 Good morning everybody. Welcome to Amsterdam, welcome to Drupalcon and I've hoped you've really enjoyed the keynote by Dries this morning and the picture that's the reason why we're starting a bit later than expected. It's good to see a lot of familiar faces here, a lot of new faces and today I'm going to basically address to you on how I grew my company and basically how I've crossed all the hurdles I've come across. So basically it's an open session and you are free to ask me any questions afterwards on how we did it, what hurdles I took and if you have any questions about my slides, you can visit me right after the presentation. My name is Michel van Velde and as I said I will give you a talk on how I grew my company called One Shew. First a little bit of an introduction, this is necessary to learn about you know why we took the hurdles we took. We're an advertising and digital agency, we're with 40 plus specialists based in Newtract, the Netherlands and we provide services for offline and online communication. We've been growing rapidly. We entered the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 and we won the FD Gizella Award and we're quite proud of that because we were number 25 in the Technology Fast 50. That's number 172 on the EMEA ranking list, EMEA 500. Yes it's possible to grow rapidly with the Drupal Agency especially in this era when there's more demand than we can offer. We work for companies, governments, NGOs and we create and realize seamlessly integrated communication solutions and not only our solutions are seamlessly integrated also our processes and workflows adapt to those of our clients which means we follow a client strategy and I will come back to that later, all the different kinds of strategies you can follow with your company. So what we do and this is quite well it's quite a lot of we offer we combine creativity and strength of the strategic agency, UX design agency, an online agency, a mobile agency and an advertising agency and when we started the company we had a dream basically to build this and we started off me and my companion Flores Daxen, I'll introduce later in my slides, we had what we call a big hairy and audacious goal. We wanted to become a global agency with officers all around the globe. We're now eight and a half years later and we're now working on a subsidiary in Germany and one in Amsterdam as well. So basically we're expanding and it will take us a while to reach this goal and that's why it's called a big and hairy audacious goal and it's good to have a big hairy audacious goal because it sets you know a mindset to grow if you have something to wish for but it's not there yet you can work towards it and it gives you a lot of energy. And we have another dream and I can share that as well. We want to go to the Bahamas. So once we're finished with this all in a lot of years time, we're going to fly out to the Bahamas going to sit there drinking beer, have a laugh and say do you remember Drupal Con? Do you remember growing? Do you remember all the hurdles we've taken to achieve success? So the first thing I want to basically tell you is that think big, dream big so you can grow big. If you don't have a big hairy audacious goal then you can work and basically on your daily projects and you can't work towards that big hairy audacious goal. And a study recently showed that only 2% of all entrepreneurs have a big hairy audacious goal but those 2% are also the most successful ones. So I urge you come up with a big hairy audacious goal as we did and grow fast. So we started this agency basically at my house, at the dinner table, 2 second hand laptops, yes we're going to create a full service agency. How? We didn't have a clue at all. But we had one thing, we had Google. So we started Googling on how to set up an agency. And the day we registered at that evening I had a party at my house and this guy walks in and he says hey how are you doing man? He's a good friend of mine. He says well I started an agency today, a company today. He says all right do you have a website yet? I said no I don't. He says yes you're going to be my first prospect then. So that evening I signed my first deal, wasn't the most profitable one. But then again we were starting off and within a couple of weeks time we decided to focus on bringing in quite a few nice brands and that worked out fine via my network. But before we started off the agency, with my companion Flores Derkse, we had to define rules. Rules on how to cooperate, how to work together, what to do and what not to do. And one of the rules was is that we didn't want any investors in our company. We wanted to be an independent agency. And we knew that would give us hurdles along the way. We could not grow rapidly as rapid as we could because we didn't have any investors. I always see it as there's two ways to the south of France. You can take the tall road, cost you a lot of money or get you there quickly. Or you can take the country roads. Takes a bit longer. It's a lot nicer though. And when you get to the south of France you know you don't have to meet your investor there who basically invested all the money so you could pay the toll roads. So yeah, we had rules. So no foreign money, no investors. And not working on projects my wife wouldn't allow me to. So not working for clients that would not be generally expected