Already the first of February,  and 2015 is progressing at a steaming pace. January has now passed and what a busy few weeks that was for us here at Natalie Crowe Designs. 

With the New Years celebrations,  School Holidays in full swing in January,  we took some much needed downtime to recoup, reground, and recenter for the fantastic year ahead of us.

My daughter and I spent plenty of the holidays enjoying the sun, playing and exploring our creative sides in the world of craft.. Finally breaking open the “craft cupboard” doors after collecting for months before in order to have plenty to do over the 6 week break. To say the leave we had a ball. I gave needle felting a go, which was at times like acupuncture (if you’re familiar with needle felting you’ll find the humorous side)  and experimented with oil pastels, all forms of paper, foam, and created forts from cardboard boxes, chairs and sheets.  We expanded our vegie garden and ventured to Sydney for a few days of discovery.  It was great to spend so much quality time as a family, it was only in the last week of January that we started slowing down, and on Wednesday 28th Little Miss started Year 1. An exciting time for both of us to say the least! She’s growing up so fast! So now that, that is all water under the bridge and we’ve established our regular routine again, it’s now time to kick things into gear and initiate our 2015 goal plan!

First port of call,  follow up all the calls, emails and enquiries via Facebook. We switched our business phone off for majority of the school holiday period, so on returning to the “office,” I was greeted with a large number of calls, emails and messages via our Facebook.  I have just about returned all of the calls, emails and enquiries and booked each of those clients who have requested consultations or completion of further work into our schedule.

2015 is looking to be the biggest and brightest year yet, with extension of our existing services, client road maps,  supporting some really awesome local events and working directly with our community.  We plan on making this year, the year of achievement, the year of contribution and the year of growth for Natalie Crowe Designs and our supporters.

We look forward to hearing about your journey!
Stop by our facebook page http://www.facebook.com/nataliecrowedesigns  for more frequent updates!

Have a great day!

A sight for sore eyes, the arrival of contractors, meant that trenches have been dug and that it’s gearing closer to things slowly progressing in the world of Natalie Crowe Designs. 

For those of you who haven’t been on the journey with us for the past 3 months. We have experienced what has been the most challenging circumstance that ‘we’ as a business, have every faced. As you can imagine, the lost of a primary tool to provide services for clients would be difficult,  but for a small scale, local website design business – not having consistent and reliable Internet Connection and Phone service has been ‘devastating’. The total of losses in client accounts is easily in the $15,000 mark and until we have connection this will continue to increase. It’s understandable not everyone is in the position to just hang around for 3 months whilst Telstra get themselves organised.  Unfortunately this is something that we’ve had to come to terms with…   It’s been heart shattering watching your business fall to pieces when all of these events  have been completely out  of our control.  But it’s on wards and upwards,  It can only get better from here right?

We’re hoping that in no more than a week we’ll have ADSL internet connection back in the office and that we can finally start making solid plans for development for our clients and for the remainder of 2014.

Believe you me, when I say that I will be letting everyone know when we’ll be back online and back in action. We’ve missed all of our clients, fans and followers and can’t wait to  catch up on your travels and triumphs whilst we’ve been  offline.

Have a great day everyone!

Hi everyone,
This is definitely not going to be your traditional business post.  But I need to share with the vast majority about our obstacles as it’s meant down time for the business and an unavailability period spanning into October at this stage.

For those who have been watching our journey over the last 8 weeks, you may have noticed a drop in the number of projects we’ve releases or spoken about via social media, you may have noticed the drop in  communication and others instances – for example not being able to reach us by phone or email. 

We have been working through a number of obstacles – particularly with Telstra,  but things have been given a whole new level of extremity.   We’ve been in negotiations with Telstra since early July trying to get a new phone line in and internet services installed as there have been problems with the ones we currently had.

After several dates with Telstra and estimates to when we’ll actually have services again and what needs to take place we’ve been told it won’t be until late september -early october that we will be back in action with Telstra contractors expected to be out to trench the lines putting new  lines down in order for us to get the services we need to continue operating. 

Originally, we were told it would just be at most a few hundred  $$ and a fortnight and we’d be underway,  I  expected this to be the case and had been working with several clients on jobs and planning projects with the expectation of it being a fortnight before we’d have solid adsl internet at the office. 

I took on several projects and started on some new training materials and planned to work when I could using the internet from my mobile and head down to the local cafe’s and setup camp down there whilst we got things sorted. It meant that turn around times were increased but we were getting there slowly.

