 So welcome everybody I think you all hear me. It sounds pretty loud from here in front Welcome to my talk about how to diversify your web service business beyond Drupal My name is Daniel Gerhardt, and I'm one of the founders of amazing labs. I Can't tell you how to diversify your web service business beyond Drupal that works for you But I'm going to try and tell you some stories about our personal experience because we've done quite a bit of diversification in the past few years since we started with our company So some words about myself. So I was born and bred in the united states in switzerland I moved to switzerland when I was seven years old. I studied economics in Basel Then I became a chartered accountant So I worked as a manager with kpmg in the area of international auditing and accounting Then I had after five years quite a change in my career So that's when the amazing story starts and that's what i'm going to tell you more about later on And another big step for myself is what that I moved after many years being in switzerland. I moved to south africa last year So 2007 that was the end of my old career in the start of my new life. That was the time when Facebook had already taken off. So people were going online having social behavior And my husband Gregory and I started spinning the idea of creating a startup creating a platform That centers around civic and social action that allows people to collaborate online To build projects around common ideas and achieve goals with fundraising tool publication tools Lots of features and functions and at the end that ended up that we built that platform around or on Drupal So we kicked off our startup. We quit our jobs 2007 both of us. We founded our company 2008 We went to silicon valley. We had interviews with tech bloggers got Quite some media attention had lots of fun. We're really in this web startup Groove we launched our platform called amaze.com in 2008 first to alpha then a beta Those were really good times Then came 2009 2009 the money was slowly going down. We had some user traction but not really enough Lots of ideas how to further develop our platform and become leading in that space But it just didn't happen And that was when we had first moments of okay, what's going to come next the first team member Left for a proper job away from our startup And at the same time we had that down moment of not knowing how to continue We had some requests from corporates if we couldn't do some customized work for them If we couldn't recreate this platform for them They don't want to have their projects on amaze.com But they do want to work with us and have maybe a known platform for For example for a company anniversary or to just collaborate online internally And so we did three white label solutions of amaze.com in that time That gave us money gave us additional motivation and we did see a new vision We saw that it could be possible to make something good out of what didn't turn out to be so successful And so we did more and more customized work We did it a little bit under the hood So there was still this platform amaze.com where you could log in create your project And then there was a footer with a very small line saying by the way you can call us if you want to customize solution But we didn't really out ourselves. We were still sharing this vision of becoming a leader in this web platform space with our own product So In 2010 we decided we are going to go that path. We're going to become a web service company We're going to out ourselves as a web agency so away from the sexy young web startup to a very common web service company We did a rebranding and we launched in september 2010 as amaze labs So amaze labs.com and that was clearly a web service company based on building Websites on Drupal We had huge expertise with our platform that we had built in the past years and that gave us the kickstart then To be successful in that service industry What happened later in the next years is so we had we had grown quite well with amaze with amaze labs That was about 30 growth per year and in 2013. We had our had our first spin-off. We're going to talk more about that later That's amaze metrics and then we had two geographical spin-offs, which was 2014 We had an office opened in austin in texas and 2015 now a few months ago in june in capetown So maybe back to the topic. So why should I diversify or why should we diversify like away from what we all love most which is Drupal That's maybe just one perspective diversifying away from something that's core I mean, we might want to just ask ourselves like What is our overall strategic company goal? What do we want to stand for we asked ourselves? What does amaze labs want to stand for? What does our group want to stand for if we continue to grow? Ours is to become a leading global web service provider global web service provider That maybe also explains why we have to diversify beyond Drupal because Our strategy and our offering cannot just only include Drupal. It's not we're not only perceived as a technology provider We build websites and provide web services to clients So following that strategic goal is really important. We all know that and to succeed in a goal. It's crucial to just Understand, where are we now? Why do clients want to work with you now? Why do they book you? Why do they ask you to write a proposal? Why do they then Accept your proposal? Maybe it's because you just happen to be the cheapest service provider offering for a certain product that could be But then they still had a reason to ask you in So you do stands for something we all do stand for something we have a reputation And that reputation can be a great technical capacity. It can be being a leading Drupal Service provider, but it can also be something else. It can be that we try to create beautiful websites. It could be that You have a great team of people that people just like working with you because you deliver a good service Maybe it's just generally a service orientation that stands for you and not the technology So only if you understand why you win projects you can follow that strategy And also make the right decisions and where and how to diversify and what to focus on So in our case we believe or we have seen that about 50 percent of our clients Choose us because of Drupal Because we are