 Okay, we have almost the full house. There are some seats here and there, but let's get going. So welcome to the life in the fast lane achieve sustainable growth. My name is Janne Galliola and I'm the host. This afternoon of tonight. And with me there is Jeff Valpol from Phase 2, Paul Johnson from CTI Digital, Tim Deeson, Deeson online and Vesa Palom from Wunderkraut. People that we together employ more than 450 people. So we should know at least something about growth. So short introductions first. So as said, my name is Janne Galliola. I'm CEO of ExoWe. We are 70 people started in 2006 with one person. So we have grown quite a bit. And then off to panelists please. Yeah, hi, Jeff Valpol and CEO at Phase 2 Technology in the US. Started in 2001 with four people and we now have 130. So 13 years. We've been in business. We have headquarters in Washington DC, offices in New York, San Francisco and sizable office now in Portland, Oregon. Hi, Vesa Palomo, CEO of Wunderkraut. Started about five years ago. Today we are more than 150 people in Europe. So pretty much all over Europe. Officially headquartered in London, but we are quite distributed. I'm Tim Deeson. I run an agency called Deeson. We're about 30 people based in the UK. We kind of, we've been a group agency since about 2007. We've kind of concentrated on full service to the, in the sense that we do user experience design strategy as well as Drupal services. So some clients uses for typical agency services and some uses for Drupal as well. Hi, my name is Paul Johnson. I'm a director at CTI Digital. We were founded 10 years ago. We're based in Manchester. We have offices in London and a developer down in Brighton now. We have a CEO as a majority shareholder and five directors as a management team. We've grown over 10 years from four people to about 32 years ago. And now we're touching 58 people. Okay, thank you. And if you want to have questions in the middle of this session, then use hashtag Drupal fast lane all together. And I'll monitor with my fancy iPad here and then maybe, maybe index the questions here. And then later you can have questions also by the mic. But let's get to the, to the discuss. So the first topic, we have three topics here. So first topic is why do we want to grow? That is the question. So panelists in a free formed order, what is the business reason why you want to grow or what was the defining moment you found out that you actually want to grow and why? So I'm not actually sure I do. That's a joke. So I think for phase two, the initial first five years of our company was very small. We had no growth plans and no growth path. And I think it took a while for us to understand we were a business. And I think that's really the key defining point is once you realize that the point of a business is actually to make money, you learn that by figuring out that model and that engine and then scaling it appropriately, I think you earn more profit for your shareholders. So there's an economic reason. The other part about it is just opportunity. Once you get good at doing something, I think you want to be able to replicate that and you hire people that take a lot of pride and enjoyment in delivering success and they want to do more. It's addictive. So actually say be sure you want to grow because it's not something that you definitely need to do. Being a mall freelancer is a pretty sweet place to be at but you can't do all sorts of stuff. And basically one of the primary reasons for growing is to be able to do different kinds of projects for different kind of customers and go to places you wouldn't otherwise. That said, it's really like a balanced question on like do you want to grow and how big do you want to be where your life and business changes quite a bit when you keep on growing? I think certainly for me as a founder it's been interesting to understand I think why grow is a really important question when you're moving from being a freelancer or as you go through those different points because your job will change if you're at the top of that pyramid and understanding what you want to be doing day to day and why, I think it's quite important because otherwise you can end up with a business plan that doesn't really reflect the reality of what you want to achieve. I think it's been good because it's allowed us to align to opportunities well and certainly part of the driver of that is being to take on more interesting opportunities or clients or skills that feels like we can do better and better work and kind of I think in line with that that's allowed us to keep optimizing the business to work on those blue chip clients so it's certainly something that we did badly and didn't really understand at the start and I think as we've learned from those mistakes to understand where you need that clarity it's been important to kind of get better and better at that. I think the reason that we've grown is partly that we've won bigger and bigger projects as time has gone on and realised that we're quite good at servicing these large clients but in order to do that we've had to get subject matter experts in certain areas like scalability or migration or accessibility and in order to do that you have to have a certain size to be able to attract those you know expensive specialists Thank you. Let's do a quick quick gallop from the audience so how many of you are working alone in a single man entity single woman entity less than 5 people or 5 or less people less than 10 people less than 20 people less than 50 people less than 100 less than 100 more than 100 more than 1000 okay so there is still plenty room to grow good so what's the benefit of growth of growing to the clients what the clients get when you grow so I think the client gets a lot this is definitely something that we utilise to our advantage in the sales cycle the clients about like Paul said the ability to bring specialist to the team that a smaller organization couldn't afford so we can take a full breath set of experiences from strategy and design through content strategy UX development get into deployment and dev ops and infrastructure scalability and all that so we can deliver a very broad set of services and I think that's a great selling point for some clients however I think there's a point at which size becomes you hit a point at diminishing return and so we try to target ourselves and imagine ourselves fitting the sweet spot between you know I call it the Goldilocks strategy right so you had the three little bears you know and this one this bed's too small and this bed's too big and three little bears I'm mixing my I think I'm mixing my my fairytails but so you know I'll go with the porridge right the porridge was too hot the porridge was too cold this one's just right right so we see ourselves as being large enough to deliver all those services but not so large that we've reached you know