Sunday, October 04, 2009

Enercient's top needs/ wants right now

I don't really know why I'm blogging this- but I think it might be therapeutic & help me keep things in perspective. As you know, I've been working on the Enercient Project for nearly two years now, and we've got quite a team together. Each stage of progress brings a whole new set of problems and needs, and this is just the latest. It might be something completely different next week or next month- but here's where we are.

1. Steady Stream of income for me personally. I have this wierd conflict right now, where I am attending more and more meetings/ appointments with prospects/ customers/ vendors so I have decreasing amounts of time every week to get out there and do work that puts money in my checking account. We're at the point where I've got to start DEPOSITING money.

2. A web developer. I have also reached the point where my webdev abilities are stretched beyond my capacity to continue being the one to do it. We have products, data, and relationships we need to get online, and I'm ok at creating static content, but static content isn't getting it any more. I need someone versed in LAMP, CMS, and in design- I know this will be difficult to find, but I haven't started looking.

3. An admin. I have also reached the point where I am missing appointments and opportunities, and I need someone on whom I can start dropping some of this workload. I need someone to start setting my appointments, ordering supplies, and some billing help would be great too.

4. An HVAC mechanic. I'm pretty close to being covered on this one, but I could start selling more if I didn't have to be the one doing the hands-on work at this point.

5. A full-size one ton van. I know I should start working on not being the one doing the hands-on, but now that blue is dead, I need somewhere to keep my tools and be able to do work when needed.

6. 52 thousand dollars- heck, I might as well make it 63K. The breakdown is simple:
a. 12k to fund our presentation and presence at the AHR expo
b. 10k to pay Photon Infotech to set up our web 2.0 web presence
c. 10K/ month for next three months to pay Enercient operating expenses
d. Enercient owes us more than 11K at this point, but we're carrying 4K in Enercient credit card debt and 7K in a personal loan from us.

7. Advertising, stationary & collateral material. We need some stuff to hand to potential clients. I've developed a few things, but it really helps to have it professionally printed.

8. A Systems admin with Linux experience. I'm tired of hosting 5 different wb sites with 4 different hosting providers, and I'm tired of tring to figure this stuff out myself. I see this person being someone who is looking to grow, and could expand "into the cloud" with us.

9. A fast commercial connection to the internet with a rack. Actually I don't care if it is just one hot machine with a massive hard drive running several vitual machines and a massive backup storage device- but you get the idea. Dedicated hosting would probably work too.

10. A technical writer. We have 20 vendors with hundreds (thousands?) of devices and we've got to create O&M, and installer instruction manuals for our installing contractors.

I know everyone starting a business has a lot of these same needs, but the tricky part is determining what comes first. At this point its starting to feel circular. I need "A" to get to "B" to get to "Z" to get to "A"

We've got a great team, some really great products, and some really good leads/ proposals out there. All we have to do is to remember to keep pushing, keep driving, and keep moving this thing forward one day, one week at a time. Anything you can do as a friend, associate, partner, or relative would help greatly.