Over the past five years at Raincity Studios, we've built a talented and diverse team of drupalers, open sourcers, travelers, photographers, bloggers, vloggers, innovators, cultural transformers, and social media experimenters.   We've developed and hosted hundreds of websites and in many cases, we've helped our clients achieve their goals.  We've also helped train hundreds of drupal developers and played an active role in helping grow the drupal community around the world. 

We're very proud of our track record, but we're the first to acknowledge that we've also made mistakes along the way.  We've seen projects fail because we weren't being direct about the poor business model or lack of planning. We've seen projects go broke through mismanagement and we've learned many valuable lessons about cost control, communication, project management and accountability. We've watched some communities flourish while others turned into ghost towns.  All of this has taught us a lot about business development, sustainability and our strengths and weaknesses as a studio.

It's also taught us that you can't just keep doing things the same way.  Just as the same development solution is not perfect for every client, the same operational model is not the right fit for every business.  More importantly, we've learned that our operational model needs to be adaptable to accommodate the changing nature and scale of our business.   We've always prided ourselves on being an agile and innovative company and we've never wanted to get too comfortable with our success, so we've been taking practical steps to restructure our operational model and reorganize our offerings.  We've been researching the best way to go about doing this by consulting with trusted friends and individuals for whom we have great respect.  We're very grateful for the advice and support they have provided us and it's made us optimistic about the possibilities we can create for ourselves in the future. 

However, this process has also caused me to reflect on my own role within the company.  As a founding partner and majority investor in the studio, my personal and professional life have never been very far apart.  In spite of the incredible experiences, the exciting projects and the great people and community, this has not always been an easy road for me to travel.  The highs and lows that come with managing a company have been personally taxing and I've struggled to find a balance between my work and my personal life.  As a result, I've come to acknowledge that it has affected my abilities to properly manage the studio.

As part of this reorganization effort, I've decided that it is no longer in the best interest of myself nor the studio for me to remain in my current role as CEO.  Over the next few months, I will transition with the core team, taking on a new role as Business, Social Media Strategist and Project Consultant.  As we create this new transition, we will be looking for a new managing partner to help us achieve our restructuring plan. This has not been an easy decision for me to make, but one that I am confident will be better for our team and clients.

Raincity Studios helped to cultivate and grow the drupal service industry in many ways.  Considering the many successes we've been a part of and the valuable lessons we've learned from each of our successes and failures, it would be foolish to look back on these events negatively.  It has been a great experience and none of it would have been possible without the amazing people that have worked with us over the years.  I am tremendously grateful to have had the opportunity to play a part in organizing countless community events, mentoring a new generation of open source innovators and helping build an industry that I believe is redefining how humans interact and communicate.

It seems like there is a lot of change taking place in 2009 and it has got us quite excited about our future here at the studio.  We have several great sites currently under development and there are exciting new projects coming in all the time.  Thank you for the encouragement and support that many of you have offered as we reorganize our assets and business offerings.  We will continue to keep you informed as we continue this process.