What a crazy week it's been.

Crazy - but good - and exciting - and nerve-racking - and so much learning.

Breaking News: New YouTube Channel Announcement

Before I get into the content of my weekly newsletter, I'm excited to announce that I've started a new YT channel. It's a channel about technology, AI, entrepreneurship, and hearing about others' stories. I think it'll add so much value to people's lives, and I'd love it if you could go and sign up for it.

Here's the intro video:

Sign Up to the Disruption

Ok, that's a lot. Back up a bit...

I suppose that given this is my first newsletter, I might need to add a bit of a backstory.

If you've subscribed to my blog and/or existing TradeOxy YouTube channel, you've probably noticed that I've been somewhat absent over the past few months. You wouldn't be wrong.

The truth is that by October last year, I was exhausted. My business, Catalyst Group Solutions, had grown rapidly, and we faced some definite growing pains. We had multiple bugs occurring in our production, and some customers who were quite rightly feeling frustrated.

Both my business partner and I were working nonstop on our various activities, but it felt like we were drowning.

If I'm being honest, it really sucked.

It was time to take stock

At some point in October '24, Mitsi (my business partner) and I caught up for a huge chat. The meeting was intense, but also validating and fulfilling. We talked about everything - what was working, what wasn't, the reasons for our production bugs, and more.

Out of this call, we realized we needed to step back and re-architect our business. I needed to step out of development and focus on the company's strategic direction. Mitsi needed to take on the role of our engineering manager and build an exceptional team around him. We had to hire a bunch more people and integrate them into our exceptional engineering process.

All of this would take time, a ton of work, and most importantly, needed to be my main area of focus.

So I paused my content creation efforts

In light of these decisions, I made the difficult decision to immediately pause all my content creation efforts. My focus needed to be on saving our business, and setting it up for future growth.

Now, things have stabilized

I'm pleased to report that after six months of intensive work, we feel that Catalyst Group Solutions has not only stabilized; it is ready to thrive and grow. In that time, we have rebuilt our entire engineering department, instituted clear, measurable metrics, and introduced clear deliverables for each role. We have an insanely effective project management team who work closely with our engineers to deliver truly groundbreaking products.

This Quarter, We Set Some Ambitious Goals

The end result of our efforts was that this quarter, we finally felt like we were ready to grow the company. Our team is good, Mitsi and I are well-rested, and we're both excited for the future.

To do this, we set ourselves some super ambitious goals.

  1. Triple company revenue
  2. Launch our AI offering
  3. Get back into content creation

Wow. That sounds crazy.

It really does.

However, Mitsi and I are ready for it, and we believe we've got a lot to offer.

So Sign Up, Join the Channel, and See if We Can Do It.

See you next week,

James

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