When we first started our company, we laid out our goals in a shared Google Doc. We wrote about what we wanted to do, how we wanted to treat our employees and customers, and the growth numbers we wanted to achieve. One of our original goals was to hire one consultant per year.

In 2012, it was Jes Schultz Borland, and in 2013, it was Doug Lane. We held off adding a consultant in 2014 because we wanted to be financially able to hire two consultants at once in the next round. I’m not saying we WILL, I’m just saying we wanted to be ABLE to. See, one of our other goals is to be able to survive a 9/11-type business event – no incoming revenue for several months, and know that we can still pay everybody’s paychecks for that duration. That means we’re a much slower-growing consulting company, but everybody involved can sleep soundly at night.

In 2013, we also added a part-time admin assistant – my wife, Erika. She was previously a legal assistant at a downtown Chicago law firm, managing administrative and office work, so she’s been able to clean up a lot of our messes. (Scheduling training classes, selling videos via credit cards, helping out our accountants, and sending out Christmas cards with stickers requires a surprisingly high amount of time.) Having Erika on the team has really helped free us up to focus on the technology parts of the job that we love.

In 2014, we realized that just like admin duties, handling incoming sales requests had become a pretty big chunk of time too. Do the numbers: we have 5 consultants, and our main product is our SQL Critical Care®. That means we sign 4-5 new clients per week, which translates into hundreds of clients per year. That’s a lot of emails to answer, contracts to sign, and engagements to schedule. I do that work today in my spare time – and oddly, I really enjoy it – but if we’re going to scale this little shop, we’re gonna have to bring in a sales pro to manage this process full time.

So on our Employment Opportunities page, we added a job description for our new salesperson.

We’re looking for a salesperson with experience. If you’ve been working with SQL Server for the last several years, and only SQL Server, it’s probably not a good fit. (That means most, if not all, of our readers, ironically.) However, you might know someone who’s a good fit, so we’re putting this out there.

We’re excited to bring them on board and get our sales process polished – because hey, that means we can hire more consultants and trainers, woohoo!

Update Jan 27 – we’ve got the resumes we need. Thanks everybody!