Wild First Week of 2010

Everyone starts out a new year with wide eyed optimism. You can go to sleep on December 31 burnt out, disgruntled and generally down in the dumps but then wake up on January 1 a new person full of enthusiasm, optimism and feeling like a million bucks. And our company is no exception.

So this past Monday January 4, 2010, the first work day of the new year, we showed up and besides everyone freezing their butts off, we all were fired up for the start of the new year. When we left before the holidays we had sent out a couple of important proposals and we were looking forward to getting positive feedback on some of those. Monday came and went and we heard nothing. Not completely unexpected since it was the first day back. Tuesday was a different story but not the way we wanted. We found out two proposals would be put on hold and the largest would be, at the very least, delayed, but more than likely gone. The optimism of the new year quickly turned in to a kick in the stomach.

Wednesday was a new day though and Tuesdays disappointments quickly turned in to Wednesdays accomplishments which lead in to Thursdays and Fridays. On Wednesday we finalized a handful of new tasks for one of our best clients. For a variety of reasons we have not done much for this client over the past couple months so it was great to get back on the horse. Then we made a great step forward on phase 2 of an important project that we finished about 6 weeks earlier. When you finish a project and you’re able to go to phase 2 it’s a great piece of positive feedback that the client is satisfied with the work. Then Wednesday night a couple of us had a great dinner with some clients to talk about 2010. I don’t think the meeting could have gone any better. On a scale of 1 to 10 the dinner was a 12. We went to dinner hoping we would have the opportunity to do a fair amount of work with this client in 2010 and the volume of possible work for us is far more than we could have hoped.

And then it got even better. Thursday, out of the blue, we got a call for a very important and meaningful opportunity. All of us do things because it’s good for business because, quite frankly, every company has to pay the bills and every employee needs to collect a paycheck to live. On the other hand, some projects are far more important than the money and are worth doing because they are good for people, a lot of people. We started the process of working on a project like that Thursday morning. Before the end of day Friday we had three members of our team booked to leave Monday night coming back Wednesday to spend the day Tuesday with this client figuring out to what extent we can help them and how quickly.

At the end of day Friday I was exhausted. It’s hard enough getting back to a five day work week after 2 weeks of break and partial work weeks because of the holidays. But then when the first week is such a roller coaster it makes it that much more exhausting. I’m ok with the roller coaster as long as by the end of each week the highs are much higher than the lows. I hope to look back at this blog at the end of 2010 and say that this was the first great week of many more in 2010.