On a personal level Mandy and I consolidated a few long standing issues in our lives and put ourselves on a more solid footing than we have been for a long time, and if anything good could be said to come out of the pandemic I would have to say that would be one of them.
Business has been strange, certainly at the start of 2020 the business was just floating along, while the all the client work was getting done, it was, in retrospect the business itself not getting the attention it deserved and was being neglected in favour of other issues which were sucking our time up. Again trying to take something positive from the pandemic, the need to self isolate and the lockdown itself gave us time to reassess a lot of things. During the initial lockdown we decided to look at every aspect of the business, and build a long term strategy to move it forward. Like a lot of people it would seem, we started with good intentions but somehow the days seemed to pass by. We certainly did make progress both in creating a plan and starting to implement it, but in all honesty we could have done better. What did improve dramatically was our back office systems, handling domain renewals, project management, support and general administration. While not glamorous these are the bedrock which we felt we needed before making any large scale changes.
The mid part of the year was taken up with trying to ensure we could help clients when needed, and this required us ensure we had adequate resources in place to get through things, as well as working on a major new site for Kristina-J as well as a large project we took on outside of the escort industry.
In the latter part of 2020 we finally had a coherent plan as to what we needed to do, primarily up our game when it came to site design, redefine our fee structures, and work on our SEO. With these clear goals in place we have completely changed our fees ensuring clients only pay for what they need and no longer be "shoehorned" into a package which may be either more than they need or in some cases not enough. Some fees for clients have reduced, some may increase but at least everyone now gets to pay for what they actually need and will use.
On the coding and design side I have started some on-line courses on specific scripting libraries, giving me the ability to bring a whole new dimension to future sites. We have also set aside time each week to look at design trends, new technologies and techniques and generally stay informed and on trend.
Over the Christmas "break", actually not to much of a break given the pandemic restrictions in place, we took apart our SEO strategy, and started to rebuild it from the ground up. We spent a lot of time planning and reading up, then started to implement things. While this is an ongoing project (I do not expect to have this where I want it until well into this year) results in some areas have already been spectacular and in general so far so good.
Of course no retrospective would be complete without looking at the most important part of our business, our clients. We lost some due to their decision to make cuts because of the pandemic, which is of course to be expected. One long established client passed away unexpectedly which shocked us and made us realise how fragile things actually are. Most clients however are still around, and we have made arrangements where we can to provide support. Of course as always we would like to thank all our clients for all their continued confidence in us, we all need to support each other of course but it's nice to see it actually working for everyone.
The pandemic has changed a lot of things maybe permanently, time will tell. For those who have succumbed we send our heartfelt thoughts, for the rest of us, know that things will improve. It may not go back to how it was before 2020 but a new normality we can all live with and prosper in, will emerge.
Here's to 2021!!