to work for. So we had a different set of rules. We written them down. So we had a ground basis to work on. And we had our big hairy audacious goals. We created our website using Drupal. And we had our first client. So together, this is Boris Dax, by the way, he's my companion. We combined in our, you know, board of directors or management team, two different personas. And this comes in quite handy in the future. This came in quite handy in the future. Because I have a marketing and sales background. And my companion had a UX design and development background. There was no way we could basically not work together because we had our own different sets of expertise. And this would basically, you know, give quite a lot of balance within the management or team or, as you call it, board of directors. So we found this two new clients. It was as was children's villages, a major NGO and go ton. That is a large food producer in Europe who works in over 17 countries. And we were allowed to work on their website with the two of us. So I did the consultancy. I did the selling. I did project management. And Flores did the design and development, you know, with two large projects, you know, we were working our butts off. We were working. And I say we started early at 830 in the morning, definitely until one at night, you know, and that comes with the job if you want success. Because you have to create first some profit, you know, profit you can invest later in new stuff. And you have to, you know, you know, break the ground floors and set your company in motion. So we were working really, really hard. They say if you've worked 10,000 hours on a project or a specialist, well, we've worked 10,000 hours plus in the beginning to create our company. So when we got the first two major brands, we started to shout them, you know, like shout it from the roof, you know, we created a press list. And we send out a press release to every new station we could find. And that got picked up, you know, and suddenly people were talking about this new agency. Everybody was thinking that we were with 10 people already, but it was just the two of us. So everybody's talking about these new agencies like hey, they got two new brands, big brands, they choose for one shoe. Something is happening there. We created a boss around our company. So we didn't do project management, sales, marketing, development, designing, no, we also did present PR for our own company. And that's really valuable. That's what most of the agencies don't do. They create successful projects, but they forget to promote it, you know, and not just promote it on Drupal.org, because that's where the developers come. No, promote it to your local press. That's where you start or or the national press or the international press. There's a lot of websites, you can find where you can promote your work. And we did. And then suddenly, independent persons were talking about one shoe. They were talking about our agency. Something is happening there. And that's really important. Independent people talking about your company. Because I always say, Hi, I am from Coca Cola, and I'm selling you Coca Cola. Yeah, right. You know, because you're from Coca Cola. But then this independent person says, Coca Cola is great. You know, you got to buy it. And then suddenly people think, Hmm, could be interesting. So one of the major reasons for success is to promote your work via independent channels. And we did that in the early days. And we were lucky as well. I can tell you that. Not only because I had a network with a few large customers, potential customers in it. But also we were the first agency to adopt Drupal in the Netherlands. So what we started to do is giving back at the same time. We started looking if there was a community around Drupal. And we found out there was one event and there was about 10 or 11 guys sitting around pizza boxes at the university talking about Drupal. So I have a marketing background. I decided to join the meetup. I would go there and sit down with the guys and they were talking about code. Okay, I'm not a coder. I know marketing. I know sales. So I sat down there and then suddenly I see this guy walking in with a suit. So I walk up to him says, Who are you? I says, Well, I'm from KPN, one of the largest telecom providers in the Netherlands. And I've heard something about Drupal. There's a meetup here. And then I thought, Okay, there's 11 guys 10 11 guys sitting around pizza boxes here. We need to professionalize this as well. Not only professionalize my company, but I also need to professionalize the community. So the next meetup, we started promoting fire independent channels as well. And Drupal.org and and all the channels we could find. And I created a role better, you know, and then suddenly two new large companies would walk in in their suits. And suddenly we had a table there and we can all those large companies would basically address the Drupal developers there and talk about Drupal in a more professional way. So the event we was called the Drupal gem. And the Drupal gem became the biggest Drupal event in the Netherlands with more than two to 300 visitors every year now. So we basically started giving back and I want to address to the keynote of trees, which is really good, give back to the community and it will bring you profit along the way anyway. And