Book sales was over the roof this year. Our focus has been the corporate market the last couple of years and although sales spiked, corporates rarely pay in advance and more often than not, disturbingly late. Of course this hampered with our cash flow quite a lot and there were times I thought we were gonna have to close shop. Strategic loans and optimization of order processing was key to our survival in 2010. Learning from past mistakes was a major turnaround as we now have a representative in the US that helps make sure all administrative documents are in order and our staff know the procedures in customs and post office. We can now boast 0% lost packages during delivery.
Mid year, I was contacted by Adhityo Priyambodo, a former business partner back when I worked at Ametis. He asked me to join his startup, which was NgaturDuit.com to support it from the business perspective. This was an exciting new chapter because we had a chance to present the idea at the StartupLokal meetup back in September (check out our slide here). A month later, we partnered with Aidil Akbar and his consultant group Akbar's Financial Checkup (AFC). We spent developing many features as a result of this partnership and we hope to launch them in 2011. The projects in 2011 among others are online consulting, online seminars, games... It's going to be exciting!
We also opened several new divisions in 2010! The first division opened was managed services, also known as maintenance. At the end of Q3, we opened another division which was gaming and mobile apps. Already we have three gaming projects coming up in 2011. Hopefully things go as planned :) Finally, this December we contacted our freelance designer and offered him a partnership deal to join and build a design division. The design division currently already have 3 ongoing projects so it's a pretty decent start.
Not all of our divisions were peachy. Our online recruitment system, Talentum did not do as well in 2010 as it did in 2009. This was mainly because we were not overly active searching for recruitment projects this year. We did get some recruitment projects from referrals, however we hope to move our focus from projects (quick cash) to a steady revenue business model. We are currently in discussion with a head hunter agency to provide and support their IT recruitment system.
Of course, many of the progress could not have been possible without a good partner. On January 2010, a longtime friend and someone I admired business-wise, Harry Kazuya Rasito, joined Avevo as a shareholder. By leveraging Harry's network and resources, we were able to jumpstart or at the minimum support some of Avevo's divisions. Having a reliable partner is also important in the sense that I had someone to discuss problems and get advice from someone with more experience.
Finally, perhaps one of the major changes in 2010 is the location of our office. Formerly contracting a ruko, we have now moved to an office building. It's not in the premium business locations (sudirman, thamrin, kuningan), but pretty damn close. Although the office rent is twice what we used to pay, I think working in an office building is better for us because everyone is now more disciplined and professional. I guess it's the effect of the environment.
There are several other exciting adventures we have planned for next year, but I dare not state them here yet. Perhaps in next year's documentation ;)
fast connection / slow connection
