Monday, December 31, 2007

Been mighty busy

The Year

This year was pretty intense. I spent two years buying out dead weight business partners and rebuilding my business and in the process ended up with a brand new outlook on things. First off, my business has been re-engineered and is doing great. This was largely because I was under so much pressure to raise funds to buy out my partners and had no safety net in the process. Failure wasn't an option. Second, I really learnt the value of teamwork and have had awesome teams around me in all aspects of my life. Weeding out the people that were negative influences was painful but in the end I have a fantastic crew. Third, I have in this past year not only expanded my reach in business as far as I could but also took a lot of risks in diversified investments and they all seem to be paying off reasonably well.


The Projects


This year I've been fortunate enough to win over new customers from all around the world and a few major ones in North America. I can't say that I did it myself, I couldn't have done it without the amazing team that I've been lucky enough to assemble. We've killed ourselves and amazed our customers and that's the key to keeping up momentum. We've had 6 major projects in 5 cities and all of them were executed with class and finesse and of course were profitable as well. The biggest project had nothing to do with my primary technology business - I invested in some property in Costa Rica where we'll be building a private resort. The first step was renovating the nearly finished villa that was already there.

Costa Rica

We started with a partially finished shell in August and just completed the renovations and a new infinity pool two weeks ago. This was an intense 4 months in which everything that could possibly go wrong did. Not only is the property on a peninsula that only has ferry access, it's also on top of a pretty steep hill and there are no concrete trucks in this region. It gets better, the renovations and pool construction were done in the rainy season which was the worst one in 30 years. Our main road got washed out twice, there was a tornado that zipped by 100M from the house and of course an earthquake in Peru triggered a small tsunami.

The People

It's all about the people. The team that worked with me on this, my construction manager in CR, the locals who he hired and the contractors were all unbelievably loyal in a place where nobody is reliable or very concerned about anything at all. They were all amazing and we showed gratitude by treating them with utmost respect and then turned the villa over to the construction crew on the final night so they could party with a pig feast to celebrate an impossible job. These people were so happy to be able to have a party in the house that many of them looked like they were going to cry. None of them had ever been allowed in all of the pools and houses that they worked on let alone have a party with all their bosses and whoop it up in the pool. That alone made it worth it.

The Villa

The first 3 bedroom villa in the project is complete and is taking bookings. It's a referral only kind of thing but ask me nicely if you're interested in renting it. We set the bar really high especially given that it's in such a remote surfing town but I think that the results are pretty spectacular.

Santa Teresa













2 comments:

PGuy said...

Great recap Sanj...I'm proud of your accomplishments, for real. It's inspiring to say the least!

And fack me, the villa is off-the-chain yo! So dope! Nicely done!

All the best for 2008!

P.S. Love that 12 Tenets too. I sent it around to a few peeps also...

sanj said...

Thanks dood, I can't wait to raise the bar even higher. Hope you do the same. This year we're going to try to sponsor some education programs at the village and start retooling the land for off grid self-sufficiency.

S