Things spanned into the 4-5 week mark and we started getting phone calls from clients who were unhappy with the wait times and needed to move on with their projects. Which gutted me to be honest. I have prided myself on great turn around times, communication and quality service. After 5 emails and phone calls and being unable to keep up with demand, we have sadly had to assist several of our clients with moves over to a new web development team. 

With a small family or any family with young children and working from home, you know yourself that you work around the commitments of your family. Having no solid internet at home, meant we’re restricted to  10am until 2pm  work time to be back in time for school pickups, if you include going to consultations during the day and travel time – my business hours are cut in just over a 3rd of my regular dedicated work time.  I love my job, I love my business and I love being able to help my clients put two and two together and  business a solution that suits them…  my regular hours span most often –  from 10am – 2pm for consultations and general business and then 9-12pm  sometimes 1am-2am depending on the projects being developed and the tasks we’re required to complete.

It’s now going on 7-8 weeks and  today alone I have worked through several emails with clients needing to take the next step on projects that we’ve carried from the ground up and having to notify them that if they can not wait until we’re back on track, that they’ll need to move forward with another developer.  A number of those emails have been sent negotiating with other  developers. 

I will admit,  I am very much at loss with all of this , business is business and I completely understand where a lot of my clients are coming from, and there are absolutely no hard feelings regarding them having to move forward.   I wish them all the best with their business. It’s just disheartening to see your own business that you’ve built from the ground up  suffering a loss at the hands of another business.

It’s expected that we will be back in full swing in October, and I will do my best to negotiate a plan of action with every business we were or planned to work with over the next few months. I am exceptionally apologetic to anyone who has been impacted by this inevitable decision, but I can’t continue operate the business under the current conditions.  Until we know exactly what’s happening I do not want to see anyone else let down by invariability of our current obstacles.

As zig zigular says – “when obstacles arise, you change your direction to reach your goal — you do not change your decision to get there”. We’re just moving in a different direction, and I  will be in touch as soon as we are back on track and able to offer services efficiently. 
Thanks for your patience everyone.

Kind Regards,
Natalie Crowe & team here at Natalie Crowe Designs

Taking a different approach to  writing today, as it’s been a over a
month since we’ve been able to write to you all. The last four weeks
have been  exceptionally busy, but more so than that, it’s been a
challenge here at Natalie Crowe Designs headquarters with Technology 
posing a rather extreme level of adversity for us. 

Have you ever
wondered or given a thought to what it would be like working within
your niche or industry without the key tool in which you deliver
services?  Well guess what? That’s been an obstacle that we’ve been
facing since early this month. We’ve had no internet service available,
what’s worse is that we weren’t aware the extensive process that it
would take in order to get the issue rectified, nor did we anticipate
the time delays or additional issues to arise. 

As you can
imagine, being a website design business and having our internet service
go down, it’s made production near impossible.  We sought out wireless
internet and  have use of  multiple techniques to increase the service
quality, antennas, different modems and suppliers, but have recently
found we’re in a “blind spot”  and are only going to get minimal
coverage at best.  At the moment, we’re using a particular setup and the
download speed is barely enough to get the emails through. Which is
frustrating to say the least, particularly when the issue was something
that we couldn’t predict happening.

As a result, we’ve been at a
standstill. We’ve been advised that by early next week we should have a
new line trenched and that with all going to plan we’ll be back on the
airwaves before the end of this month.

We can’t apologise enough
to our clients who have been  caught up in the delays, but we are
working as quickly as we can to get the situation addressed.  

At
this stage, we are offering quotes to clients wanting new work
completed however, the quotes will not be able to be serviced until
September due to the extensive time delays finalising work for our
existing clients.

As a business owner, this has been
exceptionally stressful and I can’t stress enough to others, WHAT
BACKUPS have you go in place for your business?   Don’t be caught up in
something like this, should circumstances out of your control impact you
and your business. 

We cannot say Thank You enough to our
amazing clients, they’ve been patient and  unbelievably forthcoming, 
with clients more recently offering to have us in their home so we can
continue our service provision.

We’ve spoken to a collegue
23/7/2014 who has said we are welcome to utilise their office in the
short term  whilst  our technology issues addressed.

We’re heading out there today, to make the most of this opportunity. 

We hope everyone has a great day today and we’ll post up some additional blog posts  we’ve been working on in the down time. 

Thanks in advance.