About a year ago, I started to realize that I was spreading myself way too thin in trying to build my business up to achieve its maximum potential.  No matter how driven you are to succeed, you must always make time for yourself and take the time to “stop and smell the coffee”.  Without doing so you are hurting yourself and your business if you do not take time to realize what parts of your business are profitable and what parts are not.  You are also hurting your own personal health as you never have any downtime.

The life of an entrepreneur & freelancer is not a 9-5 type of job, instead it is a 24 hour type of job.  There are no definite work hours, but it seems there is always work to be done and never enough time in a day to get that work done.

For the last 4 years or more, I took very little downtime as I was focused on keeping my customers happy and building up a profitable business.  I also had basically given up playing music as I felt at the time, that the business was more important.

At this time last year, my company was based on:

•    Providing web hosting services & support for local clients in the NC area
•    Providing web design & consulting services to a range of clients throughout the United States
•    Managing multiple websites for 2 separate large internet retail companies
•    Owning, operating & continually updating an affiliate based network of over 100 niche internet stores
•    Operating as a merchant with a network of internet retail stores selling novelties & other products
•    Partnership in a new domain monetization startup company which would build niche websites on premium domains in exchange for a cut of the profits

EastWave has always run a very small staff in our main office in North Carolina.  All development work for customers is handled in our NC office as well as all order processing for any of the products purchased on the web stores that we own.

I think there have been a few development customers that would come to us thinking that we were a large company with many developers.  The truth is, almost 100% of any new development on websites either for customers or for our own interests was completed by me personally.

There have been numerous days to where I would work at the computer for 20 hours at a time, sleep a few hours and get back to work and put in another 20 hour day.

I knew that I had to make a change, but I wasn’t quite sure what that change would be.