the largest Drupal shop in switzerland that exclusively does Drupal. We have lots of experience So about 50 percent come they know they want a Drupal website. That's what they're going to do They're going to ask us in But then we have 50 other percent and those are really important. Otherwise we can't succeed and about 30 come Because they want a good looking website. So beautiful web services is something we try to create We try to make it look good And 20 come for other services maybe because they've seen a case a special solution that we've built a community solution Or a second screen solution just something special that they've seen with another client that they think we might have good expertise in So the perception of the agency is not fully based on technology. It's on delivery and experience And that's why our positioning and our strategy must also be quite broad So after having failed with our like social collaboration platform Like maybe on a side note amazing.com did continue to exist for a while But as per end of 2011 we closed that platform and fully focused on the web service side With that platform we wanted to be all to everybody We wanted to achieve it all and we've learned quite painfully that we have to get a few things right to be successful in the business And we also often criticize our clients for you know Creating feature creeps and just wanting to do everything and putting it all in one release But we're all not really immune to adding another service offering It's like oh, could you maybe do this website and wordpress, you know, we have one in triple one in wordpress You could go like yeah, okay Or we also need SEO. Will you add that for us too? Yes, of course not a problem. We need german translations Yes, we'll organize that for you. So I think we all see that this just tends to happen Adding additional services and losing focus Is this now a contradiction to diversify and to to stay focused We decided for amazing labs that we focus fully on Drupal Technology is clear. We do Drupal only if it's not Drupal. It's not within our company It might be another company within our group, but it's not going to be amazing labs Because we believe that we want to stand for being the best in our field. At least that's what we try And that's some something our clients can easily refer to it's like you stand for being Switzerland's largest Drupal company or someone else could maybe be Just the best android app developer, whatever it is So for those 50 percent that come to us for the technology, we want to have a very clear Delivery focus or a very clear reputation Those are maybe the cio's the cto's of the companies those that do the technology decisions that care about what cms is there But what about those other 50 percent? We now tend the larger the project gets the more we tend to talk to the marketing people So usually it's now the chief marketing officer We're talking to when we get the projects and sometimes they don't even care what we're going to build it on They just assume the product is going to work. They even assume it's usable. That's just like the underlying assumption So they are surely going to Look for something else So the reputation is focused of course on different things that we can Deliver along the line as I said one of ours is the design focus And that's how we try and get into the other area and not just impressing like cio's and cto's but also the other part of the business owners and decision makers So if we go one step back into Diversification as a topic there are generally two ways you can go in diversifying you can Have a service diversification of your business or a geographical diversification We've done both in the last few years. We're going to talk more about amazing metrics Which is the typical path of service diversification It's just for example a web designing company starting to offer web design Which hasn't done that before or starting to offering hosting hosting solutions Geographical diversification is quite straight. We have Us being a swiss company starting to offer our services abroad diversification can start very subtle the different means so In switzerland we often observe that we have a very high Cost level in switzerland So there are many agencies that are now only now starting to outsource some of their capacity They hire maybe start very small hiring one or two freelancers abroad Maybe in eastern europe or some other closer place, but still with a significantly lower cost level That is already a form of diversification It might be that that agency does not offer their services yet in another country But they are diversifying because they expose themselves to a different Legal environment to maybe a different currency and that's already part of diversifying a business Just maybe a very subtle way Of course that collaboration can get stronger. They can start looking for partners joint ventures They can merge with other companies abroad. They can acquire other companies And they're getting to stronger forms of collaboration and diversification Or go the ultimate step and just do it yourself Go somewhere start a new branch open a new location be it in a different service area or in a different geographic location There are many many reasons for diversification and this these bubbles here They're not exclusive in a way that they aim To name all of them. These are just some that we've seen we've experienced The most obvious one probably for all business owners is revenue growth. The own market might just be too small It's too small to just offer Drupal development in a small country possibly Might see it's very easy to tap into something extended and then grow a significant share of your revenue Risk reduction, obviously portfolio theory All of you know that if you have different pillars you can stand on it's not so bad if one breaks away If you're a one-trick pony and that one trick pony or that pony tends to get weak Then you can be in big trouble So risk reduction on a long term is a very important reason for diversification Extending the service range is another one as we've seen before and Offering new services seems so easy. If there's an ongoing client relationship Where we have happy customers. We've built websites for them with design development It's so easy to tap into that and add an additional