E-dreamz Company Blog

We just recently crossed over that important 10 year line in February. 10 years of course seems like a very long time, but it’s hard to believe it’s been that long since we started E-dreamz. The interactive world has changed so much since 1999. I can remember doing just as many multi-media projects as web related projects back in those days. Today almost all our projects are geared to the web. Back in ’99 most people didn’t have broadband. You wouldn’t or couldn’t imagine video and rich media components on a website. Shortly after ’99 the big “.COM” bust happened. It reflected poorly on any development firm at the time. I can remember one of the main reasons I left my old firm to start E-dreamz was the feeling that all we were doing really had no substance. At that time this entire industry was just an infant starting a new life. No one seemed very good at defining what exactly went into a high end website and what something like that should cost. On top of that, very few interactive companies knew how to properly execute anything.  

It took us several years to get our groove going. I can remember the challenges brought on in the early ‘00’s. The first few years we weren’t operating on the best business principles. We were this new and different interactive company in a completely new industry. Everything needed to be different. There was no need to track or measure anything. No need to understand budgets and operation costs in depth. No need to understand business cycles or cost ratios. Those were the old ways of doing things. The new way was “free-form”. A complete organic way to run a business. Now, we weren’t in the pool of internet start-ups that ran out got VC money, spent like mad men before we even made a dollar. In that sense we kept things a bit more real, but we still needed some tweaking. It took a bit of time to understand a simple overarching principle. That it was the business that allows us to flourish in our creativity and knowledge, not vice versa. If the business wasn’t taken care of the rest would fall flat and the doors would close quicker than anyone could have expected. Boy, was that a wake up call. We witnessed so many firms come and go that seemed to have all the talent in the world. Obviously being young and new in business you need to learn harsh realities. You want to learn them sooner rather than later in my opinion. Better to take the pain all at once instead of dragging it out. And in that sense the old ways of doing business really never changed at all and don’t change. Sure technologies come and go, but basic solid business principles apply at all times. If you take your focus off those principles then you are in for a mess regardless of how great your talent and perceived outlook. Umm, that seems to be happening a lot these days with those “too big to fail” companies, but I won’t go into all that here.

For me we started hitting our stride in 2004-2005. Our focus and business sense seemed to be more on point. We understood, more than ever, the importance of the right team, priorities and business structure. We started to achieve the goals we set out to accomplish. We balanced out all incoming business related to project and recurring models. It was the first year we began tracking and measuring all that we did. To me it was the first year we became a sound business that knew where it was going and how to get there in the real world. There was no make-believe assumptions anymore. No more listening to all those other people telling us what to do and how to run our business. To this day I am still amazed at how many people I listened to who, in fact, ended up running failed businesses. Once we started to believe in ourselves is when we knew the best calls came from within our own team. Sure, we had some great mentors and some very positive encouragement from the outside along the way, but most if not all of them were family. It still bothers me to this day to think how many distractions come when running a business. 95% of them are a waste in every sense. There really aren’t that many Google’s and Yahoo’s out there.

Today we enjoy and appreciate where we are as an interactive professional services firm. Our key service offerings are completely inline with our overall direction. We like being a business that has truly created a lifestyle that allows each of us to feel rewarded, to grow as professionals working for the benefit of everyone involved. We could care less about merging, going IPO, getting VC money, selling tomorrow, etc. All that is laughable these days. Being great at what we do is what drives us now. Being sound and set in good principles drives us to continue forward. We have a bright future ahead of us that we control and that peace of mind is something that is more rewarding than anything else.