What is Growth?

Grant McCracken, in a blog post titled New Models for New Media wrote:

“There is after all another option. We may give up extensive growth for an intensive bond. This may be the time to say “ok, let’s build a better connection with our community.” I mean, that’s the business we’re in. That’s what we’re for. And who is to say that intensive “growth” is not better than extensive growth. MySpace has yet to find a way to pay, but perhaps it has yet to produce right amount or kind of value. And this may be the outcome of an intensive strategy. It’s early days. The logic of capitalism and new media will continue to bump up against one another in this way. Corporations will eventually begin to think more intelligently about the new creature in its midst. Just not yet.

This quote really stood out to me because one thing we’re really trying to do at Newfangled is get to a point of serving fewer clients at a higher level. There have been times where we have succumbed to financial pressure and taken on projects that were just not a good fit for us. Whether it was an issue of capabilities or relationship, ignoring a bad fit is always costly. These projects tend to go over budget and disappoint the client, making the ongoing relationship a tense one at best. We’ve learned this lesson well, and are being very mindful to make business decisions, like being ok with taking on fewer clients, that help us work toward better positioning ourselves and better qualifying projects that will enable a great working relationship, for the long term.

You may have noticed a change recently to our pricing page, where we now talk about Total Managed Support. This isn’t exactly a new offering for us. In fact, our desire to offer comprehensive support and consultation to our clients has always been at the core of how we operate. But we’ve never articulated it well; calling it “hosting” always oversimplified the offering, and put a kind of service that was assumed at the front, while not getting anyone excited about what really mattered: a secure relationship and valuable expertise. I hope this new model helps us to continue to meet our goal of a higher level of service.

Update (5/1/2009): Mark O’Brien just posted a more in-depth explanation of why we started the Total Managed Support model

.