Soon you’ll hear me blather on about some new mis-adventures… er…  adventures… er ventures that I’m embarking on in business. It’s a little scary – outside my comfort zone of the travel industry. I’m excited. Very excited. More on the specifics when they’re nailed down.

In the meantime…

Back in January my Mastermind Group, which is like a personal board of directors, helped me realize that I needed to jettison some of the more unprofitable aspects of my business. After a lot of soul searching, and a ton of reading Tim Ferriss’ “The Four Hour Workweek” again… and again… and the E-Myth series of books, I decided those smart, talented, opinionated people were right. I wasn’t happy… but they were right. I was essentially a professional volunteer and after committing to dig out of my own fiscal nightmare, I really needed to heed their advice and then – and here’s the hard part – do something about it.

I started with a lot of thought about what I wanted to do when I grew up. I love design and the hosting is stable and profitable so all the web design and web hosting remains intact – nothing changes, except for some great new enhancements to service and training, which have been stalled and choked by the bottleneck of projects that I’ve been afraid of facing.

Crossover Consulting was founded as an outsourced IT department for home based, small and medium sized businesses that couldn’t afford their own staff-person back in 1999. The challenge has become that it’s time consuming and doesn’t really have a great return on the time investment. So, I jettisoned all but one client. She’s local and she’s a pleasure to work with. She keeps me busy about 10 hours a week, but it also keeps me sharp in the skills department. I was on the fence about it, but Kendra Kinnison’s sage business advice in this blog post about a Results Oriented Work Environment tipped the scales and she made the cut.

Further analysis brought out that the way that the projects were aligned and shared resources weren’t quite right either, so all of the projects that were travel related now come under the umbrella of Crossover Consulting and I formed two new entities to better position the non-travel portions. This way the tech support, billing and training for all things travel is supported through Crossover Consulting, and everything else administrative comes under the new brand:  The Orchard Bay Group.

For design projects that were non-travel, I’ve always used Port Aransas Web or Padre Island Web as a point of sales and service – but new in 2010 I started to see an increase of more than 200% of non-travel, non-local business – so I decided on a name and brand for the bulk of my design endeavors – Marker9 Design. Why Marker 9? Simple: I live at Beach Marker 9 in Port Aransas, Texas. Plus, it just sounds edgy and cool. And I am all about edgy and cool. Just ask me.

Summing it all up:

1. Orchard Bay Group – the “holding company” for everything. Serves as the billing and customer service entity for all non-travel business.
2. Crossover Consulting – Speaking, Writing and Training on Website Design, Marketing and Social Media. The parent entity for GemTravelSites.com, WP-TravelDesign.com, TravelWebServer.com and TravelWebMarketing.com – which remain intact, sleeker and more focused – and all travel-related.
3. Marker9Design – WordPress Design, Themes and Customizations plus design for logos, merchandise and print.

Each of the sites continue to run independently of one another, but with the realignment I’ll shave more than 20 hours off administrative tasks each week, and I’ve got my eye on an amazing company to handle some of the other marketing-related tasks as well. It may seem counter-productive to actually add more entities, but trust me – it makes sense in light of what’s around the bend. Having all the travel-related projects separated from the non-travel ones will allow for growth and staff to concentrate on the niche they serve.

It’s like the Rubix Cube just flipped into place. Oh – and one more thing. I decided to add a new phone number for the Orchard Bay Group – which is an homage to where my Grandma and I spent almost every waking free moment of most summers growing up. When I went to get a new number from RingCentral, the number that I found was, in fact, her actual phone number – just toll-free.

Coincidence? Call me at 877-337-1538 and we’ll talk about it.