Work and life

Since I moved to Kidd’s Beach a year and a few months ago, I been building a life style business from scratch with no outside funding or capital.

I wanted to not only live by the ocean, but to enjoy all it has to offer. So I came “home” to Kidd’s Beach and have been working from my home doing website site design and website hosting. It’s been a slow start, the business not growing as quickly as I’d hoped and I feel I’m about 6 months behind where I’d hoped to be at this stage.

What I’m trying to achieve is pretty simple really;

  1. To have the flexibility with work to spend the important moments with those that I love when I want to and whenever they need me to
  2. I also like to be able to go for walks, dive, train and more all through the week rather than after 5pm on a weekend day and on weekends only.
  3. All the while being financially stable and secure,  what I mean here is owning a home, being able to provide, not having to worrying about bills each month, health and getting old

The first two points I’ve achieved already. I’m now working on the third.

The last quarter of the year is looking good for me and I feel this is probably the right time to now make a big push to get things going in the right direction.

I spend more than double the amount of time on building the websites than on any other task and I need to release some of that time to focus on sales and marketing. That is the bottle neck right now. I’m going to try bring on someone to help in terms of actually building websites. This will mean spending less time doing development work, consequently more project management but importantly more sales and marketing.

Long term, the website hosting is a great passive revenue earner. It’s a recurring annual fee that I just need to invoice once a year and answer the odd support query. I spend less that 0.5% of my time on this part of the business but next year it will earn me over 10% of my annual revenue. Website hosting is the service that keeps a website on the Internet (basically renting space on a computer, a server, on the Internet).

Over the next five years, website hosting will grow to be a significant part of my annual revenue and even as it grows will remain mostly passive income. My goal is to keep building websites to grow the web hosting business. Hosting allows the business to generate more income without me needing to invest in more people and major expenses to maintain the revenue.

Long term, 10+ years on. I’d like to be employing perhaps two or three at the most people to handle:

  • Sales & marketing
  • Website development
  • Support

This should mean that the business can sustain and grow itself till I choose to close or sell it. I would think over time I’d expand on what I do, get a few fingers in other pies.  For now though, this will do just fine to get me set on my third goal.

It may seem a bit odd writing all this publicly, especially since work is not something I talk about normally. I think those close to worry  as I don’t talk about it, so you don’t know what’s going on.  So I guess I wanted to share with those I care about that I do have a plan, it’s looking good and I work every day at being more.

Want to know what “a day in the life of..” looks like for me. Read this > Weekday Lifestyle Schedule

[Update 23/11/2014: Last week I bought plot of land in KB. Read more here]

Recent posts

Recent Comments

Topics

Brendan Written by: