 Mike, check. 1, 2, 3. 1, 2, 3. 1, 2, 3. 1, 2, 3. 1, 2, 3. 1, 2, 3. 1, 2, 3. Learnings and insights session. OK, the Global Drupal Business Survey Exclusive Learnings and Insights. At least for me, you should check from the audience. OK, thanks. It's working all the time. OK, thank you. If you want from this size, how are you? Are you OK? Sure, perfect. So I'm going to read the questions. Yeah, if you will see, yes, yes, you will ask him. And after, maybe from someone from the audience. Yeah, exactly. Maybe we want to ask him. Yep, perfect. Thank you. You're welcome. Hello and welcome. My name is Janne Kalliola, and I'm here to talk about the Global Drupal Business Survey Exclusive Learnings. Inside this is quite bold promise, and I tried to deliver it. Let's see how it goes. My fancy face is there. I've been working with XOF for 16-plus years when I found it was a CEO for 15-plus years. And then now I'm Chief Growth Officer. And I have been coding from 83, so I'm coding by heart. At the end, a number of things. I got my first public software or commercial software done when I was in high school and so forth. Now I'm focusing on the growth of XOF, that is a Nordic leading open-web technology company. Number of offices in Finland, in Estonia, in UK, around 100 people, a few hundred clients. And we are hiring. I guess that everybody's hiring. So if you would like to discuss with me, then I'm all ears. But that's about myself and the XOF, I guess that you were not here to learn too much about those. Of course, it's nice to mention those. They are very, very key. I'm very keen on those. But let's talk about the survey and the results. So if you were about the background, then the business outlook, growth, community, technology staff, the business community. And then there's time for conclusions. From my conclusion, then there are time for questions and answers. So me and Michel van Welde, XOF and Wanshu, are nowadays I.O. from the Netherlands. We have been serving the Drupal Agency from 2016 onwards. So this is now seventh time that we have done this. Drupal Association and RIS have helped with the survey from time to time. And we have also shared the results every year with them. And there is the infamous Drupal CEO dinner that happens, how happened yesterday. And then we had also the virtual drinks. But the first rule of the dinner is that what they said in the dinner stage at the dinner. So I don't talk that much about the dinner. We had fun. But all the stories need to stay there because it's very crucial to keep the confidentiality. First time ever, the results, the latest results were shown. Actually, trees got a sneak peek for history's note. There was one, the wind rate or the business prospect slide was there. But now we talk, or I talk, and you listen, but let's say that we talk. The learnings from 2016 to 2020, so seven years, what I've seen inside about the Drupal Business Development. So this is the dinner yesterday. If you were not there and you would like to be there, then please get in touch with me. I'll get you to the right circles. And then maybe next year you get the golden ticket too. We had a lot of fun. All the data that I'm talking here has been collected using service from every year we do it once. We got answers from all over the world, typically Drupal Agency owners, directors, management CEOs are the people that respond. We have changed the survey from year to year. We didn't ask about COVID in 2016. We were not that ahead of our time. But we did ask about that in 2020 and 2021. And now this year we decided not to ask because we got very similar responses both years that yes, remote work and issues because of that, more work from the client's staff journey. And then we decided that we'll drop those because the form was quite long already. And every year it tends to get longer when we get new ideas about the questions. There are several different categories in the survey and I don't go through all of them here. This is very, very short version of what was discussed yesterday. I had 70 slides yesterday, broke my voice and so forth. So they are the most important and interesting ones here. Everything that is interesting is not important, vice versa. But let's start with the business outlook. So the top 10 industries that the Drupal companies serve are charities and non-profit education, government, media, healthcare, IT, banking, insurance, realm, tourism, retail and consultancy for 22 order. And you can see that it has fluctuated somewhat during the years. But the charities and non-profit has been always the top in top three, I would say. Actually, almost the top five have stayed quite the same throughout the years. We added education in 2019. So if you remember, and I guess everybody remembered the education has less lines than the others and it was because we omitted it. Probably because of stupidity when we now think about it. But we omitted it and then there was a lot of other responses that had education. So we decided maybe we'll add it and then it sprang immediately to the top. The top three industries are sort of easy ones. And this is something that we have been discussing or not maybe discussing. And Michelle and I have been yelling about this, that be more brave, that do something else. There's less competition. Drupal fits very well, it's known. But also the ability to pay higher prices is limited. Michelle always says that the charities and non-profit, the non-profit mark means that there's no profit for you, my friend either. But they are, on the other hand, good for the society. So in that sense, people should be proud that we serve those kind of industries that help the society to be better. After those top three or top five, then it