First, I constantly think that I’m doing myself a disservice by not moving my website company to a full time profession. With over thirty clients and the ability to have another thirty within a six month period (if I wanted them), I can certainly build myself a very respectable portfolio. The problem is that I created my company to be the anti-website company in that I don’t charge thousands and thousands of dollars for initial site designs. Those large design dollars are what sustain many small website companies. Plus, I also set up my company so that it wouldn’t gouge customers on monthly fees. Other companies charge $25 per month for hosting expenses – I charge between $5 and $7. See what I mean?

Whenever I think about pushing the website company to a full time job, I always remember that I have such drastic student loan debt that it’s not quite realistic for me to drop my full time job to pursue this entrepreneurial opportunity. Even still, though, the idea is always sitting in the back of my mind…

And next to that idea is the idea that I should start a grant writing company. I love to write (can you tell?) and I’ve been successful on each grant that I’ve ever submitted. By the way, those grants have totaled more than $1,000,000 for the companies for which I’ve written them. Not too bad, really. And the grants that I’ve successfully completed range from private foundations to large government grants.

So the second idea that constantly floats around my head is to get serious about opening up a second small business that focuses on grant writing. I think that it is a profession that I would be very good at in both the short and long term.

And finally, the third idea that is always floating around my head is to just open up a full service communications consulting firm. In this scenario, I could wrap the website company, grant writing, and a variety of other concepts into one business and offer a full suite of services to potential clients. One of my college professors put that idea in my head six or seven years ago and I haven’t been able to shake it out yet. Of all of the ideas presented above, I think that this one has the most potential to become a reality one day.

The barriers that I constantly run into when I think about the third idea are, of course, financial in nature. Again, I would need to line up at least ten or so clients and have them signed to at least one year contracts (preferably three year contracts) at a significant dollar amount in order to have the capacity to pay for everything I need to pay for in the first year of business (taxes and my salary included, of course).

I think I could do it.