Over the several years my padna and I have worked several projects for Felthos Foundry while maintaining our current sites and infrastructure at the same time. Our biggest complaint that we felt kept holding us back from releasing different sites, products and services was time.

We both have “burn rates” in our personal lives with mortgages or rent, utilities, car payments not to mention the women in our lives so we have been working Felthos Foundry as a second job. Over the past year we have been working between 40-50 hours for the man while struggling to keep our dreams alive. In addition to the 40-50 hours of work each week I also deal with 8-10 hours of commute time and another 35-40 hours of “Bri” time (my little girl) as well as the incidentals including cleaning, doing bills (or taxes), wife time and, oh yeah… sleeping! Basically what this boiled down for my padna and I is that we have around 16 hours per week to work on our ideas. This 16 hours is further reduced by the requirements of maintenance of our various sites in our network. If both of us have roughly 3 hours a weekday to spend on our company, we estimated that we both worked maintenance issues which include blogging, upgrading infrastructure, small items on our to do master list for 2 hours leaving only 1 hour per night for project work.

So, we have been spending our left-over one hour a day working projects which will increase revenue. To make matters worse, this is usually the last hour of our day. Brilliant! We trust the last hour we can barely keep our eyes open to forging our future.

Last weekend we had an off-site, which is another topic in itself, where we discussed pitching some awesome ideas we had to my padna’s boss who has offered to possibly fund some project’s. Considering our time, if we could cover our “burn rate” with funding I would definitely consider entering into an agreement… but then all our hard work and ideas would be split with the money man. Personally, I want to be in control of my ideas but if someone is funding you they probably get a say in how you spend your money and how your ideas are executed.

Going to bed the second night of the off-site I must admit I felt a little depressed that we could not get our ideas done without help and that we would have to work with/for someone to realize our ideas. As I started drifting off to sleep, another thought sprang to my mind… allow for one of us to focus on projects while the other solely takes care of maintenance! It sounds to simple to work, but after only one week we have been able to churn out a site and a solid process for creating that type of a site quickly. You see, an additional advantage for allowing one of the partners to fully work projects is that projects tend to require deeper thought and a little while to get into the work. By fully concentrating on just the prioritized projects and not worrying about two hours of maintenance each night I feel we have possibly quadrupled our efficiency.

The moral of the story is one that’s been around for ages… Divide and Conquer!

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