On behalf of all the staff around here:

Merry Christmas!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

P.S. Have been thinking what nice image to attach to this post, like the Google’s view the most:

Back in the heyday of the NBA I used to love watching Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls. No matter what kind of game MJ was having, Phil Jackson would rest him at the end of the third quarter and for the first few minutes in the fourth. He’d come off the bench rested and ready, and go on to do the most amazing things I’d never seen basketball court, more often than not leading the Bulls to victory.

And sometime during the fourth quarter, Marv Albert would remark “he lets the game come to him.”

Sometimes as an entrepreneur you have to let the game come to you. Things don’t always move as quickly as you want. Software doesn’t get developed overnight. Search engine rankings take time. And user adoption of your product doesn’t happen overnight.

About a month ago I felt myself pressing. I was pressing too hard to get siteMighty to the next level. I was pressing too hard on my team, our partners, and our business model. I realized this one night when I literally laid in bed all night with my mind racing and unable to sleep. I was pressing too hard.

So I made the decision to step back. I let the team step forward on siteMighty, and instead of trying to press so hard to grow fast, let things take their natural course for a while. We have a fully developed product, our users like it and are finding success with it, and we have a great team behind it at supporting it.

It was an incredibly freeing moment when I realized I could take a break from siteMighty and stop pressing so hard.

So that’s exactly what I’ve been doing, I’ve been focusing my energy on building the business infrastructure for Flatsourcing which has been going incredibly well, and is something thats been waiting for my attention for a long time.

And today I realized that the game was coming to me.

• A good friend of mine signed up for an account with siteMighty and gave me some great feedback on it.
• I looked in on our support tickets and stats that I’ve been purposely ignoring for the last couple weeks. They’ve been handled excellently by our support team.
• Today we received a revenue-share check from a partner it was literally 10x what it was last month. That means we’re growing but more importantly our users are growing. Wow, if that’s what stepping away will do, I’m heading to Panama.
• Most of all, I’ve been having fun again.

Letting the game come to you feels great. Pressing too hard feels stressful. It’s a lesson in entrepreneurship and I won’t take lightly.

Thanks for the life lesson MJ.

So we’ve been working hard on the redesign for Flatsourcing.com and really thinking about what are goals are with the site. It is going to be a Wordpress-based platform, but it needs to function as more than just a blog. We asked ourselves what we are trying to accomplish with the site (I know, a rarity that we actually think about our goals before plunging headlong into design, I should have been doing this years ago):

1. First and foremost, we are soliciting business for Flatsourcing, so we need to both communicate what we do, and enable visitors to the site to easily contact us.
2. We are communicating both our skills, but more importantly, demisifying and personalizing outsourcing. We want to use social media (twitter, video, profiles on LinkedIn & Facebook) to enable clients and potential clients to really get to know our team in Kazan. We need to put a face on the business over there, and bridge the cultural, time, and geographical distances to bring our team as close as we can to our clients.
3. We want to make sure that our current clients have the tools they need to work with us. They will have an (eventually private) area to login to with access to all the tools we use. Basecamp for project management, Freshbooks for invoicing, Skype for voice chat, and Adobe Acrobat Connect for video conferencing.
4. We want to communicate our expertise in our field. We’ll do this through the blog, so that the site is a living breathing expression of what Flatsourcing is, not just a corporate presence placeholder.

So, with those goals in mind, we drew up mockups for the design of the site on both sides, New Orleans & Kazan. I’ve included the pictures below. Are we on the right track? What would you like to see from us on Flatsourcing.com?

Today, Oleg and I started discussing the redesign for Flatsourcing.com. This is a project that has been in the works for while for us, and now are focusing our resources on get it up and running.

The redesign is the last step in the full launch of our Flatsourcing Web Services. We’ve been hard at work over the last several months refining our processes and adding new clients. This is been a lot of fun, and we’ve found tools that work for us, process flows that work for our clients, and most importantly of all have a number of successful and ongoing client relationships under our belt. It’s time to grow!

As we work on the relaunch of Flatsourcing.com, I’ll be live blogging the details of the site design as it unfolds. We’ve been working in a much more integrated manner lately through the help of a very stable web conferencing software, Adobe Acrobat Connect which I highly recommend.

I spent the afternoon today using the mind mapping software MindMeister brainstorming the feature set for our WordPress-based Flatsourcing.com site. It’s embedded below:

As we continue to move forward we’ll be talking about more details of the process. We’d love to hear what you think should be on the site to help us communicate what we do. Hit me up in the comments.