Sawaya Consulting Year End Review – 2011

December 28, 2011 | Written by Amber Sawaya

I love the week between Christmas and New Years — I’ve always taken that time to look forward to a fresh start, make some goals and archive the past year. Here are some of the thoughts jumbling around right now:

Archiving a year and archiving a job are totally different now than it was three or five years ago. Space on a computer is no longer an issue and at this point it’s safer to have files on my machine that backs up to a Time machine than to have CDs of work floating around.
I don’t have personal resolutions this year—just trying to stay on the path of keeping up my yoga practice with Fluid Heart Yoga and our bi-weekly workout at Age Performance. Even though I have a flexible work schedule the time these things takes is difficult to find.
I have a few goals for our business next year. Most notably we need to redo our online portfolio. It grew organically. Like a weed. And is overwhelming at this point. It doesn’t even include our latest projects. The other goal I have is to execute on the work we have scheduled for the next two months. The last few weeks of the year are always insanely busy for us as people wrap up budgets and plan for next year, and this year is no different. We have more business to do in the first two months of 2012 than we did in all of 2010.
2011 was a record year for us. We took on more clients and more projects than ever before (and even my legendary organizing and project management skills were taxed to the max and I spent several weeks reviewing schedules in my head instead of sleeping). I am happy to report that we delivered on all projects and continue to have happy clients and repeat business.
For the first time we had clients cold call us. People found us online and asked us to bid on their projects. A few of them turned into really solid, awesome clients and we have some great things on tap with them next year.
We were doing a few things with social media at the beginning of the year (I teach a workshop on Social Media), but as it became clear that was going to be the realm of marketers and PR people and we stopped focusing on it. I have a couple great recommendations if you are looking for this kind of work — and we can still help with a very basic strategy and implementation.
As the rise of mobile design and development started to hit corporations we were involved in explaining this to several companies. We have a presentation you can see here. More and more we’re moving into mobile apps — we’ve always focused on information / design + technology and this is just a new way to serve it up. The thinking behind mobile apps came naturally to us — the tedious intricacies did not. Fortunately we were able to welcome Dave Morgan to help us with our native apps (iOS/Android).
Steve and I spent the last few days buying a dishwasher and new disposal and washing the walls and ceilings. This is why adults become no fun to children. We spend our winter holidays doing these kinds of things.

Any minute now Steve, Dave and I are going to eat some waffles and plan our strategy for the next couple of months. I’m so fortunate to have such a great team, great clients and great business. It’s an exciting time in history to do what we are doing.

If you haven’t checked out our year-end holiday app, you can do so here.

This work includes the photo “Next Year I Will,” available under a Creative Commons Attribution license, ©Guerrilla Futures | Jason Teste.

Categories: Random Thoughts, What We Are Up To

Tags: 2012, Year End Wrap Up

Our Holiday Mobile App

December 22, 2011 | Written by Amber Sawaya

This year we sent out a Holiday Mobile App instead of a printed card. It was a great way to have something we can show clients as we talk through building mobile apps and what you can do with an HTML5 app instead of a native iOS or Android App.