A Builder’s Journal entry – Feb 22, 2024
Trying to grow a custom WP development shop solo is brutal.
I’m running on fumes here tonight after starting my day at 2am.
The seemingly obvious solution for being this loaded down with work would be to just hire… but that’s not so easy.
Hiring is tough and expensive as hell, and quickly burns cash (from my numerous attempts).
I’m being reminded again hardcore this week just how difficult the business model truly is. It’s easy to sell services and get some revenue growing, but it starts to crack pretty quickly.
There’s this weird balancing act of needing to have more revenue to grow, but there’s a lag between the revenue going high enough past my own personal needs to have enough to hire the PROPER talent.
Hiring cheap freelancers doesn’t solve anything (I’ve tried numerous global sources).
Finding people to be “in the trenches” with me is what it really needs… but that’s tough to find quickly and costs a lot.
Overall I’m still super grateful for the business and my clients, but definitely seeing that I should have done this hard push 10 years ago when I didn’t have a wife and young kids (and still had a lot more natural energy and excitement to push through the grind).
All of this means that I’ve decided to hold off on even finishing the website or properly “launching” ConfidentWP for now. I’ve got to figure out a way to manage the current workload a bit better over the next few weeks and then I’ll revisit.
P.S. It’s funny because my overall goal was to build this model to be my “day job” sorta gig, to still have some slivers of time outside of it to build my other digital ideas (job boards, directories, etc.)
But I can see now that without some MAJOR changes, I won’t have time to do anything other than collect domain names this year.