Summer 2019 Check In

It has unintentionally become tradition for me to spend summers with Reclaim Hosting in a state of self-reflection as I organize my professional life, tackle a big project, and write a check-in blog post.

In the my early Reclaim days the big project and summer blog posts came in the form of self teaching and pumping out a ton of ‘how-to’ articles: Site Publisher: HTML 5, Static HTML Contact Forms, Generating a Backup, Updating WHOIS Information, Email Retrieval: POP vs. IMAP, & Understanding Email: MX Records.

During the summer of 2017, I set up KinHR, created a really basic company policy handbook, and transitioned our Sales accounts from Asana to SuiteCRM. This was also the summer that we held our first Domains conference!

Last summer, Jim and I did a deep clean of our CRM, and I added in a ton of custom fields that helped our overall ability to track the lifetime of a contract. And as a new Account Manager, I sent out the first semester newsletter to all accounts, keeping everyone up to date on the happenings at Reclaim.

Which brings me to this summer: Chris and Danny joined us few months back, we hosted our second Domains conference (part 1 & part 2), Jim and I traveled to WFU for a workshop, and I took on a new position at Reclaim! It has been a busy couple of weeks to say the least, and I don’t see things slowing down anytime soon. At the end of June I wrote out my Work Plan for the next year, and I have to say that I’m pretty jazzed for what’s to come. My intention will be to continue writing about these projects over the next year as way of self-reflecting and keeping myself accountable.

With that in mind, the first item on my Work Plan is to transition Reclaim Hosting accounts from SuiteCRM to Zendesk Sell. I think when I set up SuiteCRM originally, I always knew that there was a likelihood of us growing out of it one day, and that day has most certainly come. What’s more, Reclaim already uses Zendesk for support tickets, so the jump to a Zendesk CRM environment was not hard to grasp. In fact, the Support and Sales environment are integrated really well so a Support Agent can notify a Sales Agent of an incoming lead with a single click. I can feel myself starting to sound a little advertise-y here so I’ll stop while I’m ahead and simply say that this move is really, really good for us. I’ve been transitioning accounts over to Sell for the last few weeks, and I’ll blog more about that progress soon.

Lastly, I can’t write a Summer 2019 Check-In post without recounting the recent ice cream party that took place on a particularly warm afternoon last week. I was so bummed that I missing out (a big downside of working remotely) and before I knew it I heard a knock on my front door. The Fredericksburg crew sent ice cream to my home!! I ended up joining the party on the robot and it was just like I was sitting around the table with the RH team + Tim’s family that was visiting!

After ice cream, Tim shared some of his adventures with Virtual Reality (he just blogged about this here), which was another cool moment of the afternoon as well. He walked around the streets of his hometown, and we got to see the house where he grew up. Meanwhile my fiancé had come home for the day, noticed I was eating ice cream at my desk, and ended up looking over my shoulder to see what I was up to. His quote, after observing for a few minutes: “You’re rolling around on a robot, you’ve got a family in the conference room, your boss has a VR headset on, and they just delivered ice cream to your door. Your job is pretty cool.”

Yep… I would have to agree. :)

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