We’re carrotmedia, based in Newcastle upon Tyne with a reputation for rolling out fantastic web and design solutions for our clients.

As the Managing Director of Carrotmedia I would be slightly biased about my own company but I’m going to tell you about a real problem that happened last month.

We recently had one of our e-commerce clients depart as they wanted a turnover beyond £2million. We have a fantastic relationship with all our clients so to be told they are going elsewhere is a painful experience. Once the initial shock was over and I sat back to analyse what had happened, I came to the realisation that I actually agreed with our clients. This left the question: “What were we going to do to make sure this won’t happen again?”

In just over a year we had taken this ecommerce site from nothing to a £250,000 turnover. When I was talking to another client about the situation their first reaction was; “can you do that for my business?” We have a track record of building websites to this level but then get stuck.

We called an emergency meeting in the office where we all sat down to discuss how we can build ecommerce business for our clients faster with less cost. A throw away remark was made; “well short of starting our own ecommerce business how will we find out?”. This was a great idea and putting your own money on the line will definitely help the team concentrate on finding the right formula for our own solution.

I’m currently in the process of choosing a product to sell online. Once the product is secured we will be planning, building and launching our own website. We want this to be an interactive experiment and we’ll be talking you through the process from start to finish.

Our client moved to an agency that has a track record and portfolio of big brands in a similar market place so were attracted by this potential opportunity to draw on their experience. Don’t forget that we neither had the opportunity to prove our capability or had such an impressive portfolio. Could it just be a case of the grass looks greener from the other side of the fence? At the end of the day we had lost a client and something had gone wrong; let the experiment begin!