Today, September 27, 2012 is a significant day for me. This date in 1999 is the founding date for our company. 13 years ago today I walked into completely empty offices and started work building WorkersCompensation.com.
Holy crap I'm getting old. This explains all the sex related articles I have written lately. I am clearly having a midlife crisis.
The initial tasks were establishing our mission, laying out the site plan, building the development and QA process, and hiring people to make it all happen. I was lucky. I found good people, and several of them are still with us today. One of the very first things I did was design and create our logo. I am pleased that it is a small part of me that has survived numerous redesigns and still adorns the site today.
1999 was an interesting time. The tech world was in its glory. Dotcoms and other tech entities were being valued far beyond anything anyone had ever imagined. Y2K had challenged and driven the tech industry like no crisis ever before it. These were heady days. The rules had changed. The old paradigms no longer applied. There was no end in sight. Launched on January 1, 2000, we would run our site for a few years, sell for a bazillion dollars and retire. This was a GREAT plan.
Four weeks after we launched, the tech bubble burst, and everyone took their toys and went home. It was like showing up for a wild party just ahead of the police who raided it.
New plan. Dig in. Work hard. Innovate. The rules had changed. The old paradigms once again applied. With no external funding, we bootstrapped our way through, and, rumor has it we survive to this day.
Truth be told, I am not having a midlife crisis. There is no reason for it. I am one of the luckiest people in the world, and am working the greatest job on earth. Together with an outstanding team we have built innovative systems that improve claim handling for thousands every day. We auto-populate critical workers' comp related forms for customers with our custom product FlashForm SSL. Our Virtual Claims Kits save insurers untold headaches and great amounts of money. We drive Benefit calculations in third party software systems. We manage online registrations for regional conferences. And with our WorkCompResearch service we pioneered the online Compliance and Legal Research Library for the industry.
Today our website remains the busiest online source of information for workers' compensation in the world. Don't take my word for it. Compare our stats with other WC sites at Alexa.com. We co-manage the second largest workers' comp group on LinkedIn, the Workers Compensation Roundtable, and we provide the online resource center for the largest LinkedIn group, Mark Walls' Work Comp Analysis Group. It is located at www.workcompanalysisgroup.com. We have almost 2,000 followers on Twitter, and our CompNewsNetwork serves over 10,000 article views a day.
Even my blog has enjoyed some moderate success, being named one of the top blogs for the industry by LexisNexis.
No, tomorrow morning when I come to the office and start my 14th year in this position, I will have much to be thankful for. I am one of those fortunate few who can truly look forward to the workday. I work with good friends, committed to the company and a cause, and we have terrific customers and partners who largely make our job seem easy.
And this may surprise you, but we share a decent amount of laughter here each and every day. I can't believe it has been 13 years since this all began.
Time really does fly when you are having fun.