2022 so much promise!

We thought 2020 was a difficult one, I’m not going to say bad, because actually our work took off beyond all expected levels thanks to so many businesses realising they need to be online to reach customers in their homes. Things have changed obviously as the pandemic turns more endemic, and we are trying to live with Covid, but our workload hasn’t!

When life takes over

We always try to maintain a professional business persona, in person, on Zoom calls, the phone or on email but this year really threw a spanner in the works for us, with a death of one of our parents. Who knew how much this would put everything on hold? The run-up to her passing wasn’t easy either, and one of the upsides of self-employment was being able to adjust our working hours to fit with hospital, doctor, care providers appointments not to mention the meals on wheels service that we found ourselves providing.

So, a public thank you to all of our customers who were so kind and considerate when we missed deadlines and weren’t our usual ‘available’ selves. Alongside this, special mention has to go to Darren our honorary thirdfenton who held the fort as much as possible as we were out of action for nearly a month in the end.

Playing catch up

Having lost a month of work time, playing catch up saw us working 14-hour days sometimes and of course we didn’t listen to friends and family telling us to calm the f**k down, and the inevitable happened with the pair of us catching Covid at the beginning of August. Poor Darren had also succumbed in July and was still suffering the after effects. Honestly, could it get much worse? In the early hours of a sleepless night even though the pair of us were exhausted beyond belief, we just sat there staring at each other asking what we had done to deserve this!

Three weeks on and we are finally getting back to some kind of normality. We even managed to launch two websites this week – go us! But yes, we are listening to people this time and are being more aware of not working stupidly long days or promising something we can’t quite deliver just yet. I would like to think we will keep this sensible approach, but I doubt it!

What now?

One of the websites we launched was a project for ourselves for fellow web developers and that’s been quite exciting. We are also investigating and implementing changes for ourselves and customers on enhanced privacy and GDPR law – a very dry subject, but ethical data is going to be the hot topic next year, and we want to get ahead and make sure all our customers are complying, so if you are a current customer, expect a very boring but necessary email coming your way soon!

We are in the middle of 3 other builds and have work on the books that will take us into 2023. I refuse to mention the C word, but I already know that any prospective customers getting in touch will start to hold Cxxxxxmas as this looming deadline for some weird reason.

Anyway, this feels a bit like a dear diary blog post. Just thought it would be a good idea to let you know we’ve not dropped off the earth, even if it feels like we have, literally!

Onwards and upwards, teamfenton!