has fluctuated from year to year and there's no specific list that in which order it has been. Because it depends also that who answers the questions that the agencies have gone and some have appeared and so forth. But the interesting ones, and I mean interesting in that sense that they have a lot of money that could belong to us, are like automotive, finance, logistics, fast moving consumer goods. They have been always underserved every single year. Sometimes telecom industry consulting that are also pretty decent source of money have been popped up in top 10 and then promptly next year drop down. So it seems that the Drupal doesn't get the foothold in those industries like it has gone in these charities, education, government, media and healthcare. And healthcare and medicine is only one of these that actually pays big bucks. All the others typically have long contracts, maybe not media, it seems to be wind power that where the wind blows then the media goes. So the government, education, charities, non-profit, all of them favor long-term contracts and they are good, especially if the recession is coming and it might be coming. So in takeaways, the Drupal companies want to work with industries that benefit the human kind and this is very, very cool that we are on the good side of things. We proud people, we proud about this. Drupal has not become a household name as I did top three. It's still every single time we need to convince the client that this Drupal is an option. In education, we don't. They say that we would like to have a Drupal side please and then they just discuss that who is going to implement the site. But on the other industries, there's a lot of discussion that which system we use. Do we use CMS at all? Is CMS broad or DXB? Is that the solution to our problems or it's something else? It takes years or even decade to build a reputation in the industry, especially if the industry is conservative. Automotive in Germany is a good example that it takes time to get in and it seemingly takes time to get out too but the money is good in the middle. So the breakthroughs might not happen at all and if they happen it takes long time and there are not that many companies that are despair heads that would do this over and over again back their head to the wall and then got the breakthrough and then Drupal would be a household name in that industry. But that would be really, really awesome. Then if we look at the growth or maybe lack of growth, what is happening in the business community with the agencies, we ask the size information with the headcount. We don't ask any euros in the whole survey because we, I and Michelle, we are at the end, we are competing. Our companies are competing with those that we survey so asking euros might be a little bit iffy that they would answer. So we ask other things like number of people and the age of the company. And you can see that there is not that many total age companies, everybody is already in preschool. Actually yesterday in CEO dinner, there was one company that got the big applause that said that it's like less than two years old but they just forgot to answer the survey. So that might happen too. But you see that there's a lot of old companies that are not very large. If you're sole entrepreneur, I understand that that you want to be in a good company so you are alone. And that is, that works really well. But then if you want to, and there might be lifestyle business that there's two or three guys or girls that run the show and then you don't want anybody to spoil your system. I completely get that. But then if you are bigger and you don't grow, then there will be all kind of challenges, both to you and the Drupal community. So we are growing older, we are not growing larger. And if you want the Drupal to grow, I yesterday heard that the Drupal ecosystem is worth 3 billion euros. So that's the amount of money that goes in the Drupal business. And it should grow, it should grow really fast because the system is good. But it won't grow if the companies won't grow. Because there's no magically new companies are not appearing. So it's the rest of the companies that are there they should grow. The pipeline expectations, project pipeline deals as we rate pipeline expectations all are excellent. I know several industries where the CEOs would sell their mom and rest of the family if they would get this line of numbers that almost 70% of the companies had growth in project pipeline deal size and pipeline expectations. Win rate was more than half of the companies that it got better. There are some companies it got worse, but not that much. So the product is good, the market is there, but we probably spend too little time marketing and selling to somebody that is not already in the market. So we don't grow the market, but we share the pie and not grow the pie. That's my assumption that what's happening. And this is because most of the Drupal companies seem to me to be risk aversive. Most probably because they are the first companies of their founders and founders would like rather code than run the company at the deepest bottom of their heart. Some of them don't want to grow, that they don't want to have all the troubles that comes with the growth, but they want to have a steady income and that's okay. But those kind of companies have the risk that if the Drupal loses the momentum, they will lose the steady income. And as the companies are small, they can't attract people that will develop the business to raise them to the next level because they can't afford to have somebody that is not productive, that doesn't do and bring euros or bucks in. The market would feed more Drupal projects. In the current situation already, there's lack