – are starting to get the attention they deserve.

It’s too early yet to know if this decision will pay off – right now, we feel like a startup all over again. But whatever happens, we only have ourselves to answer for. And that feels pretty damn great.

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