Change seems to be the theme of our story these days with the Internet, search marketplace and our daily set of tasks morphing rapidly. Change is a good thing but never comes without its price. For us that price has been painful, literally.
The StepForth staff has just survived what has to be counted as the longest, most physically challenging weekend in the nine year history of our firm. Bill is still down sick, Scott is temporarily offline, Ross, Mark and I have just recently gotten back online, and our new offices are still turned upside down.
StepForth brags about how we do all our SEO work by hand, without the aid of automated systems or in-the-box software. As a small business, we are extremely cost-conscious. We are saving about $200 per month in our move and saved over $1200 by doing the heavy lifting ourselves. One thing we forgot about… We are geeks and geeks tend not to resemble bodybuilders. While we all weigh in over 98lb, lifting heavy boxes is not in our general job descriptions. Suffice it to say we are all suffering muscle strain today.
To add to the difficulty of moving a nine year old business from one side of town to the center of the city, this weekend brought the worst weather southern Vancouver Island has seen all winter. A major gale pushed power lines down, toppled trees and dumped nearly two centimeters of rain in a few hours. Much of the city was blacked out yesterday and part of Saturday night. Scott, who lives about 1500 kilometers north of us (just south of the Yukon/Alaska border), was knocked offline when the satellite connection in his new town was snookered by the heaviest snowfall Northern British Columbia has seen in over thirty years. He is expected to be back later today or early tomorrow.
Today, the sun is shining and the weather is sweet, at least in relation to what it has been over the past 72-hours. The wind is down to a dull roar and while we can see dark clouds forming over the Olympic Mountains to the south, the skies above Victoria are blue. I am typing away on a newer Toshiba laptop in my as yet unadorned room in StepForth’s new office. The coffee machine is plugged in, the internal network has been re-established, our central server is again accessible and my desk surface is actually clear for the first time in almost a year.
That’s a good way to start off in a new space. Another positive omen is the pending launch of our new website, coming on Wednesday February 1. The goodness comes in threes (so they say) and I hope to discover some bite-sized goodness in about an hour when I go off to explore a new menu of restaurants and eateries surrounding our new space. I am hoping for a three martini posting later today.