Let me take you back to Friday afternoon, 3 days ago, about 4pm to be precise. Now we had well and truly given up work for the day and found ourselves somehow in a pub discussing how to develop our gifts review website further. Whilst enjoying my lovely orange juice (27 days sober!) the conversation turned to building a gifts related community, helping people who are stuck for a gift idea to find the perfect gift and such. As the night wore on and the alcohol flowed, the ideas for the community flowed too well into the early hours of Saturday morning.

So I’ll fast forward to Monday morning when I received a link from one of my developers to our spangly new Gifting Community, completely tested, integrated into our current website and ready to roll.

So the forums are phpbb which is a ready made script, I appreciate that. But the script is pretty basic and I’m looking at complete design integration, search engine friendly URL’s, title tags, Dynamic META data, custom affiliate mod, quick reply integration, XML sitemaps, RSS feeds and a wealth of other mods on top to get them up to a required standard. Whats more by the time I had seen the integration, the PR girls had already started adding posts and drumming up conversation….

I sit here at 3am in the morning suitably impressed with what has just happened and thinking, that’s how development should work. I’ve seen companies take 3 months to change a title tag, how long does it take you to implement your great ideas? It’s worth thinking about.

What I’m Reading Today: Julian’s Puppies Will Destroy The Earth theory.

A few beers later and an idea had begun to form in my mind, I’d let them take one day a week to work on any project they like. What’s more -  I”d pay them to come into the office, use our facilities and work on that idea … in return for a percentage of any profits of course.

The guys jumped at the opportunity knowing that if their project ideas failed, they could still pay their mortgages and the only one to lose out really would be me. It took a lot of trust in the team for me to do this and I’m happy to say I’ve been duly rewarded.

Looking over our figures for the last 4 months, nearly 25% of the businesses profit has been generated from projects that the team have decided to work on with their “day off”. These range from affiliate websites, paid subscription websites, product development  – right through to a small property development.

I spent some time at a round table event a month or so ago and mentioned this to a couple of the business owners who were present, I know two of which have implemented the idea and have started seeing some great ideas come of it.

Not a bad return at all for simply showing belief in our people…