I finally finished month-end reporting for November. I was grouching around, moaning about how bad 'my' numbers look when it occurred to me to lay them out beside the October numbers. And, lo! The November numbers are bad, but they're about 20% less horrible than the October numbers were!

Of course, me being me, I'm not satisfied that I've regained three months' lost ground in the last month. I expected more out of me than that.

Still.

Next up? A real challenge.

Two bits of background:

#1 - If we all cast our minds back two years, we'll all remember that I was originally hired because the Argonuts Afield, whose campaigns were under management by Doodledorks, didn't like the results they were getting.

#2 - For the last year or more, I've been grouching around and moaning about needing landing pages--website pages specifically designed to service search engine advertising traffic.

Caught up? Okay.

TeamChaos has been testing the landing page concept with 3Dorks (the third incarnation of Doodledorks) for the last three months. It's been proven (I think) that a "landing page" does, in fact, produce the major increase in leads that I told them it would produce.

However, in spite of the impressive results, CEOJason remains unconvinced. He's uncertain of whether it's the landing page idea/design, or if 3Dorks is just better at it than I am.*

His idea is to get 3Dorks to set us up with landing pages just like the ones they've been using, and for me to manually manage campaigns toward them. This, in CEOJason's mind, will prove once and for all if the Argonut Café needs to find the dough for landing page design and implementation (not a small or inexpensive undertaking), or if they can just replace me with this same automated system.**

Yes! It means that they're considering going back to what didn't work two years ago--because going backwards will be cheaper than doing what it takes to move ahead.

If you're ever wondering why 'small' businesses in the US tend to fail? Remember that this is not the first place I've worked where the owners put the company in reverse because going forward was too scary.

I've also been grouching around and moaning about the weather for the past three days. All I want, I thought to myself repeatedly, is temps in double digits. Is that too much to ask? I just want to wake up in a place where it's not two below zero. And, lo! When I got up this morning? Negative thirteen! Double digits.

__________________________

* As I told NewBoss Anais, to a certain extent, yes, they're better at it than I am. It's software, okay? It's all automated for them--micromanaged 24/7. In-house, it's just me and a keyboard, forty hours a week.) (They provide more results, but I provide better quality results. Agencies toss up a lot of chaff with the wheat because automated systems aren't designed for nuances.

** No, of course they didn't say it that way. But it seems pretty obvious, don't you think?