Thursday, January 01, 2004

A successful year in 2003

My company eSolia had a very successful year coming off a weak one. I'm thankful for how things went!

Thanks to our faithful customers, my incredible executive partners Yuui and Takumi, the dogged perseverance of our very professional staff Hiroki, Ena, Maki, Momo, Scott, Yasu et al, and the saintly patience of our capital partner, we pulled the company back into the black.

To those people who thought we'd be dead in the water - thanks for nothing! This just shows you how powerful people can be when they set their minds to something. Thank all of you who hung in there so much! We slimmed down, and refocused the company, revamping our thinking by re-doing our website. This exercise gave us a great opportunity to work out a lot of inconsistencies, and define what we do, and don't do. It was quite painful just due to the sheer amount of work, but we managed to get it done in about 2 months.

We hired a great young web designer, Ryoko, who kept things organized while we all pushed to define our concept and the content of the site, and whose golden design touch got us away from my amateurish designs. Speaking of which, our site uses MovableType set up on an Apache server hosted at XREA to do announcements and news and such, and has its static pages hosted on an inhouse IIS server. We used a lot of excellent third-party utils such as the guardian script for error handling, the formprocessor pro script for forms, and some custom ASP scripts to pick up RSS feeds off our MovableType site.

eSolia strengthened our business with existing customers, and I started doing consulting full force. My main work besides managing eSolia was consulting on an ERP rollout, revamping an IT department, and managing a large office move. I have been back and forth to California several times, and I am thankful for my full schedule.

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