If you are wondering how SageRock is doing, as my father-in-law likes to say, “A month doesn’t make a quarter. A quarter doesn’t make a year.” So, I can’t really comment how this first quarter will turn out… just because I don’t know.

Because I’m not a public company, I don’t have to make an arbitrary projected number. I am able to act and react much more fluidly than that model.

Also, because we are small things have a way of changing very rapidly.

At the end of last year we lost several clients… some of our biggest clients, actually.

That hurt. And in fact, the pain of that will probably be felt in the near months because their contracts, for the most part, were good through the end of the year. They are now finishing paying those contracts.

Whenever we lose a client I, and especially Rocky, feel personally responsible. “We could have done more. We could have tried harder. We should have done this or that.”

And in the end, maybe that’s true. Maybe we could have acted differently or worked harder. But that’s neither here nor there. What is done is done.

There were 3 clients we lost during that period. Two told us they were cutting budget and where going to do things internally. One cut all of their paid search and that was what we did for them.

But on the other side, we have actually gained some other really nice clients. They are big names and the people at these companies are excited about their Web marketing.

At this point, I think the trade off is a net minus as far as revenue is concerned. But I wouldn’t be surprised if we make it up by the end of the year.

Greg and Brian are both very optimistic about this year. They feel really strongly that this year is going to end very strong. They feel it could be our best year ever. I think they could be right.

In fact, Nate was telling me today how one of our clients is directly involved in one of the key areas of the new stimulus. So, we are likely going to be involved in those projects as that gets ramped up.

While I’m what you might call an extreme optimist, as the president of the company, I always feel it my job to be aware of all possibilities. So, I think about all escape routes out of this year.

One of the best things about the SageRock infrastructure is that we are completely liquid. We have no investors. We have no debt. We have no money tied up in costly machines.

This allows us to shrink and expand very easily.

I’ve always been debt adverse. I carry that phobia in both my home and my company. Living within my means has been very helpful these last several months.

The only absolute obligation we have baked into the design of SageRock is our rent. We have about 5000 square feet of a warehouse. It’s currently a little more than we need at this point. We expanded at the beginning of last year because our growth looked like we needed it.

As it turned out, we are now either at that same level of production or even a little behind it at this time. So, we still don’t need the space.

However, I am using it for a video studio right now. That’s been nice.

And our lease is up in February 2010. So, we will likely have a better view of where things are headed at that point. If we decide to stay here we are likely going to renegotiate things. There is a lot of real estate available in Akron right at the moment. So that puts us in a very strong position.

So, the State of SageRock is that we are fine. We aren’t where I wanted to be at this time last year. But we are still living well within our means. And the way we are set up lets us grow and expand quite quickly.

On top of all that, Web marketing is still expected to grow this year. We are well positioned to continue to be a leader in the one segment of marketing that is still doing well.