A month ago we celebrated a great milestone for our company: 10 years since this adventure started. It is not just a round number that we are celebrating, it is the fact that we managed to build the company from scratch by investing only our time, knowledge and persistence.
10 years is a long time if you think about it but now it seems the years went by pretty fast. Especially last few years. Seems that the time passing feeling is correlated with the level of engagement people take. Indeed, in these last few years, regular work put aside, we
- participated in all niche events (eZ Publish CMS related),
- gave presentations on several of these events,
- actively blogged on our site (this is a 49th blog post),
- took active part in the niche community (submitting bugs, helping people on forums, ...),
- shared several extensions in the open source spirit (eztags, ngconnect, ngpush, ...),
- communicated on many social channels: twitter, facebook, google+,...
- sponsored several web events and student competitions,
- co-founded the Croatian Independent Software Exporters association,
- and, finally this September, organized the eZ Publish Summer Camp.
A long list of non-billable activities and I probably forgot something too. As we don't have any specific PR or marketing, this is our PR and our marketing. But, opposed to classic PR, with our approach added value is given to someone while promoting the company. That is how we think it should be.
We also believe that we are successfully balancing the thin line between client satisfaction, employee satisfaction and owner satisfaction. It is the key for a long term company success and by reaching 10th birthday seems that we are doing something right :)
In a time when start-ups are a hot approach to business and entrepreneurship, where "scale fast or fail fast" is the motto, our company would be odd to some people. We scaled slow employing new person every 9 month on average. But we like it that way, we like to have a good working spirit in our offices. Employing to many people in short period would probably jeopardize this.
Already one month in the second decade and I can't wait to see where we will be in 5 years. I am sure that it will come very fast if we continue with this engagement tempo. Various interesting projects are in the queue, new BEST Code Challenge is about to start, plans for the next Summer Camp are in the making, etc.
Even more interesting times ahead :)