maybe in the future, it can give you badges, you know, that you're a core contributor or a marketing contributor as well. So very well done trees. So events is another way to promote yourself. So we decided to do some more. So in Holland, now you have the Drupal gem. We organized Drupal cafes at our office. It's all about sharing knowledge. I set up the Drupal Business Foundation in the Netherlands to promote Drupal independently. So my company is not linked to that. We're an organization member of the Dutch Drupal Community Society and of course the Drupal Association member. Really important to have those badges on your website. Why? Gives you credits. If potential customers see those badges, they think, hey, this guy or this company is giving back to the community. They know their stuff. So it gives you credits. So if you basically give back and you invest in the community, it will bring you profit in the end anyway and you can grow. Grow faster than those who don't. So we started growing our company with our first profits we made. And that was the biggest hurdle, I think, is hiring my first person. You know, I was lying there. No, I didn't bet like, oh, my God, no. And I got regular costs coming in every month. Oh, my God. How am I going to do this? And then I came up with the idea, okay, I'm going to hire an internship, an intern, you know, it's cost effective for six months. I can find out if he's well enough. And if he's well enough, you know, we can hire him anyway. And we hired this guy who was good at a development, but also user experience. Well, that came in handy. So he could decide beside work with our clients. So we started to look for what we call T shaped personnel. Yeah, you can find specialists who are focusing on either PHP back end development. But we were looking for T shaped personnel. T shaped personnel is they're really broadly educated in several subjects. But they go deep on every subject as well. And this guy, this intern we found was really good in UX, really good. And in development. So there's a win win situation for us. By doing so, this guy internship, paying, I think it was 300 euros a month, at the time, brought in a lot of profit. And with that profit, we bought faster laptops and we could invest in new stuff. And then we started growing. We started hiring new pet personnel. And there's a lot of opportunities that came our way. I can tell you one, we wanted to be a full service agency. And then I had this miraculous idea. At the times, the Olympic Games were being organized in Beijing. And I decided, okay, how cool will it be to drive from A to B from Athens, birthplace of the Olympic Games to be Beijing, create a program television program around it, an advertising campaign to hire new staff for the Holland Heineken House there. And, you know, just by a whim of an idea, I all wrote it down on paper. Floris, my companion in the evening, made a design and I drove to the Dutch Olympic Sports Association. They thought it was a brilliant idea and gave me 100,000 euros straight away and connected me to all of their sponsors to create this expedition. Shit, didn't thought it was going that fast. So I was in my car and I'm like, oh my god, I got three websites to build. My pipeline is full. Maybe this was too big a step. Then we came up to this. Everybody needs a coach. We were basically introduced to a coach in the beginning. And even, you know, as I want to depict here, is that even the best of the best in the world need a coach. And we needed a coach as well to give our guidelines, you know, creating a television program and we were only like with four people. It's a bit too much. So to be honest here, the project didn't go off. I called them and said, okay, you know, company goes first. This television project is off the charts. Sorry about that. And I've learned from that my mistakes. So what I did is started focusing on one shoe, creating that full service agency. The coach didn't like that we wanted to be a full service agency. And he said, focus on web development. Yes, we can. But in a society where we have always connected consumers, you know, being reachable my mobile phones, telephone tablets, anywhere, we wanted to give this full surface option to our clients. Everybody was against it. Everybody. And I mean, everybody is like, okay, cool, second hurdle, third hurdle, whatever you call it. We're going to do this. We're going to show the world that it's possible to create a full service agency. We had a challenge. And our coach gave us guidelines on how to interact with new customers, set up a pipeline, pipeline management. And basically, a great coach will definitely lead to success. And it did, you know, once we found a structure to run our agency, it was possible for us to grow even faster. We had a strong focus on what we wanted to live to deliver in which years we knew that we would first focus on web development, Drupal web development. And besides that work a bit on marketing and communication, because we knew the biggest market would be Drupal. At that time, there were three agencies in the Netherlands to work with Drupal. And I think every month we had three to four pitches. And they also had like, okay, I always ask like, okay, who are my competition? Do you know that? He says, oh, there are two others. And I already knew, okay, who my competition was