an Accenture, IBM you know one department doesn't talk to each other and we create bureaucracy sort of thing so we're targeting that sweet spot for clients in between yeah what we really the reason for founding Wunderkrauts really was was quite simple it was customer demand so customers were really looking to get a international vendor who would be able to service them globally or European wide or whatever it may be for different customers but they wanted to have a vendor that is small and agile and flexible not a very easy thing to do and very few companies have managed to do it and that's one of the reasons why we ended up being what we are today being like small and flexible and not even trying to be one of the elephants like IT elephants we don't want to be an IBM really we want to be able to be flexible and move quick and change and do different stuff and also do stuff differently from time to time so that really was the primary reason for getting started yeah we've certainly been finding a sweet spot of where clients have been either shortlisting or selecting us to pitch on the spaces that were not so big were not kind of a WPP group tens of thousands of people agency but were not too small an agency that they feel like the size of the project is a commercial risk for them based on our turnover and I think part of that sweet spot has been around having those specialist services like user experience or content strategy were some of those things that smaller agencies can't have and it feels risky to the client for them to be brought in on a freelance basis but not be a huge agency that they start to feel like even as a kind of a very large pharmaceutical client for example even at that size that they're not really that valuable to them based on billions of billings and I think within the kind of Drupal community and the agencies that are out there seems to be kind of an emerging opportunity for kind of big enough to take on big jobs but not so huge that they're kind of those network agency size companies where clients are just really sick of kind of not having that customized service or people paying attention or high staff turnover and we've certainly been winning business on the basis I think to do full service on those jobs but not be so big that they kind of feel impersonal even to a really large client I suppose for CTI one of the big things was that we needed to be large enough to be able to service organizations like the government enterprise and large public sector bodies that they require a certain scale and that's partly through things like resilience so sickness absence we're also more people means we've got better availability to resource so we can plan around their changing requirements we can also achieve a higher velocity that's not just because we've got more hands on deck it can mean that we've got specialist roles so through the full project life cycle so we have people who are satisfying the kind of client relationship and sales and then we have people who specialize in planning and then we've got separate teams for development and then the support and in life services that's been a really important thing for us to kind of segment those because we found the development team were being pulled into support aspects and being pulled off projects and now that we have these two sort of like finite roles it's a much more productive environment okay so we talked a lot about sweet spot so hands in the air question for the panelists who is currently at the sweet spot below the sweet spot above the sweet spot certainly in the north west of the UK there are quite a few examples of companies that have taken that bridge between 15 and 100 and we're kind of at 50ish at the moment and it's a very dangerous gap to take you have to introduce extra layers of management and you become the profitability sort of wanes during that period and there have been plenty of agencies who have folded during that journey so I'd say we're at that sweet spot about to take a leap of faith yeah you always, the challenges keep on changing when you grow there's always the next thing and people say it's difficult to go from 10 to 20 or 50 to 100 or whatever it's difficult to go from 1 to 2 it's always just a different challenge on what you face and in our case for example the challenge right now is like time zones we get like without doing any proper sales we get like US customers who want to come in and all of our staff is based in Europe which is a massive challenge on how to manage that because we don't want to keep people working in the middle of the night so there's always the next thing, whatever it may be so it's a fleeting sweet spot then really really quick answers this is important question so couple of words only starting from Tim this time what's the value of the growth for the staff I think learning opportunities probably if you want two words yes bigger parties ability to specialize in something that you're really passionate about I think those would all be mine all those are better for staff excellent and then the next topic that we know now that why we want to grow for the fleeting sweet spot so the next one is how do we grow and let's take a first once again hands in the air for the panelists that have you grown organically all those that have grown organically hands in the air there will be more yeah you can answer to the several so have you grown through mergers and acquisitions have you grown using extensively freelance networks okay we have one that used all the three something else that I have missed okay that was it hosted then so let's go to the planning question that how do you plan growth or do you does it just happen that suddenly you found out that you are CEO of 200 people company or have you actually made a plan and followed it so in our case we started to get real growth and we made a plan and followed it believe it or not so we started a budgeting cycle and the budgeting looks at head count and it looks at profit margins and it works backwards to try to make sure that we achieve a net profit and then it essentially establishes a growth path based upon what we think we can sell so it's a difficult problem obviously you have to factor in what you can sell the size that you want to be and how you can recruit qualified people so we did achieve this year our growth plan and then at the end of the year we seized an opportunity to do another small not acquisition technically and aqua hire but that was outside of our growth plan but we looked at it as an advance against better hiring decisions than we would have made next year so we had an opportunity to get a really great team and we took it at the end of the year but it was when we were literally at I think almost exactly at the number it was the literal number that we were supposed to be at for the end of the year so we were there early and then we said