As many of you know, I’m one of the founders of ParkLogic and for over a decade we’ve been working with clients to extract the maximum possible value from their domain traffic. In blogs and at conferences I’ve gone to great lengths to explain WHAT we do and HOW we do it….but up until now I’ve never tackled the WHY….

When I reflect about my personal journey at ParkLogic I realised that over the years we’ve developed a number of core beliefs that up until now we’ve never shared. They've actually become the reason why we behave the way we do and why we love the domain industry so much.

It should be said from the outset that this is not an exhaustive list and they are not in any particular order but hopefully it will provide some insight into how we operate.

Transparency
We believe in being transparent with clients. This means we won’t lie to you if you have a question and if we stuff up then we’ll make amends. Our focus on being open means all our statistics are what the domains actually earn, and our accounting clearly show the commission we take from managing the domain traffic. We don’t hide our commission behind smoke and mirrors.

I must say that we've received quite a bit of flack for being so transparent but we believe that it's through transparency that the industry can grow and increase overall earnings.

Good People
The domain industry is full of wonderful people….so why waste your time dealing with jerks? We believe in working with good people, serving great clients and establishing strong relationships with suppliers. We believe that doing life with people is important and that if we don't work with you now you'll have the confidence to work with us in the future. For us, everything is not just about business.

For a long time I’ve been putting off conducting open heart surgery….but this past week I decided that it was about time I pulled out the scalpel and made an incision. Thankfully, not on a human but on a platform I developed.

Like many things in life I've been procrastinating about doing this big slab of work for several years. I’d kept running into problems because the work wasn’t done but there always seemed to be some convoluted work around that allowed me to just make things work.

Finally, in a fit of frustration I took the plunge and began restructuring the foundations of an application that literally process tens of millions of requests each day. It was like looking at a great big ball of string and the more I pulled the more the string seemed to resist.

Knots would form and quickly become mini-projects in themselves that needed to be resolved before the bigger issues could be addressed. Numerous times I completely broke the entire system and found myself tracking down some esoteric piece of code written three years ago. Grrrrr!

This past week was a complete mess for me. Monday and Tuesday were fine but Wednesday morning I woke up with a bad case of the flu. My brain was about as useful as a squished tomato and my body felt like a truck had driven over every square inch of it.

In this sense of stupor, I developed a fresh love affair with the couch and television remote. It’s amazing how many useless shows you can catch-up on that you didn’t even know existed prior to your state of incapacitation.

It was during this time I began to ponder the important aspects of life such as; Why does every part of Netflix seem to have exactly the same shows listed? Why is it that the categorisation system for iTunes seems to think that “Top Gun” is a romantic comedy? Who thought that Disney’s “A Wrinkle in Time” was actually worth ninety minutes of my life?

The one saving grace was many of the shows overcame the drums beating in my head and sent me to sleep. So day one was largely consumed with mindless television, sleeping and answering a couple of emails…..by the way, I cannot be held responsible for whatever I wrote on Wednesday so if you received an email from me then just reply with a big question mark.

Determining your own limitations is often necessary for your very survival but are you placing limitations upon yourself that you’ve accidentally embraced? As we journey through life there are many well meaning people that say things to us that impose limitations upon our thinking. Isn’t it time to snap the shackles of good intentions?

A silly example of this can be a belief that you can’t sing. You may not be able to sing like Pavarotti but “can’t sing?”, I think not. It’s the rare individual that can’t actually sing but most of the population have bought into limitation that not only can’t they sing but for the sake of those people around them, they shouldn’t sing.

Have you allowed others to limit what you are capable? Such as, you have to work to pay the mortgage, so the bank now sets the limits for your own life. You can’t start that business you’ve always wanted to because of the financial risk. You have a sense that you’re in a mess and you can’t do anything without disaster befalling you.

You could believe that last statement or make decisions that break the bindings of the limitations that you have embraced for your life. Sometimes a simple decision maybe to just sell the house....

A number of years ago Roselyn and I were having a cup of tea and lamenting the fact that our two eldest children were wanting to borrow our second car all the time. Sometimes they wanted the car at the same time and we had to have the wisdom of Solomon to decide who could borrow it.

During this past week I watched my wife, Roselyn, cross the finishing line of a thirty-kilometre charity walk. I was incredibly proud of her achievement as it was the culmination of a large amount of sacrifice, hard work and dedication.

I remember when Roselyn first told me that she would like raise funds to save people’s eyesight by participating in the CoastTrek charity walk. Once the decision was made she quickly developed a laser focus to her achieve the goal.

Goals are amazing things. They can inspire us to new heights as we stretch the boundaries of what we thought was possible. To be worthwhile, goals need to be big and audacious! They are also personal.

For example, if an Olympic marathon runner signed up for the thirty-kilometre walk they would probably view it as a bit of a warm up. What they need to inspire them is something much longer over as short a time as possible. In the case of my wife, she’d never done anything like this before and for her it was definitely BIG!