Bear Den Designs

Refresh Jacksonville

Google Analytics and ngenworks

I knew Google Analytics always had more under the skin but I hadn’t had the time to to tap into it. Carl from ngenworks gave an illuminating talk at Refresh Jacksonville last night (2007Feb22) on not only how to tap into this information but why. Or as his slide shown, WWWWWH. Excellent job.

Another thing he mentioned that slapped me in the face, because we do this but I hadn’t stepped back to understand the implications is our usage of analytics and basecamp . Our clients love this but I haven’t been pushing it because I thought it was too much info for them. I’ve always liked the saying “The student rises to the expectations of the teacher” and this can be applied to the business relationship also. “The client rises to the expectations of the business” and of course vice-versa.

Agile Weekly Billing

Bear Den Designs is a small company. Basically, a few guys and a dog. We
create applications using ruby on rails and we SAVE
projects already started. railsSaves

One of the things I learned early on, as an independent contractor (before I
had employees) is that I am a terrible estimator of time. One of our goals
as a company, is that we want to save our clients money and do the job as
quickly as possible. Most of the time, new clients expect us to work like
a general contractor who is building a house and offer a flat rate quote for
the whole job. I’ve tried this and frankly whether I’ve overestimated my
ability or underestimated the job it just has NOT ever worked out well
monetarily for Bear Den Designs. A couple of years ago I changed how I dealt
with my clients and projects in 2 ways.

The first was a fundamental change in how our whole company created software.
That is, we switched to using an “Agile workflow”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development .
Using agile practices is a discipline. We don’t use every tenant but we try to additional practices at each new project start. See Extreme Programming Explained for a simple explanation.
I’m sure if you are reading this post you actually know more about Agile practices than me. I will add, the secret business strategy embodied into Agile practices and keeping your clients happy is release, release, release…

The second change was in billing our clients. NO more flat rate quotes and
we bill our time WEEKLY for each hour we work. Yes, that is right weekly
billing. Since we use Harvest the reporting
burden is pretty low. Our contract bookkeeper can login and have our
invoicing done in less than an hour each week.

It’s a beautiful combination. Since we are releasing the alpha software on a
weekly (or more often) basis the client can see that we are hard at work on the job and building
the software that they want. We get paid promptly (our terms are net 1
week). If at any time a client stops paying (it hasn’t ever happened because
we ALWAYS deliver) we stop work.

Simple. Our cash flow is fluid. I don’t need to run my business with credit from the bank. (Are you listening big companies?) The client gets high quality software with the features that they want.

Please drop your comments on twitter. I’m @ebeard