We’re at an interesting place in time. Our business hops. Things work. But if you ignored the business indicators and looked only at our practices, you might not immediately get that impression.
We don’t have the development capacity to handle half the leads we could. Each of us is chasing three or more project deadlines at any given time, not to mention the persistent volume of one-off tasks. And it’s not really the laid back environment it was a few years ago (we’re working on that.)
So what happened?
Most clearly, the number of requests we get has spiked. We get about five times the leads in a day [from non-clients] that we did only a few years back. The number of client relationships we maintain is also continually growing - each of these brings its own demand.
In addition to the hard work growth, we’re benefitting from a general enthusiasm hitting the interweb. Web 2.0 momentum has found it’s way to our project floor. Design galleries and social networking have opened new channels for [client] connections. More people are getting online.
There are other factors in play as well, and each increases the demand vibe a bit more than we would have forecast (if we could forecast.)
The interesting part is that not all of this positive demand has a positive influence on our business.
We aren’t set up to handle high volume (we could easily keep three more developers busy.) We aren’t good at saying no (especially with so many interesting requests coming in.) We haven’t engaged any [supply vs demand] price filtering (yet.)
And so we’re busy. Trying to figure out how long you can call that a good problem.
BTW, part of our work to cool stress involves adding a person. Know one?
Yeah, know one?