of talent. Everybody complains about lack of talent and then we don't even try to grow the Drupal's market share that much. It grows without the agencies doing that much of anything. And my concern is that the Drupal companies one by one are eaten by bigger companies that already have or want to have a Drupal in their portfolio. And the Drupal community will be very, very different place then because big companies are run with different incentives. So either you should go big or you should go home at the end and I suck says that you should get big. The community and the contributions, this is where it shows that where the heart is in the Drupal companies that only fraction is like 3% or something like that. Of the companies don't contribute and everybody else contributes. Lot is in the documentation and development and then if you go down and the design and usability less than 10% of the companies contribute design and usability and one of the biggest reasons not to choose Drupal is complex UI or bad UI. So we create our own problems by focusing on wrong things because you should always remember that how Oracle got to the position. It's not about the great product. The products have been mediocre but it's about great marketing. And we have a great product and we have weak marketing and the product looks weak from the non-technical person perspective. It's ugly and it's complex. So those people that have the money, own the money that have the budgets in the company don't understand the beauty of Drupal. And it's sort of like the ugly duckling that you need to wait for a year that you start to see the beauty of things. Whether you have the time to do it, whether the business owner actually believes that yes, everything will be fine and now it's complete mess for a while or not, it's a good question. The amount of companies that contribute have grown during the years and this is really good news. There's less and less companies that don't contribute. And the most of the reason for contribution are altruistic that we want to give back. We have got so much we want to give back. It's right thing to do. We are proud of being part of a bigger whole. And then there are business reasons that are typically related to staff, that our staff wants us to contribute, that we have picked the people from the community and then we have the burden of giving them time to contribute because otherwise they will leave. There is very little business incentives gained from the contribution itself. The contribution doesn't change your business that much. There might be some companies that does but it changes your business by raising the sea level and not an individual boat. So everybody will be better at the triples better, including you. This is something that DEA is concerned that the contributions are going down. And more there is bigger companies that the triple is just a side note, the less there will be contributions. So that's why it's important that triple companies grow and not be eaten by bigger companies. Lack of time, client projects and complexity of contribution are the typical reason those have been seven years, the exactly same. Finally, the reason I've mentioned that something is happening on that front, on the complexity of contribution. If trees could add more time to developers then it would be a real wizard. Then there's technology, there's the golden calf in the room. We don't ask that much about technology. We ask that what libraries you use and you do use some other systems and then Drupal to understand that where the companies are. But people that answer the survey love technology because it just pops up, greatest successes, different kind of technology stuff, greatest challenges related to technology, concerns, technology, so forth, so forth, so forth. There's huge amount of technology involved in the business survey and it's weird. The technology is just a means to an end, no more, no less. And if business people in the company think too much of technology, then they're thinking wrong things. They should think about value, they should think about the client and how to produce the value for the client and how to monetize that and so forth. And technology is just a way to do it. I know that there's a lot of Drupal companies that feel that the Drupal is the only one, the chosen one maybe even. And that's nice, but if you still let the Drupal run your business and not yourself and your clients, then sooner or later you might be in troubles. So people should focus on the staff, on the client, and they are running the business wrong easily. But that means also that the technology is probably the easiest thing for them, that they know it so well. So the lures, the sirens are singing there in technology that come to fix this bug, make this feature instead of that pick up the phone. I've said to a number of people in my company that this is the heaviest object in the world. When it's put on the table, it's extremely hard to pick it up and call to the client. Instead, you will use all the other mechanism, JIRA, Slack, what not email, that you don't want to talk with the person. That would probably in a couple of minutes explain the problem instead of that you waste week in JIRA and everybody's agitated. But JIRA is technology, phone is communication. Same shows in the number of responses. And one thing that really boggles me that there are still people in the community, in the business community that think that the D7 to D8 transition was wrong. Wake up, move on, it's past. The current system is superior in all measurable ways. Maybe the simplicity is something that the D7 might have, I don't know much. That's true about it either. But there are still people that lost the D7 here