Back in the days of pure dial-up, when GeoCities and Angelfire hosted websites were the “thing”, curiosity struck me as to how one would be able to publish content on the web. After a few weeks of tweaking, I was well on my way to learning a simple hobby that evidentaly captured my full attention of the web. I was able to develop pure HTML websites with fancy animated GIFs and attention-seeking glitter all over. Taking what I had learned, it was only natural to apply this new-found skill to our very first official school website project.

1999 – Static HTML

During the last year of my high school year, our school district launched a new program for students to design and develop a website for the course. Fast-forward a few more years from when I first began to tinkle with HTML, myself and a few other students were able to put together our first official website for our school; purely designed in HTML with less glitter and more graphics supported by the all-new Adobe Photoshop software. The entire process had only intrigued me even more as these new software showed a very promising future.

2000 – Dynamic Content

After school, a good friend of mine introduced me to an intense 5-month course on obtaining our A+, MCP+I, MCSE, and CNA designations. During one of the courses, one particular application caught my attention, IIS. Directly from the course material, I decided to take on a new challenge of creating dynamic content with Microsoft’s Active Server Pages (ASP) technology. The course itself did not touch upon ASP, so I had to look to the Internet to find the resources I needed and a few months later, my first official project was born.

2001 – The Online Community

While browsing around the Internet, I noticed there was a huge potential to drive traffic to websites based on providing an interactive and dynamic website to the end-user. This model was a proven model based on the websites that existed during this era. Rather than having a one-way street streaming static HTML and sometimes stale content to the end-user, why not let the end-user populate such data? This was a brilliant idea, so I had to give it a try and I spent approximately 2-3 months straight developing what would become an interesting journey.

During the initial launch of XKUBE.com, I invited approximately 50-100 friends to join a private community that was targeted mainly for Vancouver. Within 6 months, the community grew to an estimated 6,000 members and within 12 months, the member count reached as high as 16,000 members – an amazing number at the time. What is even more exciting was the fact that it was generating a small amount of revenue on the side to cover all of the expenses. This fueled my passion for the web and what is to become.

2003 – Freelancing

After establishing my ability to generate dynamic websites, I took on a few freelancing projects. During those years, a lot of time was spent on juggling between school, hobby, and freelancing projects which eventually guided me to launch one of my first official ventures. However, during this time I was also able to travel around the world to work which helped me land a few international freelancing clients as well.

2004 – EQQY DESIGNS

Through hard work, perseverance, and dedication towards my freelancing projects; this lead me to start my first venture – EQQY DESIGNS. I was very fortunate to obtain a few well known company’s as my initial clientele such as Stormtech and Champion Clothing to help lead the way to this amazing journey.

2006 – Incorporation

For the next couple of years, I would continue to build up a strong client base to help fuel my internal passion to develop websites and the more business I had, the more it was looking like an official business. By early 2006, it was decided to move ahead with incorporating the business thus my venture officially began.

2008 – First Office

While projects came in at a fast rate, I needed a helping hand and thus I asked a friend who also understood the web industry to join my fast growing company. During the beginning of 2007, projects were becoming too much for the two of us to handle and we both decided that it was probably time to move into an official office in 2008 and that we did. We also hired our first employee which quickly became two and three.

2009 – Two Offices

In 2009, we had grown from 2 people now to a team of 10 people with two offices. EQQY DESIGNS is a fast growing web design, development, and web application development firm that is based in Richmond, BC. If you know someone who is interested in developing custom websites or custom web applications, contact EQQY DESIGNS today!

Stay tuned for more EQQY updates.

Cheers,

GH

I’m certain that there are many serial entrepreneurs out there trying out different ventures throughout their lifetime but that doesn’t always mean it will be successful. A lot of hard cold sweat, time, effort, and money must be put into each individual venture to even have a slim chance of succeeding.

I’ve had the opportunity to try various ones, but one that I’ve been fairly proud to be a part of is EQQY DESIGNS.

EQQY DESIGNS is a fast-growing web design and development company based in Richmond, BC where we would take on all types of challenges from basic websites to large enterprise level web application development projects.

And to think just a couple years ago, it grew from just myself, then teaming up with my business partner, we’ve built a business that was able to create jobs and that’s something we’re fairly proud of, even in the worst of times.

It is one of those cliche stories about how we started from an apartment bedroom to two offices and as easy as it may sound, it was definitely one of the roughest rides to date. Yet, it was also one of the best and most enjoyable experiences I’ve ever had and would do it again if I had the chance.

Today, we employ up to 10 very talented people who work just as hard as we do and without their expertise, we wouldn’t be here.

I’ll share more on this for my next entry and until then, please feel free to share your story on your business ventures!

Cheers,

GH

I am very excited to be able to share some of our new exciting stories as I look forward to reading your comments as well.

As Michael Jordan would have put this back in 1995 through a fax – I’m back.

Here, I can take you through the wonderful ride of entrepreneurship through all the up’s and down’s; stay tuned!

Cheers,

GH

I’ve updated the theme of my blog to talk about entrepreneurship – the essence of being an entrepreneur and how anyone can become one themselves. There are many ways to become an entrepreneur, as long as you have an idea and the passion to move forward.

So from now on, I will blog about how I became an entrepreneur, how it all started, and how everyone out there has their golden chance to become one. One key emphasis that I must make, however, is that becoming one is easy, maintaining, exploring, and expanding is probably one of the toughest things you would have to do – and one of the major reasons why majority of the businesses out there fail.

To find out more information about me, feel free to browse to my “About Me” page.

So come join me, my team, and my blog to share your experiences!

We’re in it for the long haul.

Cheers,

GH