Nanoman's Company Official Vicennial and Upcoming Changes
Hello, Internet! Nanoman here.
On 2002-05-17, I walked into an Ontario government office to register "Nanoman's Company" as my business's name. Their registration system was offline that day, so I wasn't able to register until the following week. During registration, 2002-05-17 was the date I provided as my first official day of business because a customer paid me that day using this name.
I had been using the name "Nanoman's Company" for frivolous purposes since 1994, but in 2001, I started using this name for my freelance professional IT work. My rationale for registering the name was to give some credibility to my freelance work, and I assumed that having a registered business would simplify reporting my income during tax season.
I consider myself remarkably privileged to have been invited into the homes, businesses, and organizations of all the wonderful people who have been paying for my IT knowledge and skills since 1994. I've been fantastically fortunate to meet so many amazing people, and it has given me immense satisfaction to see how their lives and endeavours have benefited from my efforts. I've also had the misfortune of encountering some people who have been quite rotten, but the majority of my customers have been awesome.
The past twenty years have been chaotic and exhausting. I didn't have a business plan when I registered my business in 2002, and I didn't have any of the infrastructure required to support the long-term needs of my rapidly growing customer base. In 2007, I started turning away customers and projects because I didn't have everything that I needed to keep up with demand, and my business collapsed in 2015. Despite all these challenges and setbacks, I still don't know of any job that I'd enjoy more than the one I have now.
I lost many great customers when my business collapsed in 2015, and I deeply regret this, but this reduced my workload significantly. I had a daunting backlog of orders to process, but with more time available, I've been able to build the infrastructure that I should have had in place before 2002-05-17, and I've had time to think about how I want to proceed.
When I renewed my business's name in 2017, I realized that the name "Nanoman's Company" doesn't accurately represent my work or my ambitions. I've always wanted my business to be collaborative with an ingrained appreciation for ethics, but "Nanoman's Company" sounds like an egocentric dictatorship with no obvious goals.
Since 2017, I've spent a lot of time thinking and writing about plans for my business. I've built and modified infrastructure to accommodate these plans, and I'm getting close to my goals, but some major changes will be needed that I feel I should announce.
Today, I'm announcing that Nanoman's Company will be moving into a new business that will offer all the same services that I provide now, but it will do so using a different name and business model. This move won't happen until the new business is ready, and the name "Nanoman's Company" will continue to exist for administrative reasons, but all Nanoman's Company infrastructure and customers will be migrated into the new business.
On 2021-01-22, a name for the new business was chosen, and on 2022-01-21, this new business's name was officially registered. I believe that this new business's name represents my goals much better than "Nanoman's Company", and I'll announce the name later in 2022.
It's going to take me at least a few months to finish modifying my company's infrastructure for the new business, and I've been doing all this work on my own. I'm hopeful that the move will happen in 2022, but it depends on how much of my time needs to be spent on other matters.
I'll continue supporting my customers during the transition, so this might cause the move to be delayed. When the new business is ready to take over, I'll announce the date when the change will become official, and I'll personally contact each of my customers to inform them of the changes.
With the new business, supporting the widely varying needs of my customers should be significantly easier, and I believe that my customers will be happier too. There's a lot that I want to write about the new business, but I'll save these details for future announcements.
After Nanoman's Company finishes moving into the new business with its own new website, I'll be reclaiming Nanoman.ca to use as my own personal website. I have personal content here dating back to 1998-07-02 that I want to keep, but a lot of it conflicts with my professional objectives, and there's much more that I want to publish, so I'm looking forward to regaining complete control of this space.
I'm eternally grateful to everybody who has helped Nanoman's Company over the past twenty years, and to everybody who has encouraged my professional ambitions since 1994. I couldn't have endured this long without the patience and assistance that I've received from my customers, colleagues, suppliers, and other supporters. I truly hope that all these people will be proud of what they've helped me enable for the next twenty years.