Been a while since I rapped at ya. When I last checked in I was launching a new business in the electrical sector and I was trying to ramp up fast with a couple big clients. I talked a big game about contracts I was about to sign and then got busy with work and never gave the update on phase 2. So here it is.

Phase 1 goal was to get launched with our first big customer and lock in at least $1mm in committed sales. We did that and then some. Customer loves us. We're over delivering and undercutting competitors. They keep increasing our remit. They started expanding into another state and gave us new contracts for that state.

Phase 2 was rushing a product to market to take advantage of an opportunity to lock in some ARR. That has not gone as well. I thought we would nail that fast and sell it to our existing customer then use that to find a bigger market. I predicted first sale in 30 days. It didn't happen for many months. And it was much smaller than predicted. We're still under water on that product. But! The sale did happen and we're growing it slowly. We have a strategy for making it essential by giving it to customers for free for the first year and then convincing them to keep it instead of switching to another vendor. So far that is promising but we've not realized sales yet. Too soon to tell.

Phase 3 was suposed to be "find more customers" but turned out to be "expand with our one big customer and service some small customers to get our name out". That's going well and today I have a pitch that might be big customer number 2. This is ambitious and we might have hard choices to make:

• Do we take a big swing at a project we're not big enough to handle and try to meet it on the upswing?
• Do we take a medium swing we can nail and leave hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table?
• If the big swing turns out to be a smaller contract than expected, do we gamble on finding customer 3 in time to make the numbers work?

And finally, we are both having too much fun at our day jobs to quit them but running two companies and serving on a few boards is slowly killing me. At what point do we face the reality that we have to actually focus on just this for a while?

Current revenue is meh. It's a part-time job that throws off six figures, so meh is not so bad. We're making decent money and there's a lot of promise but growth is a little stalled. Maybe I should stop trying to grow it -- I could just lock in a little ARR with customer 1 and go do other things. I hear bird-watching is fun.

Or I can take the big swing, bet the company, and see where that takes me.