I’ve been away from this blog for far too long, and it’s time to get caught up. After a bleak period of many months with minimal client projects due to the recession, business picked up in earnest in Summer 2010. From that time until now, I’ve been so slammed that I haven’t had a spare moment to spend on this blog. Things have slowed down a bit, so I’m going to spend the next few days posting about some of the cool (and not so cool ) projects I’ve been able to work on.
About that bleak period . . . For a few years prior to the recession, I bet my entire business on one client. They gave me lots of good, steady work. And they were a great group of people to work with. So even though I knew better, I did little to get additional clients. When they had a change in their business structure, the projects Easton Communications was working on were one of the things they cut. Typically, I probably would have been able to regroup and line up new clients within a month or two. But this was the beginning of the recession, and it took me a full nine months to get some new things going. Ouch!
When I finally did get things going again, it was in a field completely outside my area of expertise: writing reserve studies for homeowners associations (HOAs). I even spent several months doing tasks such as managing insurance policies for HOAs, paying bills for HOAs, and providing closing figures to title agents when individual homes in HOAs were sold. This work was all done for my son-in-law, Joe Keizur’s business, Blue Mountain Community Management. This work kept me busy for many months while I worked to bring new clients online to support our core business. I’ll write more about this experience in an upcoming blog entry.
I definitely learned my lesson the past few years. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. I always knew this to be true, but I never had it so painfully proven to be an important principal for small business owners. Easton Communications now has a number of different clients. Work is happening at a fast and furious pace, and has been for the past year.
Stay tuned for posts about some of the projects we’ve been working on in the next few days. Besides writing reserve studies for HOAs, I’ll post about writing scripts for promotional videos, more about developing animated training videos, and doing customer case studies. And a bunch of other stuff too!
It’s good to be back.
