The retailing business continues to grow, up 14 sites to a total of 152. My new online advertising campaign has been working fairly well, with very good conversion rates. However, it requires me to spend 2 to 4 hours/day on the phone, and so is hard to scale, and not something I can simply automate or hand off to a hired assistant. Looking forward, I need to turn it back on as I had it off for a trip for a week, and I’ve spend the last week trying to catch up. But it is promising and exciting to have something that legitamately works!

Last month we completed a trip to the States (Idaho, specifically). One of things trips do is throw the day-to-day routine up for examination, as you build one for the trip. So it makes me notice things that are otherwise just “normal”. Here’s some of the things I noticed this trip:

The retailing business continues to grow, up 10 sites to a total of 138. I scaled back my previous online marketing campgin, as it wasn’t turning into sales, and launched a replacement. For my first 10 kW tranche of generation, my loan has fallen apart, and in one of the most frustrating ways possible.

The retailing business is growing slightly more quickly, up 17 sites to a total of 128. I’ve expanded co-marketting efforts, which have born fruit, and I’m pretty excited to see what they will bring in over the summer and onward.

I’ve worked to get my own online marketing campaign, but it has yet to show any sales. This is super frustrating; I’ve reached out to an advisor to improve this.

A year ago, I wrote my thoughts about the in-progress Alberta Passenger Rail Master Plan. I was expecting the final report to have come out at Christmas time, but it finally appeared about two weeks ago, and just the executive summary. This is my summary after reviewing the available executive summary.

The retailing business is growing slightly more quickly, up 18 sites to a total of 110. Part of this is we pushed a fundraiser with one of our fundraising partners, and part of this is personal sales.

I’ve also finally got the website update live. A big part of that was I gave up on a complete rebuild, as the existing framework does everything I need it to do today.

Most of this past month has been spent working on getting more generation online. But I’m discovering that many of those projects will have much poorer returns than I’d initially hoped for due to high (only now confirmed) installation costs.

Most of this past month has been spent working on getting more generation online. It is a frustratingly long process, with far too much paperwork.

One Saturday morning at three,
A cheese monger's shop in Paree.
Collapsed to the ground,
With a thunderous sound,
Leaving only a pile of de brie.

I’m aiming to build a new electricity and gas retailer here, but this isn’t my first rodeo. In fact, I’ve built and sold a company like this twice before! But this is the first time I’m doing it solo. Previously, I focused on the business processes and backend management and let my partners guide the marketing and sales efforts; this time, I get to manage it all.

As part of our new Backend agreement (signed earlier this month), I have certain, regular “performance thresholds” I need to hit. This is new, and I expect it will have a focusing function. Overall, I need to find a way to maintain bringing on just over one site per day for the next several years. This will likely be the primary Key Performance Indicator (KPI) I mention in these update. My initial target is to hit 120 sites by the end of June.