because there are only two other competition competitors in the Netherlands. Working all of those long hours gave me another hurdle to take. And although I won't present a picture of her here, I want to thank my wife. She gave me the opportunity to grow the agency. She was taking care of the kids at the time. And she allowed me to work from nine till midnight for the first couple of years. It was basically ridiculous when I think back of it. But now I have my agency and it all works out fine. And now I have time for my kids and my wife a lot more. So behind every great leader, there's even a better partner. If you don't make good, how to say it, if you don't work closely with your wife, you know, and discuss all the hurdles you have to take in growing a company, it will lead to disaster somewhere along the way. So if you have a partner, discuss what your vision is, discuss your dream, tell her that you'll take her to the Bahamas. But also tell her that it's necessary to work those 10,000 hours to create your company. And this is vital, vital for success. So I want to thank my wife, Alice, for allowing me to grow my company and be there every time I needed her. Right from the beginning, we knew that we wanted to grow our agency. Not as big as we are now. We didn't expect that to happen that quick. But we knew we wanted to grow. And what we also knew is that we had to grow in terms of leadership. And that's a problem I see with many agencies. I organized a Drupal CXO event a while ago in Utrecht. And I spoke to this guy, I know I have no idea if he's in the room here, and he says, I just hired my third star, my third person. And he's been dreadful, it's taking a lot of energy. And I quickly really realized that if you are a coder, and you start your company, you know, it's fun, you know, coding. And then you attract another coder and you're coding together. And another one. And another one. And suddenly there's a room full of coders. But is there a leader? Is there a guy who knows management, project management? Is there a visionary person within the company who will lead the company past all those hurdles? In most of the times that person is not there right from the start. And that will, that's one of the reasons why a lot of agencies are still down to about a maximum of 10 people. Because it's easy to run a company of up to 10 people, you know, because it's small, you can do your agile projects, you do a bit of sales or a bit of promotion, and you get enough work coming in, and your cash flow is right in order. But if you want to grow past the 18, you know, the 18 mark is a really difficult one, then you have to change as management as well, as a leader. So that there's four levels of leadership. There's leading yourself, you know, you're a one person company, that's easy, you know, it requires some self discipline, of course, but it's easy to manage yourself. Then you get to a point where you have to manage a team of people. So that's only direct support on this. You're a typical manager, and all the typical management works comes with it. Then if you start to grow, you have to start leading a team of teams. For example, a team of project managers that will lead a team, that requires different skills, and a different mindset because you're distancing yourself from the company. And that is, sorry, commerce guys, didn't do that on purpose. So you have to distance yourself from your own staff. And the question is, are you willing to do so? You know, it doesn't mean that you have to work in this ivory tower, you know, somewhere, you know, at a long distance from your staff. No, not at all. You have to be on the floor regularly, but you don't work in a team closely together with them. That's a change. And it depends on you if you want to make that change. But it gives you time to go out there to basically hunt your vision and find new staff, find new clients and just to go out there. And then the fourth one, you know, the next step is that you're a leader of a bigger organization. You set the long term visionary goals, you know, basically tell that to your board of directors. They will address it down towards the managers and to your staff, et cetera. Those are basically the four steps of leadership that you will have to go to go through if you want to do so. So you have to grow as well. It requires discipline, time, knowledge, some gray hairs. And you have to read a lot of books as well, management books that will support you and consult a coach every now and then to see if you're on the right track, because you will come across hurdles you won't believe. They say, there's a saying, I wish you a lot of personnel or I wish you a lot of staff. Yes, it's totally true. It gives you hurdles. I will leave it to that. All right. So we decided to focus on Drupal Enterprise. We've chosen what we call a specific market within the Drupal community. We didn't want it to work for the bakery around the corner. We love his bread, yes, but we don't want to work for him. Why? A bakery around the corner is basically working all day busy with his bread. And he's not focusing on marketing or his website or anything like that and he has no knowledge of that as well. But he has some vague idea on what he wants to do with his bakery. So the amount of time you have to work with this bakery guy, you know, to get his website off