service so adding more services along the chain just reduces acquisition costs towards Adding new clients and acquiring new clients the acquisition cost is significantly lower in gaining the same amount of revenue of an existing client Then gaining a new client. That's another good reason for diversification Team maybe not such an obvious one, but we're talking about the service business and in the service business Your team members are One of your biggest assets if not the only asset We don't have anything else Our team members are the ones who sell our products who build our products who are the face to the customer They are everything we have and we invest a lot of money in our team members all of us So we want them to stay we want them to be happy. We want them to be able to expand into different areas That's not possible if we don't grow if we don't give them new opportunities Either to grow within our organization or within different service areas They might just leave much earlier than we would have hoped In our organization, we have very low fluctuation in the past years. We've had A fluctuation of employees of between four and seven percent And we believe that is not only because people like working with us Which is very great, but it's really because they have a career path They have a possibility to expand and even to change their mind We had one early developer in our team who then became a web analyst And that's not possible if there's no not possible if there's no diversification available Then synergies um, of course if you have team members within different Geographical areas, but mainly different disciplines and areas of expertise They can share knowledge you can build more organizational know-how and that's something you can rely on and is a great backup Sales is another good area. We already talked about the service range It's easier to do sales for different companies at once If we finish off a web development client It's quite easy to add on some web analytics SCoSEM because we already have a trustworthy functioning client relationship So even there again, the acquisition cost is very low and lead generation is quite low too Attractiveness as the last point Of course, they're companies. They're maybe based in Paris, London, New York That's maybe the best case of like attractiveness of locations. It's maybe Quite sexy to be able to say you work for such a company. Um It's not always that best case with those towns, but being able to say that you're In different locations with different services can be very attractive for employees. So from an employer branding perspective Diversification can be a good a good argument So how are we structured within our group? We had Amazee Labs that was then created in 2010 but based on the company Amazee.com We had this spin-off Amazee metrics. I quickly mentioned so Amazee metrics is an online marketing company That is focused on SCoSEM and web analytics. I'll talk a bit more about that case later on So that was a new company that we established at the same location of our first Amazee Labs company Then we had two further geographical Diversifications that were also own entities that we built. So a new entity in Austin in 2014 and a new entity In 2015 in Cape Town And when we built the Austin team, we set up a holding company to sit on top Which owns all the companies underneath. That's just how the structure works. So these are all individual legal entities Now we're going to talk about Amazee metrics because this is the classical path of service Diversification which is diversification beyond Drupal Just going to tell you a bit of how this happened. It didn't just come On the way It built up and the spark was actually that we had a large large client for Amazee Labs a big website That we have built and that customer had wanted more from us a very very typical situation And the question was if we couldn't offer web analytics services because one of our developers who was involved with that project Was very strong in web analytics And so we did agree to provide these web analytic services to this company All under the Amazee Labs Zurich roof So at that time We noticed that there's a big business opportunity there. There were other customers tapping into that direction We just identified we could build a business out of this or offer it in addition to what we do Now the question that came up is how was how are we going to promote it? Is it going to be like a new landing page on our website? Or how are we going to now tell the world that we're also offering web analytics SEO and SEM? And we found out it's not going to work that way. Amazee Labs stands so much for Drupal Development That we're going to dilute our branding if we start offering all these things alongside There were other arguments that led to us building a new company One very important one was that Amazee Labs Zurich was very successful at that time And we did not want to take the risk of pulling it down if our new venture doesn't work So diversifying into new services is of course like starting a new venture. You don't know if it's going to work out or not So we made just the strategic decision to outsource or spin off that new branch in order to ensure That the successful running entity is and can stay healthy That the developers or the whole team members of the healthy entity don't get punished if maybe the new one Doesn't work out and maybe we're not even able to pay a bonus or good salaries by the end of the year So we wanted to just outsource that risk into a new entity We also wanted to find a leader for that new team that is in full profit and loss responsibility Not just maybe running a cost center within our organization But being fully responsible of building a team building a service portfolio and having responsibility for the success or the failure Those were the main reasons why we built amazee metrics with a new brand in a new entity But building on the main amazee brand Back to the reason so what reasons really were pulling us or bringing us to do this step Revenue growth for sure that was probably the main driver We did see the business opportunity and we thought we could expand and grow our revenue Which did happen after we started amazee metrics risk reduction That turned out to be a very theoretical thing So portfolio theory would