I’m excited to say we’ve selected the winning submission for the Bootstrap Experiment. Congratulations go to Chris Auman, a Web developer with an idea that will hopefully get him out of ‘hand-to-mouth’ project work and into recurring revenue service fees.
Why Chris?
First - a disclaimer - I will admit, Chris & I had a business relationship before his selection as our Bootstrapper. Chris is not just ‘a’ Web developer, he was my Web developer. Meaning he did the original design for the Small Business Guru Web site about 14 months go.
Let me assure you there was no exchange of ‘moolah’ here. I’m not receiving free services in exchange for his participation or anything like that.
Chris made his pitch along with the other contestants. His idea was selected on it’s merits and on my genuine belief in his ability to execute.
I also felt his situation would resonate with a majority of my readers. Meaning many of us have an existing service based business. The challenge being to get away from hourly project work to a recurring revenue model.
About Chris
Chris is in the same position many of Small Business Guru’s reader’s are in.
Chris works out his home. He has 3 children ranging from .05 -7 years hold. A dog. And a loving wife who works full-time as a nurse the local hospital.
He has an existing business that, while doing well, he can’t see more than 3-6 months down the road.
His billings primarily consist of hourly project work. His goal is to get away from always having to track down his next meal and create a base of recurring revenue model.
His first challenge is freeing up enough time in his schedule to work on this new endeavor.
So again, like many of us, in order to build our future we need to create enough room in our lives to focus on our long term goals — so that we can work on them bit by bit while not having our world completely collapse around us.
Chris’ Idea
Chris has developed online & offline tools for a ticketing system which can be used by event planners to sell tickets to concerts, carnivals, and theater events of pretty much any size.
After some initial tests, Chris has recently upgraded the application to allow for online set up & configuration by venue owners.
That said - there’s still a LOT of work to be done…
Marketing & sales, testing, fulfillment and back-end technical support…the business has a long way to go before it can provide the recurring revenue stream Chris is shooting for.
No one wants an 11pm phone call from a theater owner in Billings Montana who’s having trouble with his bar code scanner.
If Chris works out the kinks, he’s got a great market opportunity where he can fly just under the radar of a Ticketmaster taking clubs that have 100-1500 seats collecting services fees for each and every seat sold.
What’s Next?
Job one - free up some of his time so he can focus on his long term business goals.
I started by asking Chris to share a week’s worth of time sheets — his inventory of work. Being that his work is billed hourly, this was pretty easy for him to produce.
On initial review, its evident Chris is already doing the right things. He delegates what he can to other programmers and a virtual assistant. While he’s technically a ‘one person shop’ he’s put together a good team of independent professionals to help him get the job done.
Much of his day is spent managing the many projects on his plate. 15 minutes here, 15 minutes there. At the end of the day Chris sometimes feels like he has run a marathon.
Still, we believe there may be some opportunities to streamline his processes and to renegotiate some commitments.
The single biggest time sink for Chris seems to be proposal writing.
It’s the lifeblood of his business AND it sets the tone for the entire engagement ahead — so it’s not like he can delegate it or boilerplate it. He would risk losing business and he still needs the revenue from his project work to fund his new endeavor.
Still, every process can be improved and streamlined a little bit.
So my first step will be to review some of his proposals and perhaps observe the development process for these proposals at different stages.
I used to work for a Web developer myself, so I’m pretty comfortable with the sales cycle for a web firm. I’ll be drawing that past experience to look for repeatable patterns of work that we can standardize.
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