You know how opportunity always seems to knock when you least expect it… and usually when its absolutely the most inconvenient? Well that’s how this deal went down. Jeff VanDrimmelen, owner of Van’s Websites and a friend, contacted me on on Monday Feb. 27th. He told me he was getting a promotion at his “day job” with the University of North Carolina, where he runs a massive network of the University’s websites. Because of the promotion, he wouldn’t be able to continue doing Van’s Websites on the side. The reason Jeff told me all this, was that he wanted to know if we would be interested in buying his business?

Jeff had two main concerns: First, he wanted to ensure that all his clients—whether they were hosting with him or just one-time projects—would be well taken care of. Second, he wanted to ensure that his excellent developer, Anas, would continue to have regular work. Because of the similarities between our companies, it just made sense that he’d contact us first.

We looked over the Van’s Websites books, learned about it’s clients, reviewed it’s assets, and finally decided that it made a lot of sense for us to acquire them. So we put together the contract and started the transition… at the same time myself and my family packed up and moved four hours south, to St. George, UT. As I said: worst possible timing. But because of the situation, it was “now or never.”

Four days later, when the cable guy turned on the internet in our new house, I was welcomed by over 70 emails in my (business) inbox! And that was inspite of trying to monitor and take care of the ones I could on my phone, over the intervening days. So please be patient with us as we complete this transition. We hope to be back down to 12-hour days 😉 within a week or two. Hopefully by then we’ll be well on top of everything.

I want to thank Jeff and Debbi VanDrimmelen for giving us this opportunity and working so closely with us on the transition. I also owe a lot to Kurt, for keeping the FiddlerStudios (now rebranded to wpXPRESS) fires burning while I moved, and to our awesome new developer Anas, for supporting Van’s Websites clients during that same time. My wife Jill has been amazing, being supportive in-spite of not seeing me for 14-plus-hours each day.

I’ll post more information on what his means for all our clients, both from FiddlerStudios and Van’s Websites, soon.