say of course that diversifying reduces risk at that time. It was just increasing risk It was we didn't know if it's going to turn out. We did decide to outsource that part of spin it off To make sure that the healthy entity is not at risk and short and mid term It just increased the risk of our entire group not in a bad way It's fine, but just the risk exposure is higher So it seems turned out to be quite a theoretical thing on a shorter mid term long term. This of course does work out Service range extension. Yes, it's obvious. We now include our The sco scm and analytic services of amazee metrics into all of our proposals It's like an add-on we can tell our clients and by the way when you're done or during the development you could also do this On-site audit or the off-site analysis And actually 40 percent about of our clients do choose to work with our sister company too Which is a very nice success rate and which proves that we had a successful step into extending our service range The team aspect we talked about earlier So the skills and career paths between our two companies there are quite different So there hasn't been any real mingle there yet anyone stepping over from one company to the other But the synergies are clearly there. So the both teams sit together in an office They're very close be it over lunch or after our drinks or just sitting together over a meeting and discussing what can be done together Um, they can do the monthly analytics of our website We can help them with some technical SEO implementation. So they're clearly synergies between those teams The sales side again builds up on our service range So if the Zurich CEO goes to a conference, it's easy to pitch the other service in one Line with it. So it just did also ease sales of both businesses Now i'm not going to go in depth into the case Austin or Cape Town But I quickly want to say that Also there there was a spark why we did this why we went to Austin It was not that we sat at a board table and thought what's the next step It was that we had two enormously talented people living in san antonio working for us as freelancers We tried to integrate them more into the team So at that time we only had a location at Zurich an office location and also only served european clients We wanted to bring them over that didn't work out because of the work permit situation And so we were thinking of alternatives and decided it would be nice to build something around them So if they can't come to us we might go to them And san antonio was maybe not the most attractive place to choose But we looked at other european cities and also at other global cities and found that austin would be a very attractive Place for different reasons our reasons included how interesting is the market how interesting Is the talent how hip is the whole place how tech savvy is the place and austin ranked very well So we decided together with our two team members catherine andrew that will open a hub or open a team office in austin and that they will move there and operate from there Again, then we founded an own legal entity hired a ceo and build the team around our core members catherine andrew Which has been very successful. They're very busy Cape town was again a completely different case cape town was the case that My husband gregory who's my co-founder is have south african and we've been spending lots of time there on holidays And it just has become a personal wish of ours to move to south africa And so we made a plan how to step more out of the day-to-day operations of the syric entity and how we could start our lives in south africa So that's what we did. We found a leader for the syric team hired him And started stepping a little bit back and last october we moved to cape town But we didn't know if we're going to start a business in cape town It was an opportunistic decision that came after we had met the community there So we started stepping into that community meeting people looking at troupel Seeing what's around looking at the market and then just one took the next and we started talking to people We wanted to acquire a small company there or we're thinking about it But then decided not to due to different expectations But hired two local people and started building the team There that was in june actually that we started. Um, it's been very busy I now run the cape town office and been running and trying to solve some legal things and Things don't always run as smooth in south africa as they do in other countries. So still chasing some certificates But now it's our third month No, actually our fourth month that we're running and I just hired the sixth person So it's working well and it's keeping us busy Now again, what do these three cases just all have in common and this counts for us It can be different for anyone else, but they all just grasps an opportunity rather than forcing growth So these decisions were made based on something that was around either a personal choice and emotion a situation It's not that we make these decisions at a board table that we sit together every year and say okay now a year is over What are we going to do next? It's that we see something it feels Something interesting. We want to pursue and then see if it's something we can build around We do create spreadsheets after that So it's like the number crunching and all the analytics that follows after that gut feeling and some kind of emotional decision So we do justify that gut that gut feeling with some number juggling Now there are three main areas of challenges that we have experienced The first financial resources Of course, this doesn't work without money You can bootstrap a company you start you can start with few resources But at the end there's no way around getting an office Maybe hiring some resources that you can't fully fully make billable yet. There is some overhead going into this whole process So without financial resources, it's not possible to do any of these steps Although it can be managed and of course bootstrapping is possible One very very important area that we have discovered in the past two years and have experienced also in very painful ways is the increased complexity We have five legal entities. They all need accounting Some of them have different accounting systems. They all need management capacity. They