ah screw it let's just get another 14 and add it on so the plan is very helpful but you always have to I guess allow yourself the ability to deviate from the plan to seize opportunity yeah it's good to have goals we have rolling goals usually so it's not like an annual budgeting or planning cycle it's more like well this is what we are going to do next kind of thing and it's also like ongoing and rolling and kind of a moving target you mostly grow sales first because of the nature of the business you need to have the sales to support the growth and then for example we are always hiring like at any given time if we find the right person we always hire them and then the sales follows also so I would say sales first whenever possible but if you find great people their work will also follow those people acquisitions are tricky but I guess that is a perfect topic I think there is certainly kind of an ongoing cycle mentality you need to be it's just as important to concentrate on your sales infrastructure and classically agencies struggle when they oversell but don't have the processes or people to keep delivering and you can end up with kind of a turnover and head count graph that will just keep dipping up and down unless you can understand as your head count grows that your problems will keep changing in terms of management infrastructure or process you know the sales stuff is a kind of a completely different problem I think too often agencies, smaller agencies haven't had to have dedicated sales teams and I found sales teams and business development are something to manage compared to project delivery and other things which you have to do all the time even as a kind of very small agency and I think recognising those different challenges and managing them specifically to their nature so not trying to treat sales teams as development teams and etc is quite important to understand and break up your business that way because it's easy to kind of fall into nasty traps that catch you out later I suppose CTIs some advice would be make sure you're selling the right projects know what you're good at and don't necessarily go for every single opportunity that comes along we do have a long-term plan I think it's important that you have a management team and also your staff bought into that plan so that it echoes throughout the business and two years ago it's fair to say that that wasn't the case in our company and we shrank because some of the management team were trying to pull the business in a different direction and had quite a negative impact and to resonate what Jeff has been saying you need to always be appraising things and be opportunistic so that may that be through hiring or there may be the next big project that you think you should go for because it's good for the long-term plan Excellent, there's a question from the audience so at least somebody's awake there so the there's a question that would it make sense for a small agency to hire a dedicated business development specialist to help with the growth so what's your take on that only if you've got staff you can deliver what they can sell it depends what you mean by business development specialist if it's a sales person as it is in the UK, fine, do it if it's really like developing your business I wouldn't be prepared to hand over your company and sell part of it and whatever you do it has to be all or nothing kind of thing because companies need strong leadership and if you try to like outsource that leadership that's not gonna go well Excellent so we have been talking about sales so what is the I guess that the input sales is the key to growth that you get more money in so how do you get the new clients or how do you evaluate the markets where you want to expand Sure Yes, I think first and foremost having market specialization or strategy to go after something specific is critical because if you can't be able to tell your staff whether they're dedicated salespeople or not dedicated salespeople if you can't point out a specific target and focus and say that's how and where we're gonna grow and that's what we're gonna work, we're interested in doing then you're essentially just taking what comes to you and if you take what comes to you you're at the mercy of your inbound lead generation process and that's demand that you don't control and you don't wanna be growing a business off of demand that you don't control because that can turn around on you if you can say hey, I'm only gonna sell you know, Drupal and I'm only gonna do it in the UK and I'm only gonna do it around projects that have you know, philanthropic cause or something and I'm making up a very specific niche but if you can say that and you can hold to that and you can demonstrate that to your team and you put those growth goals in place as well and you say and we're gonna go from you know, one million pounds to four million pounds doing it and here's the research and I know we can do it and then you go outwards now you have a forward looking not a passive sale strategy you have a more offensive that's offensive not offensive sale strategy I'll just add a bit on top of that basically so whatever he said also what I see in Drupal shops we talk about acquisition quite a bit and what I see in most Drupal shops is like they are first of all they are kind of busy running with the bicycle because they don't have time to learn to how to ride the bicycle so they run with it instead and the second thing is like they don't get to do the stuff that they would like to do like specialize in a niche and do some great stuff cause they are so busy in cleaning up their messes cause they sell whatever just to get the next paycheck and that's a really really like business circle to be in so breaking out of that circle somehow and getting to the next level and decided hey look we don't have that many customers for some time but at least now we are doing what we really want to do and what we are really good at and that can be tricky because believe it or not people need to have their paychecks in order to eat so tricky Definitely one of the most important things we found is that kind of deal evaluation work so we've got quite kind of a rigorous way of pulling apart both the client and the project of successful can we be successful with it what is the commercial context does the client even understand what they want to achieve are they capable of achieving it what are the kind of context of the business risk so if you're building something that's going to be on national television a week and the client doesn't really know what they're doing inevitably that flak and backlash is going to come at you even if you were really never going to kind of succeed and that's going to hurt your reputation your profitability you're going to spend a lot of management time kind of fighting around stuff that was just always a kind of inevitable