the chart, is taking you the same amount of time working for an enterprise, a client who has a lot more cash to spend, who has an IT person or marketing person available, who has knowledge of the projects. It makes working a lot more easier and they pay better. So we started to focus on the enterprise market of Drupal and that was a good choice because it gave us bigger clients and we started to shout it off the rooftops again like, hey, we found another large client, people started believing it and what we did is what we created, the an ecosystem where it would lead to success. And we call this the wheel of fortune. We came of this, we created this ourselves. So we started off with our proposition. What is it that we offer? Well, as I said before, strategy, UX design, development for web and mobile and advertisement, that's our proposition. So we are a full service agency that can help you with your seamlessly integrated communication task. And we started to promote or tell this to clients. And we also did marketing. Marketing is an essential part in growing your agency. Never forget that. So we communicated our proposition to our clients and via all the marketing channels we can find. This would lead to a business, but also new employees. And we told our proposition also to our employees who started basically communicating our proposition as well. And that will basically lead to growth. What comes with that is that you have to set up an operation that serves your proposition in the right way. So you have to create workflows, you've got your processes all aligned towards your proposition and your clients, specifically your clients, all your processes and workflows should be addressed to your clients working with your proposition. So when you have your operation in order, you have to stay in touch with your knowledge as well. The world is changing rapidly. We all know that. Drupal 8 beta is coming out pretty soon. So yes, you have to get that knowledge up and running within your agency. Don't forget that you have to stay up to speed. If you don't innovate, if you don't learn, it will basically start your engine somewhere along the line. With that new knowledge, you know, in an ever changing market, you have to check in with your proposition every two to three years like, okay, you know, markets changing. There's a lot of new knowledge. Is my proposition still working? And then you've got a wheel, and it just starts turning, you know, and Dries Boudart showed us a rocket, a rocket aerial company, and we were just driving around this road all the way to the south of France, eventually leaving us, leading us to the Bahamas. So this wheel of fortune, take it into your mind and make sure that every part of it is done correctly, that you have all those items written down. So you have an agency that works with leadership comes also a lot of responsibility. I told you that my agency has grown now up to 40 people who are expanding rapidly now. That comes with a lot of responsibilities. And you have to learn, you know, I was a creative founder once, and I have to learn how to act responsible as well. Three of them, I will mention here. So you got your organizational goals. I discussed earlier the dot on the horizon. As a manager, or as a leader, you are the captain of the ship. Keep in mind what the dot on the horizon is, and that you sail towards it. But also be aware that a ship never sails in a straight line. It also goes like from left to right to reach that horizon and tell that to your staff as well. Productivity and results of colleagues and your organization, this is an operational role. And you have to grow into that as well. You know, normally you're a coder, you sit behind your coding, having a lot of fun. And then suddenly you're looking at charge on how the productivity of your staff is, you know, that's a difference, that's a change. And that's a role you have to take as well. Definitely in the beginning, later on in the process, you can address that to somebody else. In the future, when you grow, your team leads can start reporting to you, but that's one of the levels of growth you can reach when you're growing bigger. And there's a social responsibility as well. You have staff, you have a role in society. Don't take this too lightly. This is a task you have to address as well. So work with your staff. Make them feel at home. If there's trouble at home, work with them to resolve those problems at home. And take a role in society as well, especially in an open source society, is that you have to give back as Dries noted already. And another thing I just wanted to tell you, just be so cool, they can't ignore you. Be a cool company or being a cool company is another reason for growth. Why? Just people want to work at a cool company. That's really basically it. So what we did, we were now in quite a large office. So we created the bar. We have our own lots of bar slash discotech for Friday parties. I give the keys to my staff and just guys, you know, I'm off. I'm off to my wife and kids early. Here you go guys, have fun. We create barbecues. And we go out regularly. We have a game room, all that kind of stuff that every developer dreams of. We have it. And that's really important to grow because if you can't find the right stuff because you're not cool, you're not cool to work for, then it's difficult to