As Zoe wrote

When we first formed the company, we promised to blog about what it was like launching and developing our business.  Growing pains can be both exhilarating and painful, and as much as we shared our stories and learnings with those close to us, most of our tidbits never made it on our blog.  I think when you are living it, it’s sometimes hard to write about it in a coherent fashion, especially when you’re also trying to use said blog to promote your services.  But here’s a quick break-down …

Everyone told us it would take 12-18 months to get our business going, and along the way, we’d have to re-adjust of plans about a thousand times.  It’s totally true.  On the business development side, we found much more early success than we ever imagined.  Paying off our liabilities and drawing salaries came much easier than expected.  We also learned what it was like to move from a steady paycheck to cyclical revenue.  Not good or bad, just different.  :)  The only thing I miss about a steady paycheck is those naïve days when I didn’t have to worry about Quickbooks, federal tax withholding, and EFTPS.  Neither Z nor I have that passion around accounting. :)
 
And speaking of passion … boy, has the last year shed a lot of light on what we like and don’t like professionally.  Back when we first conceptualized JobSyntax, all we knew is that we wanted to work together.  If that meant making gift baskets, cool.  It didn’t really matter, but Zoe and I realized we had a special partnership so we wanted to see where that would take us.  We made a list of things we wanted to do, and the common themes were 1) We wanted to help others solve an existing tough problem, 2) We wanted to teach others how to mitigate and solve future tough problems on their own, and 3) We wanted to make a difference. 

Since technical recruiting was our expertise, we went from there.  Lots of placement firms and headhunting agencies existed in the tech space, but since Zoe and I often felt that these businesses just contributed to the problems we saw in the technical recruiting space, being actual recruiters was out.  We could do it and do it quite well, but it didn’t achieve our goals.  So we decided to put a spin on things and help jobseekers and employers – particularly those who were still growing but were motivated and sought long-term solutions – to succeed on their own.

The problem was we were trying to boil the ocean.  We knew that when we were going into it, but we partially wanted to see what types of services generated the most interest and what types of interactions provided us with the most satisfaction and let us make that difference.

That’s where we are now.  Since life has introduced some happy changes we didn’t build into our original business plan, this is the perfect opportunity to shake things up a bit and hone in on our now better defined passions. 

Two things you’ll see from here (and more dialogue on this in the next few blog posts):

1) More love and attention paid to the social media – blog, forums, podcasts, screencasts, etc – portions of our website.  Interacting with readers was the original spark that made us want to start JobSyntax and it’s by far our favorite “company duty.”  More, more, more … and better, better, better!

2) A more finely tuned focus on our service offerings.  You may have noticed that our jobseeker and employer pages have already changed (way less info! Woo-hoo!), and we have some additional thoughts to share with you on this.

So until the next blog post, that’s what’s up here in JobSyntax Land.

gretchen