and it was so good and so forth to wake up, move on. And if there was somebody here, then I'm not sure about saying that you need to wake up. Then let's look at the staff. The hiring has been focused for several years, as you can see that this is 22, 21, 20, and so forth. So constantly hiring mode, it has grown from years to years. I plan to hire Drupal talent this year, it has grown. I do not plan to hire Drupal talent this year, has gone smaller and that's typically those lifestyle businesses that they don't need to hire anybody because they are happy with the people that they have. The main reasons, you can see that the attrition has grown and that bad news. That bad news in two ways. One, your company loses good people. Two, the community loses the people because most probably they won't go to other Drupal company but they will go somewhere else. The Drupal community is no longer that kind of church that people go every week and then stay there because of the faith or because of the community feeling but it's less. The people have kids, the people have other things on their lives, so if people leave Drupal company, the chances are that they will leave the community too. For good. The developers have been very, very hard to find throughout the years and then in the beginning of these there was a lot of companies saying that somebody need to do something about it. And now in the past two years, I found out that somebody is actually me, that I need to do something about it. And then we have been gradually being able to untangle the problem. Almost all companies that I discuss train their own Drupal people. There's no other way. If you think that you could start use poaching, then you are raising to the bottom that you raise the price, raise the salaries. And then the market price might not raise at that time. Or then if you don't grow, then you're actually shrinking if the market grows. Salaries are growing extremely fast. Or they used to grow extremely fast. Then the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis inflation and then because of these reasons, not any of these because all of these would just accelerate the salary growth. But because of that, a lot of venture capital backed companies stopped hiring and actually started firing. The developers got more common sense for the salary requests that the sky is. There is a limit before the sky. It's somewhere there that you actually should favor for a company that you can be there throughout maybe coming recession instead of that. You just hop on to the company, the company to maximize your own personal value. The business community adds, neither is sort of worth a shout out that this is the most friendly business community, most open, I think that also most honest business community, of course, you never know what the people actually mean when they say something, but I've got that kind of feeling that everybody in the CEO dinners and these discussions, they are honest and they want to talk about the issues with the real names. And this is unique. And this is something that will be our strength in bad times and in growth times because in both you need grit. And if your grit is not enough, then you can always talk with somebody, some of your competitor and actually get energy instead of losing it like in the other industries. And I feel really privileged to belong such lovely group. So I'm really grateful to you all people that I can be here with you. And then the conclusions. Lack of growth makes Drupal business vulnerable and Drupal business community vulnerable to internal external shocks. Sometimes you don't need the competitors because your own staff makes your life very miserable. But there are external threats, there are internal threats. And most of the companies are so small that they are fragile by definition that the shocks will be problematic. And then the business owner, the agency owner, the CEO is the person that needs to bear the shocks and that's not nice, I can tell you that then there are, it's a slope to mental problems and the exhaustion and all kinds of things that you don't want to. So if you grow, you can hire people that worry for you and you pay for them, pay to them that they carry certain amount of the load. The Drupal platform is in excellence and this has never been better shaped to conquer the world. So it's just us to make it happen. Finding good people, keeping good people is harder every year and if you are not a big company you can't afford to pay big salaries either. So again, this is something. And then after let's say 20, 30 people in your company the community spirit inside the company and that is gradually disappears and then you need to compensate that with bigger salaries because then you are no longer sort of trailblazing on something but you are part of a bigger corporation enterprise that's not that sexy or interesting to be in that kind of thing and then the problems are harder also but the money is way better. One of the biggest question is that how the raising cost that are raising left and right can be transferred to the client price. I don't know if somebody knows then please tell me too. I would be really, really interested to hear that what is the right way to do it. But all of these problems are solvable. That's the good news that these have been all these problems have existed before in different industries and different platforms and they have been sold. Not everybody has sold them but there's a lot of people that can do it. It's about sales to make money that the first sale and then execute and then invoice. That is very, very simple business. They are not that many steps in the fraction chain. And it's about execution and the best day to start executing