Just as Busy as Ever, But Missing Most of the Revenue
Dave Aiello wrote, "Season's Greetings from everyone at Chatham Township Data Corporation. The year 2002 is finally over, and I'm glad to see it go. For a long time this summer, I wondered if we were even in business anymore because there was a such a dearth of opportunities. But, business recovered to a 'reasonable' level in September and October, and we were fortunate enough to be able to sustain that through the end of the year."
"There were a few big milestones here at CTDATA this year. We successfully completed a project for a large financial services company in Morris County, NJ, at the beginning of April. This marked the end of our work on major projects for 2002, requiring us to find a way to generate revenue on smaller, more tactical projects."
"In July, we relaunched AAHArefs, the website we maintain for USA Hockey's Atlantic District Officiating Program. This was a surprisingly successful rollout of a second-generation training seminar registration application based on the Slash content management system. As a result of the rollout, USA Hockey was able to provide seminar admission information to over 2,000 hockey officials in New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania."
"August 22 was the 13th Anniversary of CTDATA's incorporation which would not be a big milestone from my perspective if it wasn't so hard to generate income these days. Some of my friends and family stopped by to celebrate the anniversary. You can tell we were looking for anything we could find to take our minds off the lack of business."
"Our website reached 1,000 pages of content around Thanksgiving. This was a victory for us in that it showed that CTDATA was still surviving the economic downturn, and still publishing information that is useful to our website's readers. About this time, it became clear that business had rebounded in a measurable way, and this fact made achieving the 1,000 article milestone more gratifying."
Dave Aiello continued:
Over the past few days, I looked at some of the content on our website and the emails I've sent recently, looking for inspiration for this article. The best summary I can find of the current state of the business from my perspective comes from a message I sent to Art Iger, a friend who works at J.P. Morgan Chase:... I have my head down right now, working on {several} things:
- An e-commerce site for one of my clients, using the Interchange Open Source toolkit with Apache and mySQL.
- Migration of the final pieces of CTDATA infrastructure to Linux.
- Conversion of existing CTDATA-related Slash sites to the latest Slash distro.
... I'm just as busy as I used to be, if not more so, but a lot poorer/hungrier. I have no money, but, I've accomplished more on projects that matter to me since September than I did in the previous three years.
CTDATA is certainly better organized than it has been since 1990. We are fairly focused on the projects that are generating revenue for us. But, those projects are too small and too few to satisfy me, or anyone else that knows the whole situation.
I am more optimistic for 2003 than I was at this time last year. But, the economic outlook is still overcast, and the geopolitical outlook is truly scary. In some greeting cards I sent, I said that I hope that all of us are in one piece and better off in a year than we are today. Any progress without disaster would be welcome.
Before I conclude, I'd like to take a moment to thank our clients for helping us to survive the most difficult year in our company's history. I hope that CTDATA has added value to your business. I'd also like to thank our partners at other companies who helped CTDATA significantly in 2002:
- Martin O'Donnell
- Phil Lurie
- Michael Weinberger
- Shane Hanlon
On behalf of our little company, I want to extend best wishes to our customers and all of the readers of our website. We hope that 2003 is a better year for all of us, in our personal and business lives. CTDATA is still here to serve you. If we can help you to build a better web-based application, or a better Internet-based infrastructure, please let us know.
Best wishes to you and your family during this holiday season.
Dave Aiello
President
Chatham Township Data Corporation
Previous CTDATA holiday messages: