2025 Year In Review

This year in review is going to include both from my personal achievements, but also from work, and also other client projects I work on via Grizzly Pumpkin, my web design and development brand. So let's kick off with that first.

New Clients

Towards the end of 2024 I had acquired a part of a business that had some website hosting clients, primarily just annual recurring revenue, plus a couple of development clients that look for continuous improvement and maintenance of their website. A goal I had for 2025 was to look to gain at least one additional client, ideally that would look for ongoing development or maintenance, but at minimum that need a new website and hosting.

Due to time commitments, other projects, and my 9 - 5 I did have trouble going out and working to increase the visibility of the brand. However, thankfully through word of mouth of my existing clients I did achieve this! I ended up with three new clients this year:

1. TaxSteps (https://taxsteps.co.uk) - A local personal tax and estate planning business. I was approached to design and build a new website, following a rebrand they had completed. They were also interested in hosting too.

2. Fenland Gun Club (http://fenlandgunclub.co.uk/) - This is a local clay shooting club, one of the committee members is also an existing client and so they decided to bring their hosting over to me for easier management for them.

3. Bushfield Joggers (https://www.bushfield-joggers.co.uk) - Launched a week or two ago, this is the latest project, which I'm also very pleased with. Combining a couple of projects the club has been maintaining separately, into a newly designed, custom Laravel and Statamic application, alongside hosting and ongoing maintenance.

These new projects each provided their own challenges, and helped with introducing additional processes and learning opportunities throughout. Overall, I'm very happy to have these new clients and the opportunity to work on their projects.

Restructured Hosting and Development Services

After completing the migration of all of the hosting and development clients towards the end of the last year I completed a full review of the services, and based on this was able to compete a full restructure of the services provided. Making everything much clearer to current and future clients, and also keeps everything a bit more streamlined for me.

Due to increased costs over the last couple years, this did include some pricing changes, however, thanks to new partnerships this wasn't all an increase, with some pricing coming down to make it more competitive.

I also created a range of starter packages that include website design and development, based on key factors, this makes it much simpler for me to quote for new projects as I have a clear starting base. Throughout 2026 I suspect these will be refined a little further, as I had identified some issues with what was included but on the whole it was a big improvement compared to previous workflows.

Promotion

A really exciting part of my 9 - 5 is that I received a promotion, previously I was a Senior PHP Developer on the team, and now I am a Team Lead, managing a team of developers and scoping and deciding of technical aspects of the key product our team is responsible for. This does mean my day to day development is reduced, however, I feel this is where my freelance work actually helps with my employed work. I experience challenges and try tools that I wouldn't typically use, which is great, as it provides me much more broader experience and some of the findings I have had has then helped with my employed work.

Review In Stats

There's some things that don't really need a long explanation, so these are just some additional stats based on 2025 (both for me personally and in my work) and hopefully will allow us to compare at the end of 2026:

Grizzly Pumpkin

• 446GB of data hosted

• 127 invoices sent

• 42 clients hosted (2 with custom VPS servers)

• 41 maintenance tasks (client app and server maintenance on a maintenance plan)

• 2 new websites designed, developed, and launched

• 2 clients on a maintenance plan

Personal

• 122 episodes across 16 shows watched

• 14 movies watched

• 2 games completed

• 1 book read

Overview and Looking to 2026

Overall, I'm very happy with my 2025. Personally, financially, and professionally it has been a very good year. It has been very stressful, and tiring, especially when you sprinkle in that I've been to various music events, airsoft game days and much more. I'm now taking a much needed rest of the next few days before it all starts again in January.

Looking to 2026, my goals I think are going to be relatively similar, some key things are:

1. I'd like to get my new Grizzly Pumpkin website finished and launched, has been a difficult one to progress through the busy year.

2. 2 new clients, similar to 2025 I ideally would like these to be recurring development or maintenance, but hosting would also be a good achievement.

3. Read 2 books, reading is something I've wanted to get more into, so I think having a goal to read 2 books is good, I do already have some I'd like to read.

4. I would also like to write more on this blog, so I want to publish at least two articles in 2026 (excluding the year in review).

Happy New Year!