grow because it all comes down to finding the right stuff. So if you grow from being a creative leader, a creative founder, I must say, into a leader, this is what it also comes down to. This is really a hurdle because you get distracted every day by operational things that will basically draw you away from the task and goals that you have one to reach. So first of all, make use of your time wisely, absolutely focus on clear results and definitely also long term success. Not only on the day to day stuff. If you focus on that, I'll come to that later, then you won't grow. Avoid perfectionism. Developers by nature are perfectionists, zeros and ones. If something is at 85%, you can make the decision. You don't have to know if it's 100% correct to make this decision. If you're at 85% and you have the gut feeling to think, hey, this is cool. We're going to do this. We're going to build this application. There's always a developer coming up to you and say, no, no, no, we've got to do some more research and go client research, et cetera, et cetera. If it feels right at about 85%, just do it. Don't be a perfectionist in making choices. Be perfectionist in code. Yes, if you want to produce code, you have to be a perfectionist. But in making choices as a manager, you don't have to be a perfectionist at 85%, just give it a go because it feels right. Update the way you work. There's different work habits. Once you're a director, once you're a leader, and set limitations, and most of all, do important things first. Another thing I want to share with you is that innovation leads to growth. And I'll tell you why in a second. There's a lot of people questioning me. It's why I spend so much time on innovation. We've just hooked up the Google Glass to Drupal and iBeacon technology. iBeacon technology didn't work that well for Google Glass because it's overheating. I'm going to tell you that straight away. But will it lead to a lot of business straight away? No, not all. You know, you can't make money out of innovation itself at all. But then again, why should you do it? Well, it leads to present PR. Because if you do stuff, that nobody has done before, it will lead and you send out a press release. You know, people will pick it up and then say, hey, this company is doing cool stuff with Google Glass and Drupal and iBeacon technology. Like, wow, they're doing some great stuff. So we decided to spend an X amount of our budget just purely on innovation. Great thing is that the Dutch government gives you subsidies for that as well. So you can basically deduct it from your wages. And yes, it's fun. It's fun as well, because your staff can work on the latest technologies. And so they have fun. Your staff has fun. Your present PR agent has a lot of fun because hey, they can send out press releases that are being absolutely printed. And then suddenly your name is being picked up as an innovative company. You know, and some innovation would lead to products we've done there. We've built products based on Drupal and QR codes in the past. And then even the largest publishers in the Netherlands now even work with our products. Yes, sometimes it would lead to a product, but in 90% it doesn't. But it leads to growth growth of your company because you get attention for being innovative. So take that in mind, you know, if you want your staff to work on cool projects, just give them time, but make sure there's a PR plan behind it as well. So you can publicize it and spread the word. When we look at short term thinking, that's the enemy of long term success. So you grow your agency. We've passed the hurdle of 18. We started growing. I needed to get my processes in order. I needed to get my operations in order. And I was working on my daily to daily business. I needed to change offices. We've been moving already for four times now. So every two years we moved our office. And that takes about four to five months, you know, organizing it and buying new cables and tables and all that kind of stuff. You know, I love IKEA. So if you're just purely focusing on your day to day business, you forget to work on your long term success. You don't work on finding new clients or new markets. So that's a problem. So you're working on your day to day business, but no new business is coming in. And other agencies are taking specific markets. So if you don't work on your long term success, then suddenly your short term process has a problem. But if you only focus on your long term, you're always busy with finding new clients and new markets, then your day to day business starts lacking. And your day to day business gives you your income. So there's a challenge, you know, it's like, okay, should I focus on my long term success? Should I focus on my short term success? No, you should do both. You know, you should find a balance between them. Yes, work on new clients, work on new markets, new products, new services. But then again work on your daily operations, as well. So if you lose sight of your operations, you will lose money. If you lose sight of your new markets and new customers, you won't get new money in. It's a lose, lose situation or if you do it correctly, a win, win situation. So Google this one, the disciplines of market leaders. It's an interesting one. And I've made a mistake here. We grew rapidly because of Drupal. Thank you, Dries. And we