Hello and welcome to a new chapter in Sitepoint’s ‘Down to Business’ blog! I’d like to thank Simon and the whole SitePoint staff for giving me the opportunity to participate in such a useful and widely read blog. I’m very excited to interact with the SitePoint community on a new level, and will do my best to make this blog as informative and interesting as possible.
I’d also like to recognize Andrew Neitlich for his outstanding effort as SitePoint’s business blogger over the last two years. Like many of you, I’ve applied the sales and marketing lessons I learned from Andrew and my business has increased its revenues dramatically as a result. I’ll certainly be watching to see what Andrew does next!
A bit about me: I’m a life-long computer enthusiast who was born around the same time as the Internet (the Arpanet, more accurately). In 1985 I went professional as a support and repair technician for PC’s and Macs at a Computerland retail store. I later entered the software world, developing large applications for businesses, movie studios, start-ups and governments. I continue to work as a process and methodology consultant to Fortune 50 and government clients, but my main focus is on web development and the outsourcing world. Over the years, I’ve also worked as a paramedic, a SCUBA instructor, and a musician and lived in India, New Zealand, Holland, and Hong Kong but I’m currently dividing my time between Louisiana, California, and Thailand.
I’m the founder and Managing Director of Sagewing Corporation, an outsourcing and consulting firm dedicated to helping web developers to grow through outsourced services. Because of Sagewing’s focus on web professionals, I’ve had the unique opportunity to work with hundreds of freelance and boutique development shops and get a good understanding of what it takes to ‘make it’ in the noisy WWW marketplace.
Moving forward, I hope to shift the main focus of this blog from sales and marketing into some new aspects of the web development business. I’ll discuss some of the day-to-day administrative issues that web developers face such as proposal writing, taxes, bookkeeping, and legal matters. In addition, I hope to provide some interesting and useful perspectives into more abstract (but equally important) elements of business such as negotiation tactics, ethics, time management, relationship building, and most importantly the art of making your business bring more than money to your life.
Now I’d like to hear more about you, the readers, and what you hope to learn from this blog. I invite all of you to leave a comment or send me a PM – let me know what direction you would like to see this blog go in! As always, I’m most interested in hearing what your ultimate business goals are, and what you most want out of your business over the long-term. I’ll do my best to satisfy, and hopefully we’ll have some fun, too.
Dave Hecker
