Lessons Learned: Three Years of Running a Software Consultancy

reefpoints.dockyard.com

14 points·bcardarella··3 comments

This is a continuation of the series I've published over the past three years:

http://reefpoints.dockyard.com/2013/12/22/lessons-learned-tw...

http://reefpoints.dockyard.com/opinion/2012/06/21/lessons-le...

Props for sharing your actual revenue and profit numbers. This ended up being much more interesting than the title suggested. I was most interested in the two times you almost had to shut DockYard down. What do you think your employees and customers will feel seeing that you almost had to close DockYard twice, as well as what your revenue and profit figures are?

Posting profit & revenue hasn't hurt us in the past. I'm pretty open with our numbers with everyone at DockYard, they knew what those were prior to this post.

I'm pretty sure everyone at DockYard knew of our difficulties earlier this year. We never had a sit down "this is a problem" type meeting but it has been talked about quite a bit. And I went over some of this at a panel I was on a few months ago.

As far as clients go, our problems weren't quality related they were cashflow related. Which I'm sure many people running a business are all too familiar with. Cashflow problems can shut you down faster than anything else. We are pretty confident that we now have a plan to mitigate these issues. We'll see how this pans out in 2015 however.

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