when we started, we had a what we call customer intimacy focus. It's basically called that our clients were our main focus and every everything we did every process we created was focus on our clients. Then after a few years, when we passed the 18 hurdle, your processes will get, you know, difficult. You have to change your management style. You have to change your processes, everything. And then the idea came up, okay, maybe we should, and this was done by an operation manager, should we focus on being a product leader in terms of Drupal. And what he did was created, he set up an organization on creating Drupal products as fast as possible, losing sight of the customer intimacy focus we had. So he was focusing on the daily operations on to create them as smoothly as possible and as fast as possible to get more efficiency. But in meantime, he lost sight of our clients. And that was a big, big, big mistake. Because it's not about how fast we can produce a Drupal site as quickly as possible. No, it's about delivering success to our clients and even better the clients of our clients. So we made a mistake there and lost sight of our customers at the time. Fortunately, we found out, you know, within the year, turned it all back and, you know, created new, a new operations style. And now we are 100% focused on customer intimacy. If you focus on your clients, your clients are happy, your clients become your ambassadors, and they will tell and talk about you as I told before, independent marketers, you know, if you can create a client into an independent market here of your agency, you know, that's the best marketing you can get, you know, and then word of mouth, word of mouth started spreading again, and the agency started growing. I believe that well, we're now with 40 people, I've heard that the next hurdle, the big hurdle will be at around 50 to 60. No idea what that one is, but I can tell you maybe next year. But focusing on customer intimacy is something really important because you don't, unless you are, of course, a product oriented company that sells hosting or which is a product, you know, then you can make things as smooth as possible. Then you should have product leadership in that one. But if you build Drupal websites, Drupal platforms or other services like that, please focus on your customer. So when I meet people, successful people, I always ask 100 questions, you know, okay, how do you do it? How did you grow? And the reasons to what they attribute their success to is actually the same persistence, hard work, and best of all, hiring good people. Don't be afraid to hire someone who is better than you. Make sure you find people who are better than you. You're the leader. You can't think of everything yourself. You don't want to. You don't have the time to. So surround yourself with a team that's better than you. And we're closely together. If you have a dream, a vision, a dot on the horizon, which is a big, big vague, doesn't matter, hire good staff, ask me in your room, sit down, legs on the table, drink a beer. Guys, I have this vague idea on where to go to. Let's plot the route together. And if you surround yourself with people who are better than you, your company will strive. Definitely. So hiring good people is a task of a successful manager. And I've read in the books somewhere that 60% of your time, you should be focusing on hiring good people, 60% of your time. May I see some hands? Who's working 60% of their time on finding new, better staff? Someone there, he's doubting. Yeah, that's what I, you know, and I find it hard to believe as well, is that 60% of my time, I should work on finding better staff. It is true. Why? Because all those daily problems you have can be solved by people who are better than you instead of you. But it's difficult. And I can absolutely understand why nobody raised their hand here, except for you there. All right. Another thing, you know, make mistakes, make a lot of mistakes. I've learned from my mistakes. I've made many of them. And I can laugh about them. I've learned from them. So I've decided to make some more mistakes. Seriously, yeah, I'm going to make a lot of more mistakes, you know, because I learned from them. People who make mistakes, they dare to do things differently. They try to find new ways of growing a company, they make mistakes along the way and then immediately decide, okay, I'm going to take another route to success. Because this is the one way street doesn't work. And keep laughing about them. Sometimes you make mistakes, you go, you go to a home, you're in your car, and you think, oh my goodness, what have I done? You know, and, well, don't be be sorry for yourself. Just just laugh about it. It's all part of business. Now we make mistakes. We're humans, we're not computers who are being programmed. No, laugh and move along. It's one of those hurdles you come along. All right. What's also really necessary, this is no actual data, this for your information, is get your reports in order once you grow. A lot of organizations tend to grow. And then they forget that one of the key issues is key issues of management is to look into reports on is your business doing well, is your cash position in order, is your pipeline in order. If you have 40 people working for you and you have a pipeline which says 10,000 euros within the next three months is