this is today. Oh, sorry, the best day was three years ago and the second best day is today. So it's better to start right now. That's all that I got. Are there any questions, concerns or something from the audience? Can you speak a little bit about the groups, sales teams? Do many people have one person teams, three people? What's the norm based on the size of the company? We have not served with that. So this is not even a pseudo scientific answer but sort of my gut feeling that can precision guess work, let's put this way. So typically if the company is less than 30 people there's not that much sales. There might be the founder doing the sales or there might be some guy that actually loves or knows or doesn't hate selling, let's put this way. The sales strategy is that we aggressively wait at the phone rings and then we immediately answer and sell them when they buy. And then we fill out the RFQs that come to buy. Then when it goes bigger than there's typically there's one or two sales people then there's maybe somebody from marketing then the sales team grows a bit, marketing grows a bit. So with the 100 person company I would be surprised that there would be more than five people in that kind of commercial roles, sales and marketing put together. It's, if it's consulting business, if somebody's selling products on top of Drupal then it might be different. But most of us in the Drupal ecosystem are consulting. If you are not selling to other Drupal shops then it's mostly not that many sales people. And then the effectiveness of the sales people actually is very much related to that how good processes and materials you have because you can get, one sales person can easily get work to 100 people and five lousy ones can't. So it's about the quality of the people and quality of your process also. So it's not just the people. I think that one of the biggest issues to let your business grow is that if you hire more people it means also that you have higher overhead costs. So you're more headcount, you have the more costs you have to make a project. And so my experience is that you don't get more money for a Drupal project if your company has a higher headcount. So I think this is the biggest issues we experienced in the past. So have you any ideas how to get more money for your Drupal project if your company is bigger but your competition has a lower overhead with the costs? Yeah, there will be overhead but on the other hand, I know that for example in France there was 400 people Drupal company and they did well, they did extremely well and then it was sold and then I lost the contact to the previous owners. So I don't know what has happened but they were profitable so it can be done. That's the first sort of relief in a sense. And there are other companies in the ICT that have grown to thousands of people and they are profitable even though they have the overhead costs. There are maybe two or three things. One is that which industry are selling to. Is it something that actually is used to pay a lot and everything that you do is on the money or is it that every single thing is always a haggle? Like charities and non-profit they try to squeeze the amount of how much of their charities is actually spent on non-charity stuff. The other one is that you should produce more value going to design, going to consulting, going to bigger part of the pie, doing support, these areas and then the third one is that you should add value and the value actually adds better in a bigger company because then you have more senior people, you have people around the company that have different kind of things so you have always somebody that can help the client and then you become more valuable to the client compared to a small company. So there are ways to do it and you need to do all of these simultaneously and not one after one because you need to grow it all the time. A good example for example, the price and the value is that our CTO charges 300 euros an hour for GDPR consulting and clients think that is cheap. It's cheap because the next line has a GDPR lawyer that charges 750 euros an hour. So it's a perception, for example. So if you work with companies like that that charge a lot from the client, then your prices will grow easier because you are the cheap guy. You talked about the developer base being limited and not growing. I would like to hear your thoughts about how we can solve this. Yes, if I would have solved it, I wouldn't be here but I would be selling people to you but there are a few factors that you need to take in. First of all, PHP is not sexy. Node.js is sexy for example in Finland so everybody would like to do that. So you need to find people that are willing to work with PHP. Now they have no issues working with PHP. Let's put this way because some people say that they tool as a tool. PHP 8 is very good programming language, very modern and so forth. And people have from PHP 4.6 or 4.7 they have the idea of what PHP is. So that's the first hurdle to go through. The other one is that the people need to understand we're publishing and that can be trained but you need to also somewhat love the idea that you are not doing machine-to-machine stuff but you are doing machine-to-people stuff and finding those kind of people. My advice is to look at the other agencies. They have smaller teams that might not have that much processes and so forth so you might save a few people from them to your bigger team that is more structured and has better development options and so forth. So you need to find those kind of pockets of people that the Drupal is upgrade and not the downgrade and they exist but it's very different on different markets. I can't really say that okay go to this address