3thought is one

Yay! We made it!!! 3thought is 1-year-old today! So get ready to sing that familiar tune and be sure to send cake. We wanted to take moment to reflect on what we’ve accomplished.

Over the last 12 months, we’ve shared some of our goals for 3thought with our readers. Let’s recap and see how well we did.

• Join AIGA and the Plymouth Chamber.
  Still love both and we’ve still have been meaning to join both, but spare capital is still hard to come by. We’ve continued to network at free events, attend AIGA events, and use other methods of networking. Will we join AIGA and Plymouth Chamber this year? Keep your fingers crossed.
• Have a consultation with an SBA advisor.
  Check, we did that back before the holidays, and… they pretty much they said we’re doing everything right. We just need more sales. So, we continue…
• Expand and diversify our client roster.
  Yes, there have been new clients and in different industries. But it’s been slow going, and there’s still room to diversify further. We would definitely like to keep expanding our client roster. In that spirit. Can we help your business?
• Strengthen and build upon our current relationships.
  This is probably a toss up. Some relationships have strengthened and others haven’t. And we’ve also had to end some that turned out not to be so good for our goals. But we still aim to build long term, mutually beneficial relationships.
• Explore new avenues for revenue.
  We’ve explored and concluded that these other channels aren’t our bread and butter. We’ve chosen to focus on the things we do best. Are there other things we’d like to try? Yes. Are those things a priority for us at this point? No, not really.
• Continue to build our influence and reputation through GOOD work, networking, our website and social media.
  Each of these gets check marks. We’ve done some great work this year, met some great people, rebuilt our website and provided content through our blog and social media channels every day. We think a few people might even recognize our company name if you ran it by them.
• Limit our pro-bono work.
  As people who want to give and help others, this is tough one for us. It’s taken us a little while to find our balance, but things are now set to a healthy, more sustainable level. We helped some great organizations last year and we’ll continue to help, but not at the expense of the overall health of our business.
• Do more work we enjoy.
  Again the answer is yes. We’ve had some great projects in the last 12 months. Many of them have been… dare we say “fun”.

Where do we go from here?
We’ve got some thoughts on that too.

In the next year, we are aiming to:

• Get a physical office space. Along with an office comes lots of things like, servers, interns, employees, office furniture etc. (more news on this soon)
• Get out of the office and meet new interesting people.
• Continue to expand our network of strategic partners.
• Continue to improve our website and create better and more useful content. (And more frequently)
• Learn more about emerging web technologies and seek to utilize them.
• Embrace the potential of the iPad as medium and produce an epub document (or several).
• Start to write a book about our first 24 months in business.
• Oh yeah, take a vacation… this is all hard work and everybody needs a little recharge.

Last thing we’d like to do is just say a big thank you to all the people who have been in our lives and supported 3thought in the last year. Thank you, thank you, thank you!!! We couldn’t have made it without you. You’ve supported us in good times and in bad. You all know who you are, and some day we’ll find a way to repay you for all you’ve done for us.

Blow out the candles, raise your glasses and toast to another successful year!