So, 2016 has started and we are already a week into it. It’s already going too fast.

I get easily frustrated with how slowly things change. It usually takes other people to remind me how far I’ve come.

At the beginning of 2015, I had a small team and no work. I was so worried and struggling to keep my head above water.

At the beginning of 2016, I have too much work. Too many clients. The problem is that I have not been very good at delegating. I am up in the crazy hours of the morning and late at night doing work for clients.

The problem is with me. I don’t feel comfortable giving up control. I can do it faster and better, so “just let me do it”. This is my big mistake.

I have a teenager who is learning to drive. As I sit in the passenger seat with no control, I feel terrified. I want to just pull over and take over the wheel. But, if I do that, he doesn’t get better. So, I have to get used to having no control.

The same is true for delegating. I need to get used to giving up control. I’ve been bad about that this past year. Overpass won’t grow if I can’t relinquish control.

That is what I’m going to try to do better this year.

If there is one thing I always want my kids to know, it’s that talent alone is not enough to do well in this world. Even the most talented people in the world can’t make it unless they put in the hard work necessary to make that talent count.

I recently had to let go of a member of my team. It’s a difficult thing to do as it increases my workload, but it was necessary. This seems to be a routine thing and I guess I should start getting used it.

I have a team member who started so strong and quickly became indispensable. She was talented and I felt so lucky to have her on board.  I mean, I could not believe my luck!  But, in recent months work started to get very slow and, being an online worker, I rarely saw her online in order to chat on Slack. Tasks that should have taken hours were taking over a week. But, I loved her work (the work she did) … so I let it continue but expressed my concerns. This is always a mistake. I’ve made this mistake before.

A few days ago, I found she had several online profiles for looking for full-time work with different names.  Who knows how many “full-time” jobs she has besides working for me.  I’ve been here before too.

I have to say, her talent tempted me to overlook this too.  I mean, she did great work when it was done.  But, in the end, I had to let her go. This is a problem with online workers paid based on time rather than projects— you never know how much time you are actually paying for. I need to start re-thinking my strategy here. When you pay a full-time person based on time, you can train them and help them grow— but you are also paying for a lot of what you don’t need and putting a lot of trust into the process.

A few years ago, I had hired a super-talented designer. I felt so lucky to have him working for me. I loved his work and our clients loved his work.  He worked for me for over a year. But, he was incredibly unreliable. He would go missing for days or weeks and cause me a lot of stress with clients. His talented kept him on longer than it should have, but in the end I could not continue. Same situation as now.  Talk about not learning from your mistakes.

I myself know better than to fall into this trap when I work for others. My talents (or previous hard work learning new things) are what get me jobs and contracts. My hard work is what keeps them.

Talent will give you an edge and it may even help the small stuff go un-noticed. But in the end, it is not enough.

Now, that 2016 has started, I intend to re-evaluate how I’ve been working. This is healthy and reinvention comes every couple of years anyway. With Overpass, we’re going to reduce the amount of client work we do and put more effort into our own products. Every day, I learn more and more.

The Overpass phone number is starting to ring more and more these days.  I’m thinking of getting a virtual assistant to help answer calls.  But it’s not at the volume to warrant that yet.  All the SEO work and content we’ve been pumping into the Overpass site is really starting to pay off now.

Mostly, I get one of two types of calls.  Either someone is looking for an app to be created (I like these calls) or someone is trying to sell me something (mostly overseas developers or recruitment agents trying to place developers with me).

But I got a strange call yesterday.

Someone called and asked what kind of apps I make.  I gave the spiel about games or data apps for our clients — but mostly to create revenue for us. 

“I think my wife might be cheating on me and I’m trying to find a way to check her messages,”  he said.  Oh.  This was about Ear Spy.  I told him that wasn’t, to my knowledge, technically possible to do.  Android and iPhone both try to protect your privacy.  One app shouldn’t be able to read the data in another.

He was disappointed.

I was annoyed by his call.  I apologised that I couldn’t help him and we hung up.

After I hung up, I realised I should have been more sympathetic to his problem.  He was obviously hurting. 

But I’m not into violating the privacy of others. 

This is one of the problems with having a spy app.  Half of the people think you are creepy and the other half don’t think you are creepy enough.  The app is simple.  We could have made it more invasive but haven’t.

I get one or two emails asking me the same thing each month.  Someone wants to spy on a loved one and are disappointed my app won’t let them do that.

Oh well, I’m sure someone else can serve that market better than I can.