and there's plenty of people waiting to be saved with Drupal. If I would know the address I would be there already. Right now from the demand side it seems that if someone knows Drupal they are hired on the spot, right? Isn't there an oxymoron? The fact that everybody's looking for developers and developers are not there. I mean what does it take to put this message out there that if you know Drupal you get hired basically? All the people that know Drupal are hired so there's no point saying that message because they already are somewhere working so we need to get people that don't know Drupal to know Drupal and that takes half a year to hear and it needs somebody to mentor them, it needs a program that they can run and so forth and I know that a lot of companies that have been talking here say that they train their own people. If you have that then the question is that how long does it take that they are productive and how you can minimize the amount of time you spend with them to get productive? There are certain ways to do it and we are exploring those but I don't want to go to that these because we want to have a certain age. On that one we have been doing training program for 10 years and learned a lot with that. And then the other one is that how you can minimize the amount of your people, your seniors helping them without compromising the quality or the culture. It's not easy but it's something that if somebody actually thinks about that then they might be breakthroughs but it's the only way that have been found working. There have been all kind of ideas to get the schools in board with this one and to be able to school say that lovely idea we would like to train our people but we need the trainer. And then we say that who could train that every company says that I'm really busy right now, maybe the next guy. And then the full circle comes and nobody has no trainer and then that sort of dies there, unfortunately. I have here a couple of new developers from last year who probably could comment on that but my question was how many answers did you get and where they came from? This year we got 63. I forgot to answer myself. Yeah, so the 63 answers this year it has been going a bit down. The best years were 120, 30 or something like that. All over the world. The funny thing that what we see and what I didn't mention here but now when we started talk about it is that the more and more companies are sort of global or regional that they used to be back in when we started that this company has office in Finland and this has in Sweden and this has Norway, Denmark then there's next company and there's always one company per country. Now there's companies that okay, we have people in our business, we have business in UK, France, Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland and Italy which country that company operates that's unclear in the sense and it's also something that we can't poke too deeply because then the people will say that I don't want to answer that question and then stop answering the survey in total. So that's a trend that the companies have come sort of borderless and the pandemic has helped in that sense. So the good thing about pandemic is that the people think about the borders way less. On the other hand, there are very few companies and I see this extra that actually know that the hiring a person from other country is not straight forward, even if there's even inside EU that you need to actually pay the taxes to that country for the value that person is doing or you might end up in court and that is extremely costilator. Okay, we have time for one more question, anybody? Is there any data on the median project sizes that these companies are working or the median price per project or price per labor hour? No, we, there are a few mentions in the, in typically the biggest projects kind of thing that there is mentioned like this year was 3.2 million euro because ever was in a project there was some other mention that got sort of international clients so it must be six figures at least or then it's very small international stuff, probably seven figures, but we don't ask the euros or bucks because people would stop answering. That is our, we haven't tried it, of course. I must admit that too, but we think that when we start to go too deep to the finances, then there will be less inclination to answer the survey and we have decided not to go there because it would also give me and Michelle unfair advantage that we don't want to have. Do you have time for one more quick one? Sure. Have you identified any kind of regional variations like between Europe and the States, Asia and so on regarding the state of Drupal? Not that much in Drupal, the, there was the before Corona, the US was doing great. That was the, maybe, maybe because the people or people thought that the US must do great. It's always great there. During the Corona, US did not do great. It did very pretty shitty, to be honest. And now it has sort of changed the tonality of the US companies a bit that they seem to be more down to earth, that they were probably left and right. And then the, there's less, not really bragging that would be the right word, but the sort of less projection of good things. And there's also the projection of not so good things from the American company. So that's maybe the biggest difference and change. The worries are the same. They might be a bit amplified in different areas. That now, for example, the Ukrainian companies that answered they had very different worries than everybody else and so forth. So there are some regional differences, but nothing very, very different. So this is truly global business in that sense. So time's up. I do thank you all. Thank you.