Tech entrepreneur obsessed with quality - in the process of launching a skincare brand

[ChocolateFactory]

Quick introduction of myself - a guy in his mid 30's originally from Europe:
Like many from my field, my interest for IT started very early. When I was 11 years old, I was building my first website and writing my first Java programs (a chat bot, among other things). When I was 15 years old, I spent the school fall break interning at a software company and they offered me a part-time job while I was still going to highschool. I was still curious to learn something new and I picked up a new language (and got a girlfriend in another country in the process). I was reading a lot of books on psychology and selling and started taking up private classes in communication and coaching/psychotherapy, and sales. I was just 17/18 at this point.
After graduating from highschool, I moved abroad and eventually started working for an IT consulting company in another country, while still going to university. Working for them frustrated me, they were making money hand over fist, but they were doing the bare minimum. I remember thinking that if I was their competitor, I would have absolutely wrecked them by providing much better quality at the same price. But I was just in my early 20's then, and how could I possibly even find clients? After a while (they had just offered to promote me to tech lead), I quit and started doing remote work for another firm. I was no longer an employee, but a contractor at this point, because it was simpler and cheaper in taxes. From there it was only a small step to convince my boss to let me hire someone to take over some of my work and split the profits. This strategy proved to be a huge success and I soon left that job and founded my own IT consulting firm. I now have a global network of highly skilled developers I work with, who provide excellent quality. I handle all communication with the clients and I'm still involved on the technical side as well.
This is both a blessing and a curse - I'm obsessed with providing premium quality to my clients, but it also means that I can be a bottleneck because I want to be so involved. I definitely have to get better at delegating and concentrate on growing my company. At the moment I'm also concentrating on a small geographic market because I believe that I have a strong advantage there as I speak the language and know the culture. I've been reluctant to expand to the US market, for example, because I feel I'd suddenly be competing against half the world. And I'm not going to compete on price, but on quality.
Anyway, the business is going very well, but I'm also working a lot. I should probably ditch the clients that take up a lot of my time, or try to delegate more, and rather concentrate on growth. But it's really not that easy - I doubt I'd find someone as passionate me, willing to handle multiple clients.

Meanwhile, my girlfriend is doing a PhD in biomedicine and I'm extremely proud of her. She has identified the need for a skincare product that doesn't exist. It's something that she has been searching for for a long time, but there is nothing like it. So in the end she decided she'd just develop the product herself. I'm helping her launch it, so now we're getting into ecommerce, which is something completely different from my own background, and I'm loving it. I hope to learn a lot here, especially about things like selling via one's own online shop vs. via wholesalers, SEO, online advertising and more.

Looking forward to learning a lot from you guys!

 

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