conclusion so we've kind of got better and better at kind of turning down as much work as we take on and that's really let us focus on where we can really go and do an amazing job of something that leaves the schedules the mindset the people the business development all of the processes there to kind of do a really good job of the things that we can succeed with and sometimes that takes a bit of kind of you know kind of steal nerves really to kind of turn down things you think okay well the pipeline is not looking great we don't have tons of stuff booked in but really and this is a blue chip kind of name or something but actually we just think this isn't going to work and there's a UK PLC who I won't name actually but we went through a kind of a period of turning down work for them and saying actually we just don't understand these projects we don't think this is going to work and actually we've been working with them having seen those projects fail with other people we've now been working with them for a while and we actually got credibility by pointing out the kind of flaws in their project process to then be invited back in outside of a tender just to be commissioned to do the work so that was kind of gratifying although that kind of year in the middle Yeah I can only resonate that there was work that we won through the British Council and there was a get out clause after the discovery phase and we used that opportunity to say we could walk away because the platform that we were going to develop upon was not satisfactory but the outcome of that was that we migrated them to Drupal 7 so sometimes you need to be prepared to take a brave step and be confident about what you're doing but with reference to sustainability I'd just like to add that I think you should find work which your team enjoy or they find satisfying but it should also be profitable and use that the profitability look to your previous projects and be honest with yourselves about how they went and having satisfying work helps with retention of your staff they're more likely to stay for a long time and seek out work which complements to your long term goals that management team have already established Good, and then there's other question from the related markets from the audience that the world is the large enough organization to serve the government and the enterprise markets, quick answers This would depend a lot on a country It is like say for example in the UK the government is actively trying to say use SMEs like small and medium players whereas in markets like say Sweden or Finland or whatever it's going to be like if you don't have a million employees you can't even bid for a major project it really varies from country to country in some places you need to be one of the big four or five players in order to play in some markets it's quite the opposite so this is highly reliant where you're operating it How do you get to learn that by accident or by just trying or Well, you kind of know it by talking to local vendors but I guess not many companies are trying to actively move to another market so you would know it for your own market probably and I think that should be easy for us it's we've always just poking to the local players and know how it is and it's easier to to determine that for the public stuff that's quite simple usually for the private companies there may be very different restrictions from size there may be like language or cultural issues or you're not being German or you know whatever you actually run into quite a few different roadblocks when you're trying to go into a new market Okay and then the third section start with the sustaining the growth and let's talk about stuff we briefly touched the stuff but it's a really important important topic in the growth that you need to have people that you can grow so what is the what is the importance or meaning of division and the culture in your organization regarding growth let's start from that side this time I would say beyond you kind of informs everything that you do the way that you conduct disciplinary actions if you've got issues with the developers what work you go to win how people interact with one another on a day to day basis the culture it's integral to the whole business I can't really emphasize it enough and I think it's something that you need to have clearly communicated because as you grow you're bringing people who perhaps don't you need to make sure they're aware of what it is that they're coming to so part of your recruitment process should actually express the type of organization that you are otherwise it's going to change and it might not be in a manner which is going to contribute to your sustainability I certainly think the kind of clarity and communication of the two the two kind of keys that if you don't understand what you're going to do as a management team then no one else will for a fact either and if you don't communicate that in a way kind of regularly and often then other people can't collaborate with you to kind of achieve those goals and I think it's something certainly I've underestimated in the past the kind of thing old as in obvious what we're doing and actually what often is the kind of leadership level of the company I think often you're kind of moving faster and looking at things in a way that not everyone else has the opportunity to and I think it's really important to kind of set those goals and then keep communicating and collaborating on them and working through them otherwise people often you know change is something that humans just aren't geared up to kind of enjoy and accept without kind of having that context for it too and I think letting people know where you're going and why it's really important and can often smooth over the kind of humps and bumps that you get with growth where things people's roles change, people's processes change people's kind of working habits are going to change and that can often be more difficult than you anticipate I think in my experience It's largely down to culture culture eats strategy for breakfast it doesn't make any difference what sort of strategy you have if your culture is conflicting with it the culture is always going to win how do you create the culture well it's a living thing first of all it's something that when the organization grows and changes the culture keeps on changing but you can do like cultural leadership as well mostly by doing the right thing and doing the stuff you're believing and actually your daily actions as a leader have to reflect your values and your vision and your goals and all that so you have to be like all the time walking to talk basically on daily basis and leading from the front line really so that's the only way I know how to create the great culture in a company problem with going last is you start to forget the question I think it was twofold it was