Why I Left A Good Job to Start Spyderserve

Recently I resigned from the Webmaster position at the local university in Valdosta, Georgia. While employed at this institution, it was my job to oversee the technical development of the university owned web properties along with several student and faculty websites. There were many things I liked about this job including the huge list of skills and knowledge that the job required and the constant need to improve these skills but something was missing. As soon as the word got out that I was leaving the university, a lot of people asked me why I wanted to leave. After all, the university offered a long list of good benefits. Honestly, I asked this same question of myself on several occasions thru-out the process of leaving. As it turns out, the answer can be broke down into three reasons.

My first reason is fairly simple; I like the idea of being an entrepreneur. My first real job was actually helping my father run a company. For eight years of my relatively young life, I learned to run a company through many mistakes and successes. These skills and lessons that I learned during this time have stuck with me and I have applied them to every job that I have held since. In a way, this practice has kept the entrepreneurial spirit alive and growing inside of me, so much so that I have always held that when I retire I wanted to start another company. This move just fast-forwarded this goal by 20 years or so.

The second reason, is that I like to feel a sense of accomplishment that comes with guiding a project all the way through to maturity. While working for the university, my unit was just one of many that had a hand in any large project and once development was complete my job was done. I see Spyderserve’s role and advantage as providing services and support through the whole web marketing process and when my clients see success, I see success.

Third, and this is a big one, I see that small businesses have a very big need. A lot of small businesses have invested in a website to help promote their products and services. This is a great first step, but the problem is that the properties experience almost no results. No matter how well developed or stylish a website is, without the proper promotion nobody will ever see the website and, in turn, that website’s usefulness is greatly diminished or non-existent. In short, small businesses need to employ the same enterprise grade methods of search engine optimization, analytics and web marketing that larger organizations utilize to make that great website generate a real return on the money and time invested.

Let me clarify, Spyderserve has not always been able to support this full service mentality. My company was actually started on October 3, 2007 as a side project. At that point, I worked for a small retail computer company and the owner did not want to get into developing websites. When one of my customers came in asking for a website, a friend of mine and I saw it as an opportunity to make a bit of money. This single project turned into a slow but consistent development of websites for small businesses all over Georgia and Florida but was limited to design and development and any marketing or promotion was left to the client. At the time, and for the most part now, this approach was fairly common when providing website services to small businesses.

So, to satisfy my goals and also my client’s needs, Spyderserve is no longer just a website development firm. Instead, Spyderserve is expanding to provide great tools and services to not only create and maintain fantastic online properties but turn those properties into a valid revenue stream so that my clients gets paid back many times over for their investment. Spyderserve does this by combining great design and development techniques with a marketing mindset from the beginning to the end of a web development project. Then we continue this trend by providing the tools and services to use real analytical data to continuously improve the website and optimize both online and offline marketing efforts. We do all of this while keeping the ultimate goal in mind, to generate more business for our clients.