need own contracts. They need own regulations All of a sudden you start thinking about things like cross-billing What if this company works for this one? What if this one starts working for this one? How do we build that different currencies different market rates? Does that work tax wise? All these questions that one maybe tends to underestimate a little bit when you start just offering new services But due to the fact that we did create separate legal entities We did blow up operations quite a bit. So you create a lot of overhead with this and What's also not to underestimate is the increase of the technical complexity. So the processes that become more complex If I look Bosti's not in the room, but our DevOps Person Bosti he's struggling sometimes quite a bit to think of our server setup If we have these clients all over and how do we charge these things and how do we manage these processes? So how did we address that? I mean we Did need lots of management capacity We did build our company out of management capacity. So when we started we had zero technical know-how which made it very difficult for us at that time But we were able to bring in management capacity and just deal with it So when we started a new company, we knew for example amazing metrics, we're going to need a new CEO from day one We're going to need someone to run that business. It won't be possible to just let that team grow organically So either we applied the existing management capacity we had within our founder team or we hired new managers to come in The third area of challenges that we've seen are the cultural challenges and this Is probably worth the talk on its own and I know that there is another talk somewhere in the business track during these days about culture company culture, but also challenges in working remotely with different cultures It starts from different time zone Only a few hours of overlapping working time Higher flexibility expected from the team There's so many aspects that come in It's different lingo. I mean we see that our company language is English Everyone speaks English But English in Switzerland the US and South Africa is not the same One very maybe Many of you are aware of the differences between the american and the english or the european culture But the south african culture brings very new fun aspects in two one example is There are different meanings of now in south african Now means Maybe sometime in south african. Maybe if you're lucky sometime Then there is now now That means probably today And then there is No, sorry. I'm just I just confused. No just now is the next step between now and just now Just now is probably today and then there's now now which means as soon as I get to it But it doesn't mean now So now now in south african doesn't mean now now at this moment It means as soon as I get to it Which could be after I've gone to the toilet after I've had a coffee and after I've done three other things And that's actually as good as it gets you won't find any south african to give you anything better than now now So you're just gonna have to live with that But now imagine a swiss saying do this now and the south african thinking that's good enough if I do it by friday So these things have to be addressed There's nothing you can't deal with it in any other way than making it transparent Bringing it onto the table and talking to your people and saying If you say this this person is going to understand this now You're going to have to find a common understanding and maybe replace now with a date and a time To make it clear for everyone and these are all very tiny things But they can become significant in a project that maybe has a very tight deadline So with all of these challenges, they are there and they are strong But they can all be addressed and we just try addressing them with lots of transparency And we also do lots of mistakes, but we just try and bring it up on the table and deal with it when it's there The nice thing is that it's lots of fun I mean experience and overcoming these challenges is is a great thing and Every company makes Its own choice or the people behind the company what they want to be what they want to stand for what is their vision Our vision is bold. It sounds bold to say we want to be a leading global web service provider But it is true. It's our vision It might be that we achieve that within a few years and it might not but it's something we strive for We want to have that bold vision. We want to explore the borders We want to cross those borders. We want to find the next big project And that's how we define entrepreneurship for ourselves So we like these challenges and to overcome them and we try to just have a good laugh in between if something goes wrong And try and fix the things So we want to give everyone in the team something that they can work for that they can look ahead Work for be proud of And that's something that just keeps me running every day and trying to make a better job with every Next step And that's actually already the end because there's so many more things we could get into detail But I know that the experience in this room the experience is so diverse And maybe this would be just a nice time to open up to discuss a few questions I'm sure you have things to contribute. What are your ideas of diversification? And it would be nice to open up the round for some questions and discussions and anytime if you have questions to me Please address them And here is my contact information if you happen to come to capetown ping me To have a beer and thank you for listening and let's discuss further So any questions any comments? We can just raise that. Yeah So the question is in case you didn't understand if we service our swiss customers from capetown Um or vice versa Yes and no so the swiss company is in charge of dealing with the swiss customers Now what we've started doing and that's also one of our strategic goals Is we do want to reduce cost of our swiss operation team, which is the largest there are over 25 people now in zürich and by outsourcing work to capetown Um, we've started that it's very fresh because we just hired the first people in june and started operations then But we've already had some few things that have can that were able To be pushed down to the capetown office, but they're still managed