2005 In Hindsight

As I ponder what Telarus has accomplished in 2005, I am overcome with a feeling of peace and satisfaction. Each difficult year in the life of an entrepreneur causes reflection and a feeling of relief that our little venture has survived another year. Each December for the past three years I've had the same thought: glad the year is over - that was a lot of hard work - there's no way I'll be able to work harder next year. And every year, I somehow work harder, build more pages, build more effective pages, and learn more skills than the year before.

2005 was a year of building infrastructure. I started the year with the need to redesign our entire back office system and database architecture. Our database could not support T1 customers with more than one physical location, or more than one decision maker (company contact), or more than one order per business. As I made a list of things that needed to be upgraded, it soon became apparent that a complete overhaul and redesign was necessary.

January through March was spent on the HTML layout of the new back office. It took over five different layouts before Daniel (our IT director), Aaron Jay (the head programmer), and I could agree on a design that we could run with. March through May was a period of intense programming and in June, the 'closer' back office was ready for roll out. Of course, many features were left out and labelled 'we'll come back to those as soon as we get a chance'. May through August we labored on the Lead Generator back office, launching it on August 22. In September we built the VAR Back Office and in October we built the Vendor Back Office. In all, these four back office sites include GeoQuote real-time pricing for agents, customer relationship management software, 'set-it-and-forget-it' email delivery system, real-time commission reports, bulletin board software, link exchange software, online marketing training, offline marketing training, ShopforT1 Closer University (a series of online exams that agents go through before they are eligible to become closers), and even Call Center software that allows agents to process inbound calls from clients looking for a T1 quote over the phone.

In addition to the back office advancements, we also began developing XML technology that will allow us to really do some cool stuff in the arena of online marketing. We created a main XML server and programmed all of our sites (both on the physical network and off) to communicate with it when looking up information: T1 quote, content, Link Exchange info, etc. Not only does this allow us to maintain just one set of master source code, it allows us to scale in ways that were only a figment of my imagination just a few months ago.

Lastly, I became a father in 2005. How proud I am to have Darien and Grace as new members of my family. I am so thankful to the good God in heaven for their little spirits. They've only been here for 7 weeks now, but already they've touched my life and given me and Debbie a whole new perspective on life, including business. We'll all here working for something - I work for them, and they're future.

Yes, 2005 was the year of construction. We are now approaching the end of this major building phase and now we're getting ready for 2006 - year of growth, year of taking this platform and building on it.