This phone was given to me by my parents some years ago.  They had purchased a number of them years ago here in West Michigan - as I recall the story was the phone company was selling these off after transitioning to newer technology some time in the 1960’s.  Dad had rigged up two as an intercom between the house and garage, and the leftovers were stored.

After receiving this one it was stored longer - in our early married years we moved a few times and never wanted to mount it until we had settled down.  I came across the phone again in a purging binge and decided it either had to be sold off or used - I was tired of it sitting on a shelf.  Some time online checking it’s potential value found that we weren’t going to make a house payment by selling it, so I decided to put it to use instead. Some measuring and experimentation found that its interior dimensions were well-suited to holding normal size envelopes, so I set about reclaiming it as a mail organizer.

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Boyink Interactive was not something I started by choice, not really.  In 2002 I graduated out of corporate America.  Oh - they called it downsizing, but I prefer to think that it affected only the people most capable of being successful once released from the fabric covered walls.  However you want to spin it, I was unemployed and in searching for a job came up with a few projects and no full time employment.  At the time stringing together the project work was the safest alternative - other options required completely uprooting the family and moving to find work, so Boyink Interactive was born.

Six years later I’m still here so can call Boyink Interactive a success - but I’ve never really felt like a true “business person” in the sense that I didn’t have this great product idea that I researched, did marketing and business cases for, produced, priced, and placed on the market.  I’d always been a bit envious of people who had done that - they really seemed like true “entrepreneurs” whereas I could hardly spell the word without help.

This has changed some this year with the launch of Train-ee.com.

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Roughly eight years ago I bought myself a welder.  I was restoring the 1950 Bantam Jeep Trailer I had purchased and it needed a new floor and some other things welded up.  The costs for hiring it out were roughly half of the cost of a small 110V MIG welder so I figured it was time to make the investment in a new tool and new skillset.

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Over two years ago now I wrote a post entitled Potential Client Red Flags, wherein I listed 6 situations that, if they come up while talking with a potential new client, might possibly lead to me passing on the work.

I re-read that post this morning and have a few red flags to add.

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Hey Folks -

Just a quick announcement.

As of today, Boyink Interactive will no longer be providing quotes for church website projects.

This decision comes after much deliberation and realizing that in six years of being in business I have talked with literally dozens of churches and have only ended up doing one site.

One.

As conversion rates go, that’s abysmal.  And not at all what my experience has been for projects coming out of the business world where my success rate is much higher.

And yes - it usually boils down to an issue of price.  I’m just not able to build sites with the level of design, content and functionality that churches are after for the budgets that I’m seeing churches come in with. 

Don’t get me wrong - I still have a passion for seeing the big “C” Church use the web in better ways than in the past.  But it’s clear that the way for me to have the most influence on getting the Church there isn’t to build better websites for a large number of (little “c") churches.  So rather than attempting to hire myself out to find fish for churches, I’m going to focus on teaching to fish instead—which currently will be through the Building a Church Site on ExpressionEngine series on Train-ee.com.

If you represent a church and are seeking a web designer or developer, I’d suggest registering and posting in the Godbit Forums for some leads on help.