the impact of culture but also sort of sustained growth right and how those are related so I think first and foremost you can look at growth two ways you can look at it as responsive growth that's kind of pulled by demand we got one or two large projects and they wanted us to scale up so in response to that we added people the problems with that are similar to what I said earlier about sales in that that's someone else's plan for you not your plan for yourself that's being pulled in a direction by demand not determining you're going to go in that direction proactively and those are the situations that typically don't last they're not sustainable growth the company wasn't controlling that destiny and the second side of it the other way to do it is really in more of a proactive way and that's what tends to be more lasting and more sustainable and the reason is because you're focusing hopefully and we haven't mentioned this yet but you're hopefully focusing a lot more on scaling than growing which is to say you actually understand the structure and the leverage that this organization needs with regards to management and certain skills and talents and resources to go to that next level and stay there and be there productively and that's where management and leadership become a big deal because that's when you can actually say hey there is a mission there is a vision for this organization there's a strategic plan and there's culture and all of those things are done in a planned and organized way if you're growing in response to something you don't have time to align your mission and your vision and your culture in a way that makes sense to those employees so I think they are very related it was a good question even though I didn't remember it okay let's have a short wording from the audience so how many of you think that you know your company's vision by heart surprising many how many of you think that you are working in a growing company even bigger amount and how many of you think that the fleeting sweet spot is still ahead of you that you still need to grow to be the sweet spot how many think that you have grown already past the sweet spot where one guy okay we'll need to talk with you okay we'll need to talk with you later so we have been talking about structures and levels and the others so what is the what are the risks involved in when you step up the operations when you grow to the next level what kind of things you need to be prepared for should I start down here you choose I'll go just go online so I think there's we could do we could do three hours on the topic alone but I think first and foremost part of the risk in growing is you start to lose the culture that you had before and I think you know like Vessa said focusing on that culture as a primary thing has to be your job whoever is the CEO your job is to ensure that that culture is not affected by your ambition for growth or your scaling plans I also think that you have to support you have to start to think about the infrastructure that in the general sense that's required that infrastructure includes financial and legal aspects you know making sure that you actually have the sophistication to do your your numbers and run it like a business it includes sales and marketing making sure that you have the ability to sell more work in the future it includes management of all forms, project management product management, staff management any you know we all tend to think of management as overhead but the reality is it's scaffolding for growth it's the scaffolding that sits outside the organization and ensures that you can stack the next layer on top and so creating a management structure that both enforces the things that you're doing strategically but isn't a negative impact on the culture is one of the hardest things you can possibly do but it's the most critical it is literally trying to build a building without understanding what that structure is so I think probably the biggest risk is it becoming a job or just a job so basically it no longer it's something that you on Monday mornings are really glad that it's great to go to work and do all of this great stuff because you have all sorts of hustles and you may have even a temptation on copying the big boys on how they run corporations because surely they know because they have tens of thousands of employees and you copy all of the bureaucracy and layers and all this additional crap which part of it maybe is scaffolding really for growth, part of it maybe just because that's the way it's done because that's the way they teach you when you do MBAs which is complete crap if you ask me so all of this may actually turn it as a like work where it's like oh my god it's again Monday I don't want to go to work and that's the biggest risk I think it's really important to understand the business in terms of kind of turnover and head count of what is just good business and that's nothing to do often with kind of being a Drupal agency or an agency or anything else I think ensuring that you've got the right kind of financial or professional advisers the work you're doing which may have been different when you attend people on a 50,000 pound deal compared to something that's on a quarter of a million deal you can find yourself in traps that are far less intuitive I think as you start to work with larger and larger clients or on riskier projects and I think kind of studying your business and studying businesses of the same size to understand what are the kind of some of the techniques and it could be around tax, it could be around liability there's lots of things that kind of keep shifting as you go through and ensuring that you're kind of paying attention to the kind of agency space because lots of these things apply to businesses of those size regardless of their type and not kind of getting too stuck into just what kind of goes around amongst your immediate peers or kind of people that you'd speak to anyway but kind of studying it in a more wide sense I found useful. I think one of the risks of becoming quite largest that the management team can become isolated from the production team the people who are actually making these things temptation to hire people just to satisfy demand you hire in the wrong people that can be a big risk you get one bad apple that can spoil things it also has an increased need for better process and good documentation so that it is scalable so that people know exactly what they're doing and also resource planning is quite a big issue with us so we have a manager who spends his whole time horizon gazing and speaking with sales and production because the more projects you have and the bigger clients and the more likely there are shifts in the client requirement projects may go away for a period of time leaving a big gap in your guys tapping the bench and you have to run a profitable business