With the new year upon us, it is a good time for all companies to take stock of the health of their business. Here at Hugeobject we are in the midst of reviewing our performance for 2006, with a view to building a practical business plan for 2007.

Practical in the sense that it is not full of pages and pages of text, but is instead focused on tangible action items. Success is in the implementation, so by remaining grounded in “To-Do” items we are creating a business plan that is:

1. Easy to implement
2. Focused on the important things
3. Measurable

We expect to achieve a growth rate of just over 350% for the current financial year, so one of the aims for this year will be working how to continue that for the 2006/2007 financial year.

Whilst we have a huge number of ideas we would love to try (the sales and marketing aspect of the business plan is twice the size of any other section!), it is always great to find out from others what works, and what doesn’t.

Ryan Carson has written a great post on growing a business for people who have web applications (we have one, with more coming in 2007). Ryan asks the question whether web applications need $$ spent on advertising in order to be successful, coming to the conclusion that:

You’ve got to be prepared to spend cash to advertise your web app

Is this really a great insight? Well yes actually - it is.

Those of us in the industry have always believed that the power of the “blogosphere”, coupled with time and a few well placed links is all that is required to bring instant success. Ryan argues that even a feature article on techcrunch has failed to move his revenue in a substantial way, meaning that:

Building a financially successful web app takes hard work, clever marketing and advertising dollars.

This suggests that if we wish to replicate our growth rate of 350% next year, we need to build into the budget some advertising dollars for our web applications.

Excuse me while I go and adjust the business plan!