It’s official, we’re in business kindergarten! Hmm, maybe business years are like dog years, because it definitely feels more like 40 than 5. In any case, I registered www.pearsestreet.com on March 8th, 2005, marking the birth of a new chapter in my life, and a whirlwind roller coaster ride into entrepreneurship. Five years feels like a short period of time, but it has been so full of activity, growth and learning. Here’s a retropective!
2005.
Pearse Street's First Logo Design, May 2005
As I was wrapping up the writing for my last issue at Destin Magazine, the idea of establishing Pearse Street as my first entrepreneurial endeavor took shape. I had spent the past year profiling local businesses for their features in the magazine, and in the process I could not help but feel that the potential for starting up my own business was well within reach. Thanks to the support of my husband, a military firefighter at the time, I designed our first logo after hours, and first website design came to life in March. Voila, we were in business! My first client was a local author and Hollywood actor, Thom Gossom, Jr. who I met while heading up the Emerald Coast Writers group. We ended up developing a number of websites for Gossom’s various projects, and maximized our circle of friends, cow0rkers and author connections to keep Pearse Street profitable for our first year in business.
2006.
Sean consults on a web design
I was expecting our first child and my husband was deployed in Iraq, so I spent most of the year working on small websites and took on a long-term book editing project that kept me busy through my pregnancy. Little did I realize that Jonathan was honing his S.E.O. skills in the desert and shortly after Sean’s birth, we’d be experiencing a serious growth spurt. Within a few months, MySpace design had emerged as a legitimate niche market and we were approached by Interscope Records to design a series of profiles for their Shady Records artists, launching us into the big leagues of this growing industry.
2007.
Pearse Street's first commercial location
By January 2007 we were officially Bostonites. After our move from the Florida Panhandle, I re-established our office in Lynn, Massachusetts where we continued to expand our client list and web portfolio, hired our first employees to help with admin support and design, and in October of that year, moved to our first commercial space, a 400-square-foot semi-industrial space which accommodated our staff of four. Here we took on our first social network development projects and began transitioning into larger website developments.
2008.
Ribbon Cutting with Lynn's former mayor
In true C.E.O. mom fashion, the day after Pearse Street incorporated, I welcomed my son Aedan into the world. A few weeks later, with our three-month lease expired and having effectively outgrown our first commercial space, we upgraded to a 2400-square-foot office space in the same building to enjoy some more leg room. While we still dabbled in MySpace design projects for larger companies like Marie Claire, Bigelow Tea and Remington College, we focused on expanding our staff to accommodate our new primary service: social network design and development utilizing our newly developed social network software framework.
2009.
After four years of intense growth and expansion, this was a year analyzing the results of that growth with our staff, our product and our systems. The result was systematically trimming the fat, strengthening our focus and streamlining our systems. In the process of designing and launching more than 10 advanced social network websites, we also released two new versions of our social network software and built out a solid marketing department to complement our design and development services. On New Year’s Eve, we marked the end of an era by moving out of the Lydia Pinkham Building, onto better and brighter horizons!
2010
76 Lafayette Street, Salem, MA
From our humble beginnings in my living room (then garage, then basement), our team now enjoys a beautiful space in downtown Salem. We have just released our third version of the framework with some great new social network features. We’ve also expanded our marketing department, now running under Social Focus Marketing, Inc. to offer social media design and new media marketing services to our clients. As if all that wasn’t enough, we’re also expecting our third Pearse Street baby! We’re nearly through the first quarter, and it’s already shaping up to be a great year. Stay tuned for 2015… where will the world of social media take us by then?!
