These days it seems impossible to get anything done. Even the simplest task is almost impossible to do because of the extreme workload faced by every member of staff.
After our recent sales deluge (where the number of new clients per week quadrupled) we expected things to settle down a bit. After all, we're still holding off on taking new contracts for Confluence Support, Remote Hosting and Bespoke Solutions so that should lead to a drop in sales, right? Nope, we're still all swamped with work. There's just no end to it. So where is all the work coming from?
We first looked to support - surely with so many customers (especially the recent influx of new customers) there must be lots of support requests? Well, not really. Although support workload has increased over the years, it's only marginally higher than it was a few years ago. We're constantly improving our products and services - anything that keeps generating support requests is frowned upon and we work like crazy to resolve the issue at source.
We then looked at sales again and noticed that although the number of new customers each day is back to normal levels (roughly 25% growth per quarter), we're seeing a steady increase in new work from existing customers.
It turns out that because we've been constantly improving our products and services to reduce support workload, existing clients are wanting us to do more and more work for them - and this is increasing our sales workload.
So, out of the frying pan, in to the fire.
The constantly increasing workload is preventing us from completing several critical internal tasks:
- Licensing module for Builder 3 and Bubbles 1 - we can't release the plugins without this
- Our online shopping cart - 90% complete but we're finding it impossible to finish the last 10%
- Centralised accounts - having tried all kinds of accounts software (both desktop and online) we've realised that the only way we're going to streamline our accounts is with a bespoke solution
Outsourcing the work would seem like a simple solution, however the amount of in-house knowledge required to implement these systems is so extensive that if we outsourced we'd simply end up spending even more time trying to explain everything to the subcontractor thus making matters worse.
As I said in one of my early blog posts: Plan for success, not failure. If only I'd known that when we started Adaptavist.
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