So my new web design business needed a name.
I must have spent all of 5 seconds considering it. While other business owners wax lyrical about the significance of their company name, routinely coming up with drivel like..
“a brand name which encapsulates the innovate e-commerce experiences it creates, and envelops perfectly the dynamic mindshare its out-of-the-box architecture implements..”
….and other such pretentious bollocks, I named mine after a coffee-stained, turquoise-tinged programming book.
Now I had spent most of January ‘09 wrestling with a spiky backup script on a server at work that refused to play ball, and I’d been brushing up on my Perl (a high level scripting language) in an attempt to get the bloody thing to work.
And while trying in vain to come up with a name, this ongoing job kept trying to invade my consciousness.
Leading my eye to a forlorn copy of “Programming Perl” lying on my coffee table..
And in a flash of inspiration, Pearl Design was born.
So full of piss and vinegar the next week I marched boldly into the CRO offices on Parnell Square to stake my claim as a newly-minted business owner, and fire up Pearl Design as a going concern.
But serving two masters proved to be harder than I thought..
For most of 2009 and all of 2010 I survived on less than a 5 hours sleep a night, staying up until the wee hours to work on my business (I was so exhausted one particular evening I ended up in Longford because I fell asleep on the train home)..
I burnt the midnight oil stalking forums and web design galleries absorbing as much information as possible on the latest design trends and jQuery ninja hacks.
I soaked up more knowledge than a wide eyed two year old child.
But I was barking up the wrong tree.
I thought I was learning the good stuff, but instead I entered the business world more naked than the day I was born.
Because I was so obsessed with doing the “thing”, I paid no heed to the marketing and business of the “thing”.
I am not a web designer, similar to the same way you’re not a baker, candlestick maker, or whatever your chosen profession might be. I’m a marketer of web design first and foremost, and you’re a marketer of the business that sells your category of merchandise or service.
And that mindset cost me years of my business life, time which would have been better spent growing my business and solving my prospects problems of getting more customers and clients.
So are you making that same mistake?
Are you spending far too much time on the development of the “thing”, to the detriment of the marketing of the “thing?”
If so, I’m here to help.
It all starts with a consultation here.
Stay hungry,
Keith
P.S. The aforementioned “inspirational” book still sits proudly on my desk proudly on my desk, but these days I use it to bring my monitor up to eye level.
P.P.S. Perish the thought but if you ever have to write some corporate speak, this little doozy will help you out..