avoid all costs so Paul already mentioned so we'll start with you this time that they are about the risks that you mentioned that you had some some bad things happening a couple of years ago so have any risk realized and how did you mitigate them I mean that that situation is kind of concurrent with when I arrived I was brought in to try and help to I shared the vision of the company and I suppose the CEO mitigated that by finding ways for that and those individuals to depart but a lot of the risk that we have is around resource we have a lot of staff it's a hungry monster to feed so we have to ensure that the sales pipeline is well filled we're looking into the middle of next year to ensure it's all about planning so I think having somebody who is not only the managing director of the company thinking about finances and that aspect there's also the long term resource planning that really has been fundamental to us turning the company around okay and the others can also share war stories now about things that went wrong if something went wrong where do you start certainly we've seen risk I think risk can come in many forms some of the risk we've seen has been from some of our bigger successes when we've had really rapid growth periods and you are trying to manage that growth and it feels good and you're succeeding but also you're growing possibly quicker than that scaffolding we've definitely had some retrenching periods where we've just tried to to kind of take a little bit of a step back and make sure that where we've kind of achieved on that growth curve that's sustainable and we've been lucky to kind of had have permanent growth I guess so we've certainly kind of grown slower and smaller than other people but we've been lucky to be able to kind of maintain it and sustain it rather than kind of dipping up and down so I think that's kind of one of the keys I think is also just when which sounds a bit kind of negative but when things when things are going really really well just understand what does that mean for the next thing if you've just hired ten people don't forget to look at that pipeline that's three months out and six months out because all of that growth needs to be kind of sustained otherwise you just deal with really really irritating problems about kind of dipping up and down and having to bring people in and take people out and that just takes a lot of energy and time which would be better spent on kind of investing in the future I think we have a culture of celebrating failure other companies have employees of the month we have the fail of the month so this may sound strange but we really do focus on like if you fail on something and stuff goes wrong try to learn from it try to make it public because failures are not expensive hidden failures are expensive and this leads to into sort of retrospective also and the fun part being like all of the most expensive failures tend to be my failures always so I get to the really expensive stuff and there's so many risks and you can't avoid all of them you just have to try to fail fast and fail cheap basically with those risks most of the risks are of course around people because the entire business is around people so you may have co-founders who want to leave the company at some point because they don't feel like it's a company that they want to build anymore you have to try to be civilized on how to deal with that and of course you know if people want to leave they have to be able to leave on good terms and yeah so many stories around that when you do integration of companies and we have like 17 native languages spoken in a group so cultural diversity is there so yeah people I saw a bunch of wonder crowd people celebrating at the bar last night I don't know if they I don't know what they failed on but something something went wrong so I think there's two types of risks that as the leader of the organization you have to look out for there's like economics there's micro risks there are things you can control inside of your own environment and that's what most of us probably have to spend most of our time on and then there's the macro the environmental risks that we sort of can maybe influence or we can kind of steer around but it's like the weather you can't control it if Drupal disappeared off the face of the planet tomorrow what would they do to our businesses we don't like to define ourselves as Drupal companies but we're dependent on it and so things like that are also scary so the things that it's disproportion I think the things that a CEO probably stays awake at night thinking about are the things they can't control disproportionately and then the things that you can't control you don't always do a good job with so when it comes to the specific things I think our biggest failures our biggest failure came two, three years ago when we it was not really because of growth it was because of not understanding how quickly our organization moved how much we had to have a pulse on the numbers and we didn't really have a good sense of our own numbers we're much more data driven now than we were a couple years ago and you have to be if 10% growth is actually 15 people then every hiring decision that you make there has to be driven by some further future planning it's really important that you understand the pipeline understand the metrics, the profitability your gross margin you have to know what your expenses are you have to know your cash and how much cash you have and how long you can go and so those types of and then the operational metrics your utilization, your effective rate your cost per employee all of those things the KPIs the key process indicators that you want within your organization are probably for us maturity point in the last year or two just really knowing those gives us confidence to grow because we can hopefully see any kind of issues coming a little bit further out in the future excellent and then there's a one question from the audience that I brutally will will mangle a bit so the question is the original question is are larger customers better for growth than small customers but my question related to that how has your clients changed when you have grown quick answers and then we'll go to the last topic start here so yeah as we've gotten bigger our clients have gotten bigger and that's been both reality that I think everybody will reflect and also one of the reasons we got bigger was to serve those larger clients so it's by design as well as by effect I didn't really have anything to add, that's the case we've definitely found larger clients to be beneficial because you can sell multiple projects to them and that relationship is more valuable you think you have to recognise that the cost of sale goes up to larger clients, that initial foot in the door stuff can take a lot longer and be a lot more time consuming than it can for smaller