I founded Alagad one afternoon in 1996. Since then, Ive been the president and “face” of Alagad. When people think of Alagad they probably think of me, not to mention the stellar team I managed to assemble.
However, with all of the drama the companys had to endure over the last few weeks and months, Ive slowly begun to learn that Im effective at some parts of running a business and not so effective at others.
Specifically, Im pretty good at coming up with ideas. For example, the Image Component was my first real breakthrough idea. I also had the idea to turn Alagad into a larger consulting company. More recently, Alagad announced TaskForce, our prepaid, on-demand, development service. And this just scratches the surface of the ideas that I have floating around in my head.
However, when it comes down to the day-to-day operations of a company, I couldnt be less interested. Im not the kind of person who enjoys looking at spreadsheets, projecting financials, or handling conflict.
With that in mind, the Alagad management team has decided to move Randy Miller, our program manager, into the CEO role at Alagad. So, moving forward it will be Randys job to execute against Alagads business and strategic plans. He thrives on spreadsheets and is much more suited to that role than I am.
For now, Im going to be holding onto my title of president. However, Im moving towards a new role of Chief Evangelist. What this means for me is that Ill have a lot more focus on communicating with developers and businesses. As a part of this Ill hopefully be blogging a lot more frequently, attending more conferences, and experimenting with a variety of technologies to create demos, useful tools, and anything else thats relevant to my job of communicating with the world.
Im really not sure what to expect out of this change yet. Im already working on an interesting social application created in Ruby and Rails. Well see what else I can find to write about as we go along!
Meanwhile, if you happen to need any help on a ColdFusion project please be sure to send me an email. Im actively looking for consulting and development work both for Chris Peterson (who is back with Alagad!) and myself. Chris is unparalleled in his knowledge and skill at finding and resolving performance problems in web applications. Were offering a great rate on his time right now, so be sure to check with us if you need this type of help.
DougHughes.net 
Comments on: "My Changing Role At Alagad" (6)
It seems you’ve been doing a lot of thinking about what works best for you and your company. Best of luck with your new path!
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I’m certainly trying! No body ever said that running a business was easy. And, frankly, if you want to be successful in life you really need to understand your own weaknesses and work around them. That’s what I’m trying to do right now.
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Good luck Doug!
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Doug… check out the DISC personality profiles. This will explain much of what you have been questioning of recent days with the people you deal with. 🙂 It might even help you get a better picture of yourself.
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Well how is that working out for you? I often hear people trying to move to “brand evangelist role” after a week they fall into there old routine
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@indiana – Well, it’ll be a struggle for me. I need to go to more networking and conference events. Basically, It’s not so much me being an evangelist, but me being “everywhere”. And honestly, I have a very long way to go on that.
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