Some interesting and unexpected staff changes are happening at
LandscaperWebsites -
Porterware -
Pest Control Websites beginning Monday 12.13.2011!
Amber, our Account Manager / Project Manager / Office Manager has accepted a job offer with another company two weeks ago, so Friday was her last day.
It's the end of an era.
She leaves some pretty big shoes to fill. Amber began working for the company about a month or two before I did approximately 3 years ago, and has been responsible for developing most of the accounting processes, as well as being the "front end" contact with incoming and established clients. Needless to say, there will be a length of time between her leaving and most of our 300+ clients becoming used to dealing with other people, Amber having been their contact for so long.
On the upside, we have now hired someone who will be focusing on pretty much just the accounting and accounting processes as his main job duties. Amber spent some time with him on Friday trying to get him up to speed. Huge amount of information to try and process in a single afternoon. The transition may be a little rocky, but we'll hope for the best of course.
Yet another suprise is the company also hiring a young lady that we had interviewed around the same time as
Bill, who we really liked. We had asked her if we could keep her information on file and give her a call if we had something open up, which we followed through on, and she seemed very anxious to join our team. From what I understand, she will be focusing on being the "front end" of the business, working incoming and outgoing calls. In between calls we will start her out on some help desk tickets so she can get to learn our system, then hopefully she can split duties between being the client liaison and design/development.
My personal role will be changing as well. I will still be doing development, but tentatively I will also move into more of a project manager roll. Very excited about the possibilities that may introduce. It will involve a lot of getting on the phone with customers clarifying how our sites work, and exactly what they should expect, which can be pretty rough depending on the customer, but I am trying to embrace and attack it. I believe that a developer, who KNOWS how the HTML/CSS/VB of our sites work will be able to convey a very accurate picture of what a particular customer will be getting, what type of customization is within reason, and what won't work. A huge them of mine is -
setting accurate expectations-
Monday, all of the email communication that came in to Amber will now be forwarded to Myself, Chris, and the new accounting guy. We are all going to get CRUSHED by the weight of it at first.
I'll miss Amber. We all will. I feel like as we worked together we really tried to look out for one another, (which is not to say we did not have our fights), and I can only hope that the next two employees have the same sort of outlook. At the same time though, I am very happy for her to have found a job that seems like a good fit for her, and is moving her life goals in the correct direction.
Technical Update will have to wait til next post.