clients our clients have gone from having small enterprises that have strong owners and you've just got to convince that one person to CEOs maybe boards that you have to go through a very bigger process and convince a lot more people and be more authoritative in how you're doing it so it can be a lot longer process you have to be very self assured okay and now listen carefully because now it's time for the key takeaway from the panel so one sentence advice to the people that are thinking of growing please I would say the most important thing is is well it's cliché world peace the most important thing is the people you hire just make sure you don't lose track of what Vess or Tim or somebody said just each person you add into that organisation while they may be small relative to the size you're growing to they have the ability to either make you successful or start to hurt you and so each person you bring in is critical to the success I'll try to stick in one sentence don't forget why you do it that was half my one issue I think be really clear what you want to achieve and why because if you don't get those two things together I think it can get quite complicated quickly have a long term objective and take small steps to get there excellent so now all of the audience are experts in growth so now it's time to go deeper so any questions so you can use the hashtag Drupal fast lane and we won't answer them right now but we won't kind of ask you to come to the microphone but these guys have promised that they will they will get back to you in twitter for those questions that I didn't ask now but we have now 12 minutes and counting for any questions that you might have please go to the mic you can form the line there what if should the founder of the company presume the founder of your company is a developer I'm not talking about myself here and this developer says very very good should that person become the company leader like yourselves or hire in a company leader let's say and remain as the top developer in the company what do you want to do it depends on that really what do you want to do if you want to become a leader go and get trained up in business stuff it's really not all that fancy just go and do an MBA or whatever that simple developers will be excellent or technical people in general will be excellent leaders if they just get the experience and training but if what you want to really do is hack Drupal yeah no then you need to do that so you wouldn't have a problem with the founder of the company for the recording that the question was that whether the is it a problem that the founder of the company is below the management in the bigger company so I think as you grow so I actually have I have four original founders four original founders then through acquisition another founder then we have an employee stock plan we've been giving some stock to various management so we're starting to get to a point where we're more like a corporation and less like a firm that's controlled by a few owners and we're encouraging that by drawing distinctions between those that own equity in the company and those that are officers acting on behalf of the company and we think this is helping us professionalize so we've brought in people from the outside like my COO for instance who was not an equity owner in the company but is a very experienced business executive and we've taken a founder in this case one of my partners originally and we have essentially put him underneath him based on skill and we think that every time we do that we're doing that for the employees we're telling the company we will run this company as efficiently and effectively as we can regardless of our ownership interests and that's also in the interest of those people that own it because they get to watch professionals build value for them that they would otherwise be trying to do themselves so we're actually embracing the distinction between ownership and management in a very strong way If I can add one more thing don't ever be worried on hiring more senior and smarter people than you are because most founders are actually afraid of that it's like what if I bring this person on board and they are smarter than me and more experienced and they cannot take over and your business grows Excellent, next question Hi, percentage wise what was your split between developers sales personnel and project managers when you were small and compared to now that you're big I think we found we would develop a heavy start because you don't have much process or infrastructure around that and then I think we're at the ratio of about a third developers and then the rest are support staff, creative project managers, finance things like that, so I think the ratio does change and it's really important to understand who's billable and who's not because as you get bigger your ratios of who's actually charges rates will go down which shifts your numbers on your head count quite quickly I think it's natural to have a shift in the proportion often times in a small company people will wear several different hats so I mean currently we've probably got about 60% developers we've got so it's 50 odd staff we've got four project managers to dedicated sales people so we're very very heavy on the dev still but we've got could you repeat those numbers 50 staff we've got about 50% developers we've got three or four project managers and then we've got a management team about five people a very small design team and then administrative staff on top of that I mean the developers are the filthy business there you guys are earning money I think our stats are something and don't quote me on the exacts but so 130 people about 60 of them or just straight developers then we have our like UX business analyst requirements people project managers and all that sorry that's like 70 developers then it's like 30 in those other categories so when you add all that up it's like of the 130 100 of them are delivery staff so billable you know in some capacity 10 in sales 20 in the rest of the business function so like 15 between sales and marketing something like that I think the biggest change we've seen is we are more diverse now so we are hiring more experts on say UX or something like that we haven't our structure is a bit different we don't have sales at all so that's why the shift hasn't been so dramatic for us if I look at the numbers and I don't have the numbers right now I can't remember them but it's also been you know more like specialists on staff that's been definitely the biggest change we've seen over the years did you say that you don't have any sales personnel like pure sales well we call our sales consultants and they are billable so that's the you can call them key account managers they do the same job but the difference is we actually build their hours what's your vision in sustaining growth with multiple