The leaves on the ground and the Michigan football victory on Saturday aren’t the only reminders that fall is upon us – there are also the roving masses of new and returning students here in Ann Arbor, and the almost complete unavailability of thefacebook.com as we all pound its servers uploading photos of ourselves from the summer. Squirrels are starting to look a little fatter and its no longer necessary to run the A/C 24/7.
Yup, its time to return to school full-time. Recently having turned 26 years old, I’m ready to put in one last year to finish my undergrad degree in History. I’m not looking forward to another frigid winter in Michigan, but at least it will give me a chance to wear some of my favorite fall and winter coats for perhaps the last time.
I have mixed feelings about my accomplishments over the past summer. My business has grown, but not nearly as quickly as I’d have hoped. Not everything got accomplished, but I did spend lots of time in the sun. As I look back on some of the right and wrong things we did this summer, a few jump out at me:
– We began to "know what we don’t know," as Secretary Rumsfeld likes to say. You never have complete visibility of the roadblocks and pitfalls before you start a business, but I feel that we finally know our market and our own strengths and weaknesses.
– We hired some key people. Perhaps more than anything else, hiring Johnny and Marv has transformed the company, as they have brought their unique ideas and personalities to our team.
– We didn’t complete some of our cornerstone products, and we became a bit lazy about long-term objectives. Shame on us.
– We were generally more disorganized than I would have liked.
I’m going to continue to build on the successes that we’ve had, and learn from the mistakes we’ve made. Somewhere in there, I might fit in some reading on the American colonies.
