This was my first year of doing Kuztek development full-time from January through to December. In May 2015 I left my position at an agency to do Kuztek full-time and haven’t looked back since. It has been a year of improving my processes, marketing efforts, and growing my network of clients.
Training and mentoring
In the spring I joined Rezzz and ashleyidesign in a mastermind group, led by Curtis McHale, for weekly group coaching meetings. The mastermind is great for accountability, bouncing ideas off other business leaders, and learning from others who have already been through a lot of the situations that I found myself in this year. I also invested in some online training resources this year, including Double Your Freelancing Rate, Refactoring to Collections, and ES6 For Everyone. Additionally, I worked with Jason McCreary and Codementor to do code reviews and to improve how I write my Laravel and JavaScript code.
Website
With the nagging and constant harassment from the mastermind group, I released the new and improved Kuztek website in April with an updated look, clearer message, and a stronger focus on our services offered in WordPress, Laravel, JavaScript, and Design. Over the following months I worked on the performance, SEO, and administrative tools of the website.
Expanding my network
I have had Kuztek profiles on Facebook and Twitter for years, but they have been very dormant, mostly just securing the urls. This year I committed to sharing content on Twitter on a daily basis to grow our influence on social media and spread our network. I signed up for Buffer to help with scheduling tweets and tracking the impact the tweets have. After a couple months, I decided to start using Buffer for tweets from my personal account too because my account has a larger and more active following. This year I also joined the local Chamber of Commerce to further legitimize my business, grow my network, and enjoy membership benefits.
Writing content and hiring an assistant
I soon realized that I don’t enjoy spending time every week setting up the Buffer schedule and started thinking about getting someone to help me with that so I could focus on writing code and running the business. At the end of the summer I took on an assistant for 10 hours a month to update social media, edit my content, find leads, and perform other admin tasks I would rather avoid.
This year I wrote a dozen new blog posts and three detailed case studies, and I hope to continue writing content on a regular basis to share knowledge with peers and potential clients.
Projects
This year has been full. I have worked for over 30 clients on over 90 projects, ranging from small fixes to WordPress sites, developed custom WordPress themes, and built web apps using Laravel and VueJS. I have continued to do regular work for FaithGrowth, as their lead developer, doing WordPress theming work and developing custom plugins. I have done a lot of troubleshooting SEO issues, mending performance bugs, customizing Gravity Forms, setting up FacetWP, writing JavaScript interactions, and even tackling some HubSpot work. I am super thankful for all these projects and the skills that I refined during the process, but I also look forward to tackling even larger projects in the future. Solving the big problems for customers is actually one of my greatest joys as I embrace the challenge of developing more complex WordPress plugins and making custom Laravel web applications.
What’s next
I am excited for next year and building upon the foundation I established in 2016. I hope to grow my sources for finding great new clients, improving the way I write code, and structuring projects. Thank you to every client, friend, colleague, and mentor who pushed me forward this year.