leaderships and does it have a positive or a negative effect what do you mean by multiple leaderships if you have multiple people in the company having strong ideas or visions about the future well I have some experience on bad and good examples of this in a good healthy relationship you are aligned and you complete some of your weaknesses and so on in a bad relationship you end up disagreeing on everything and you can't get anywhere because of that and if you end up in the later situation you know somebody has to leave if it's the first one great so depends on the people quite a bit so you can what I said earlier about the ownership versus kind of officer thing is important here because you have to reign anybody in who's an owner who feels that they should be in any way driving things differently than your chief executive so even if you're a five person company you should have a CEO and that CEO should be in charge and the rest of the team is there to do certain parts of the business the CEO is not supposed to run all aspects of the business there's a delegation and there's a dividing up of roles and responsibilities that's critical to getting growth because if you've got even you see this a lot in this community in the Dripville community you'll see the two owner shop and the two owner shop goes to about 15 people maybe 20 and what happens is you got one tech guy and one business guy two tech guys with split up roles and if they are pulling in different directions equally then it's impossible to move forward they have to either be 100% on the same page or divide and conquer on what those roles are and one of them is deciding strategy and one of them is focused on the operational aspects or something like that that works as you get a little bit bigger you're going to want more of a CEO and then someone who handles marketing someone who handles sales someone's going to handle the operations and those people need to have clear what we call swim lanes it's like exactly who's swimming and what lanes so they're not bumping into each other and the best tool I can use to recommend for that is a racy chart if you're familiar with racy it's an acronym you can google it it's a great exercise to get people to focus on what value and what purpose they're doing for the organization and make sure that those all align with the vision and the strategy and they're not pulling away in different directions so they're complementary next question just be close to the microphone so you talked specifically about how important culture is and I'm curious as you've grown what you've done to be intentional about preserving culture if that's been sort of top down leadership or if that comes from within your organization or how you've made that work and given how important that it is what steps as CEOs you've taken to sustain that as you've grown and be intentional about it we could do a really long answer to this one but the very short version because I think we are a bit short on time would be just set an example and be consistent on that I think it's important to remember too is you're going to have a culture regardless of whether you're mindful of it and kind of understanding what you're trying to kind of cultivate and having kind of a finger on the pulse as you go is really important I think it's important to know what your culture is to admit that externally so that you can attract people who are like-minded so that you can grow that Excellent, and then the last question Hi, I have a question regarding growth we've been talking about that we need to have good employees and find good employees what would be your advice when you have a company of the size 15 to 25 before we can hire somebody to take care of finding employees somebody has to find the employee and then often the CEO of the company or who is in the top position in the company how much time would you say that you have to spend on finding good employees so your company can have a good growth I think it's the most important thing you can do because a bad hire will cost you time good will, it's really kind of toxic so I've always kept quite close to that process in terms of the final parts of it to make sure that we don't have people that it's not going to work out for either party they're going to be unhappy and want to leave and they're not going to be good for the business so it's something you want to make as efficient as you can but never lose sight of how critical it is in a service business because it sets the tone for everything The way we do hiring is we first have the local managing director direct for a country being as a filter so they spend a fair amount of their timeline filtering the candidates after an assistant has such dropped really bad applicants to be honest and the last step actually is a team interview so the team who actually will end up working with the person makes the final decision so the say is not the manager or the CEO anyone else is the team and that helps quite a bit because it's a nice and honest discussion between what the company is like making sure that because the team has to survive with that person as well so it's going to make your life a bit easier if you're running a company as well As a company we spend quite a bit of time doing it because if we don't do it right then we're going to spend even more time because it's going to have to be done again I think the size point that you mentioned is particularly difficult and I do remember being at that point we did it somewhere around 40 we get our own dedicated person focused on recruiting and that made a huge difference we did dabble with staffing agencies and we worked with them for a while but it's a difficult, I don't want to go in here and all the reasons why it's hard but I think that one of the most effective things you can do my best advice for you would be get your core team together have them brainstorm good strong people that they've worked with before and have a really strong understanding what you need and see if there are any matches and if you get even one really great person that someone worked with before who just comes in and adds a ton to your culture and your ideas and your growth that will spiral out and so it's a network effect of really it's basically a network effect of good people and so I think if you can brainstorm people that you can bring into the organization people that all of you have worked with that you trust that will get you really far excellent thank you panelists, thank you audience don't you leave yet, I have two topics so first and foremost give feedback this is important, this is the only way that we can improve and the other one, the even more important thing that the discussion continues at quarter to four at G111 room at the x room there's a both business track both growing durable business so squeeze in there to continue the discussion thank you