by the zürich team So the project managers remain in zürich. We just want to add development capacity in capetown And we would serve swiss clients directly From capetown if they were small and not relevant for the zürich team If the zürich team would say look, this is not something we can do Um, it's not it's not a budget we can look after and the capetown team would say Oh, maybe we could then it would be fine. Otherwise it would all run via the zürich team Yes, um, so did everyone understand that question? No, okay, so the question was if Just being solely focused on drupal from a technology point of view is um a big risk If we have ever considered looking at other cms looking at other technologies to diversify within the technology that we offer Um, I mean michael could answer this question better than I can but no actually we do consider that we consider that all the time But not in a serious way that we say we want to go away It's just that we have a half yearly review michael monitors He's so into everything that happens within the whole open source world That we just sit together have a look at the status quo and decide again Are we going to move forward as we have decided? Or are we going to look away? So that's like a half year assessment we do just reconfirming our strategy saying this is what happened in the last half year We think it's still safe to continue this way Until now it was always a very clear decision that we're going to stick to drupal We do believe that this positioning that we have is very strong There are many clients that come to us because we just do that And because we're just quite good at that and if we start diversifying I do think the dilution effect is significant And so until now it was clear, but we do consider it. Yes all the time We don't want to run into a wall and I mean we see the risks now dris addressed it in a good way This morning and I we feel that all and it's not that we can say we're not nervous about what's happening No, that's not a secret at all. Of course not. So the question was how many people work in our office Was it only were you asking Cape Town office or a Cape Town office and what nationalities they are? So we are now by by hiring First of November will be eight people in the Cape Town office Including Gregory and myself who are the founders Nationalities oh wow I have to count so we are Swiss German South African and all the others are South African That's quite easy So the mix of nationalities is much much bigger in the Zurich team the Zurich team covers all kinds of nationalities We just found out this week. I'm not going to say because I think there's going to be like a small Twitter competition going on but we have many different languages in the team and it's quite diverse But Cape Town is quite straightforward. We try to hire locals only Yes, um good question. Um, so the question is that Julian works for a company with seven different locations And how did we or if we did manage to create links between the developers that sit in those different locations? um Yes, we did I mean, maybe it's easier our core has been very strong in Zurich and then the new companies they developed as outposts So when Austin started they started because they were freelancers within our team So the both team members of Austin, they knew the Zurich team very well They've been visiting us. We've been seeing each other at con So there was a personal relationship that made everything very easy with the Cape Town office. It was different These people are new so these links need to be created It's easy to create the links because we founders are now down there So we can somehow create these links, but we also do it through some structure So there is some structure that goes above the legal entity just to give an example There is for example Sasha who's sitting here too. He runs, um, uh, I think monthly or every three weeks and the front's tuesday The front's tuesday is just an hour where all the front enders of the group sit together and talk about topics And the same we have for back end for site building and for project managers So we do have meetups that maybe run on a three to four weekly basis Where everyone not meet up physically, of course, but meet up on a hangout and chat together And this has become very important because first of all, they start building a relationship But there's lots of knowledge exchange between the groups that would otherwise not happen Um, so maybe I don't know if that's a way or if it's something that your organization has considered But creating a level of meetings not to overdo it But in some routine that is above the legal entity and that links the people together that work in the same functions As I mean until now has proven very successful for us The people enjoy it they like chatting to the other people. Yeah Yes, yeah Yes, it's emerging. So the question is um, we know that in austin and in europe We have strong communities in drupal. It's very adopted But what about south africa because that's quite exotic on that whole landscape. It is exotic. Yes, um It's emerging. So when we came there first last year, it really felt a bit when we start as when we started in 2007 I really feel it's like Rewind eight years or seven years. That's how it felt. It's a very small community But very enthusiastic Um, not building two complex things yet You see that the adoption of drupal has not happened yet so much in larger south african companies But what's very nice is that some governments in south africa have started to adopt drupal And they are pushing that now much more and We have seen that Us now being there has also moved something. I mean, we've been organizing or co-organizing A camp now. It was the first triple camp in capetown. It happened on the 4th of september There were over 100 people coming which was quite a success because the community is really not that big But there's lots of enthusiasm in the community and I think it will grow significantly in the next years But it's still at a state where maybe lots of european countries were like seven eight years ago In terms of adoption of drupal within the developer community, but also within the the clients and the adopters Yes, it depends on on our entity So we have different metrics for each organization because suric, of course has a higher level