Pleasant Surprise

In the past week – we’ve hired two techs for Blogs About Hosting, with more hiring to be done over the next few months. The growth has been crazy and I simply just cannot handle it anymore – all by myself.

I don’t wanna be. All by myself. Anymore.

I’m thrilled with the hires. It is such an incredible weight off my shoulders and a BIG relief. Maybe now I can reduce my 18-20 hour days down to about 16? Pfft – yea right.

Anyways, in the discussions that Chris and I were having about hiring and how to structure it. In the process of doing that – I found out that my 15 year old son is more adept and skilled in the areas of MYSQL, PHP, CGI than I am. I’m not sure how that happened – or where he picked it all up . . but that was a pleasant surprise. He has a deeper understanding of some of the concepts . . . I was surprised. Pleasantly so.

When did my kids grow up? I wanna know!

Cheap child labor! ha!

Ben, my son, wants to work for us. He really, really does – – and is making deals with me over how responsible he can be and how much he really does understand this stuff.

I almost felt guilty that I didn’t think of him to begin with.

So, I’ve given him a few programs and a domain where he will install WordPress, MT, Blogger, Expression Engine and whatever else he needs to – – he’ll install it, tear it a part, break it, put it all together again and come to me when he feels comfortable with these programs and understands how they work and how to do neat and nifty things with them.

He’s not a designer – so he won’t be doing any of that. But at Blogs About, we provide a certain level of customer support that includes a lot of hand holding for use of the different blogging platforms. Lots of trouble shooting goes on, on a pretty regular basis. Fully managed hosting has always been the goal – – we support everything from blogs to photo albums, shopping carts, you name it – plus the generic support of other hosting features like CPanel, email, FTP, etc..etc..

Ben can handle some of the simpler support issues. Heck, I probably don’t give him enough credit – – after talking with him last night, he can probably handle the more complex support issues, as well.

I’m just one person and I don’t want that level of customer service to falter . . . Chris and I are beginning to realize that we can’t handle it all anymore. Even without the current contracts under negotiation – we still had to face the reality of needing to hire.

So, we did.

And in the process, I learned something new about my little man that I didn’t know about. He’s growing up. He’s becoming (gasp!) responsible and is eager to work hard in an area that he enjoys. And after we finished talking about the details – – I saw him walk back to his room, filled with pride that his skills were being recognized and he was being trusted with something that Mom thinks is fairly important.

That was cool.