because they're Larger organisms. I mean larger organization with more specialized functions They only take it. I mean except larger projects Just to manage the complexity. Otherwise we can't justify our setup with having project manager front and back and side builder all that But for example, austin is more flexible. They're more targeting a medium range of project and capetown is a real startup It's just like we're looking at whatever comes in and see if it's doable or not so the the management and the process behind Accepting a project is very different if you just look at the metrics where it's not different Is in the style and what we want to assess and what we want to know of a client So we do try and bring in some general values To give to leave a footprint. So all amazelabs products should have the same footprint But they're completely different metrics in terms of size Does that answer your question? How hard was it to leave the suric office and leave it to someone else? That's a good and very personal question. It was hard and it started quite a bit before we left For me personally, maybe I was always or I am in charge of the whole financial part of the business That's of course my background, you know, my previous life being an accountant. It's obvious And that's a very difficult area to let go of because it's lots of control involved if you control the finances and all that And I must admit that I still do that. I'm still running the finances of the suric office Um, and that's a good thing and it works. Well, it keeps me close to the team It keeps me in control of what's happening Um, and that the loss maybe is not that big We found of course a new CEO to step in to run the everyday business But one can maybe not underestimate the loss of Founders It's just something that has somehow been important to the team until that point and it's not only me. It's been greg and me Both leaving so we did have to prepare it very carefully, but I must say I do think it was very smooth There were no real major hiccups It's maybe small things that were happening, but they were all we just put them on the table and try to fix them And it was hard because letting go is hard Depending on what kind of person you are, but I think the majority of us will agree that letting go is not easy But it's also a relief and seeing that it works And it was running perfectly well. The success of the office has been great Since we left so it's not like It can't work without us But it's just it's a it's a process that you need to address and it's a very personal thing And I need to go through these steps and just find out what I need to do to let go But I'm not letting go. I'm still there. Uh, so that's nice I'm very good question Yes I'm very good question. So the question in summary are cost reduction We've talked about that with Cape Town, of course being at lower cost Has it any stage been a risk that the Zurich team all of a sudden would feel threatened by the Cape Town office growing And maybe taking away work that was the first part the second part was Do we see any risk that our brands could be negatively associated with outsourcing if we start pushing work to Cape Town You know that we become like a kind of outsourcing company that does the you know the work in a cheap country Good questions the first one. So first one. No, I I mean I can't answer it because I'm not sitting in Zurich But I really I think I can confirm that at no point the Zurich team would feel Threatened by Cape Town and this has many different reasons The first of all the hourly rate in Cape Town is so significantly lower than in Zurich that we can't even compete it's not that It's not that we would do projects in Zurich that need um quality work delivered, you know by by Zurich teams and we can't It's like it's two different worlds. They couldn't It can only mix if it's being run by a Zurich project manager and of course The leaders of that the Cape Town team or I would never allow us to take work That would be possibly work that could be done by the Zurich team. So if there's a client that has a capability to Get a project running with our Zurich team based in switzerland It's never a project that the Cape Town team would accept So it's clear that we all talk to each other and if there's a project coming in there's a funnel That sees like okay, this is a european project Zurich is going to take it over only if they would say This is not something we want to do. They don't have budget or not enough. It's too small It's not interesting, but maybe you want to do it in Cape Town Then that would be the discussion. So that threat is not there. We're not independent companies in a way that we make fully independent decisions Does that Answer your question and the second part because of the outsourcing We don't want to we're not an outsourcing company. We are a global web service provider So we believe that we need global presence and the fact that we are present in South Africa And that we have lower costs there doesn't mean that we are an outsourcing company there We have global presences all over the world and we try to follow a strategy of of course optimizing cost if we can So I would never consider us selling us as an outsourcing company And I also don't think we would be perceived of that Because mainly we have local teams working for local projects and if we can Get in a large project some overflow working From another location that is cheaper. That totally makes sense But I must also say that right now we have a case where the opposite is happening Austin is very very busy and they needed capacities from other people and they now are drawing capacities from Zurich Because they need lots of backend capacity and we happen to be able to give that to them That is nice because we don't have to then hire a new person We can on a short term optimize our capacity planning Even if it's maybe not the most efficient thing on a long term because the rates are different on a short term It might really make sense Does that answer your question kind of? Are there any more questions any more comments Any more experiences to share If not, I'll guess we'll close Yeah, we're still on time. I think time enough to get a coffee and to move to the next session Thanks very much for listening and enjoy the rest of the conference thing