going to be close, you have a problem. And you know that beforehand, if you have your reporting in order. So you need your cash flow position, you need your sales pipeline management, you have your marketing reports. And also your product, your staff efficiency reports, really important. And get your reporting in order as soon as possible. I already started reporting when we Flores and I were with the two of us, you know, he was programming and I made sure that he got the information about, okay, what's my pipeline, this is what's coming in. And so we can make management decisions based on numbers. Makes it a lot easier. If you do everything on gut feeling, you'll get a discussion along the way. If you, if you base your decisions based on numbers, it makes it a lot easier. So take your time to set up your reporting. Yeah. You said in the beginning that you didn't want any investors, so assume that you don't have any investors. No. But did you ever finance any parts of your growth? For example, when you meet a person who is highly skilled, did you ever go through a phase where you either thought about getting a credit in the bank? No, I have a bookkeeper. Also, basically, I'll your question is, did I ever finance my growth? No, no, I didn't. I don't care about money at all. And my companion doesn't either. We love to build great stuff and get rewarded for that in a way that, you know, we get on the podium and things like that, you know, we love that, but we don't care about money. So we don't spend. Our bookkeeper says, guys, this is getting ridiculous. Start spending some money, but we don't. And we haven't done that for the last eight and a half years. So our cash position is nice, I can say. And the funny thing is, is that we've we've created this ridiculous cash position. Now we can finance our growth into Germany or set up a shop in Amsterdam. No problem. Higher new stuff. No problem. But for the last eight and a half years, you know, we didn't spend at all. Every, you know, maybe gonna laugh, but if you're gonna buy a printer, you know, just a printer, you know, everybody needs a printer at their office, you know, we're debating on which one, you know, go that one is 25 euros cheaper, you know, but this is effective and how much are the cartridges cost, et cetera. We have small discussions about that one. Why? It says money in the end, you know, so think big, act small. That's what we do. Don't spend at all. So you can finance your growth yourself. And I always say that there's two types of, of agencies or companies. You have companies and you've got independent companies. I'm an independent entrepreneur, not an entrepreneur. So and that makes it a lot different. There's nobody, you know, I have to address to and say, okay, you know, my company is doing well and he says to me, no, you should do it differently. No. If I want to have fun tomorrow and Google and Oculus Rift is coming in within two weeks time, I'm gonna have a lot of fun with that because we're gonna have a program. Lots of cool stuff, you know, on the Oculus Rift. I don't have to tell an investor whether I can do that or not or spend ridiculous money on an Oculus Rift. Things like that. So it gives us freedom. So we're 100% free. And we have money, enough money to grow ourselves now. But yeah, it's getting dark here. All right. So you don't. Yes. I can tell you that there was a competitor. One of the three agencies that started right outside along us in 2006. They brought in a investor. And they grew rapidly. And I already saw them, you're growing too rapidly. This is not healthy anymore. The investor will basically guide your company in a direction you don't want to. That company is now bankrupt. It's finished. It's gone. And at the time, I was afraid. It's like, Oh, my God, everybody's growing more rapidly than I do. You know, it's like, should I get an investor? Of course. So those questions came along. We decided not to, you know, and we're now, you know, one of the bigger agencies and we're having still a lot of fun and we're still 100% independent. All right. So I'm going to tell you, and I see the slightest is not correctly and made a mistake here. I want to tell you about the blue and red ocean theory. Who knows about the blue and red ocean theory? All right, good. Um, it's a theory based on an ocean and there's a lot of fish swimming in that ocean. And then the sharks come in and he's hungry and he has a lot of fish, you know, he's laughing, you know, that's basically what happened when we started off with Drupal. There was a lot of demand and we're only, well, we started as the first agency in the Netherlands later that came three, three agencies. There was so much market, there were only three sharks within that ocean. So we had plenty of fish to eat and everybody was laughing. And you know, with that success, that drew a lot of attention of some more sharks, you know, some more sharks coming in and suddenly what's happening is that those sharks start competing for that one little fish, you know, and that can get nasty, really nasty, it can get bloody. So a blue ocean can turn into a red ocean and that will happen. If an ocean is full of fish and there's only one shark in there, believe me, new sharks will come in, you know, as I said, you know, three agencies in the beginning, there's now I think over 102 agencies in the Netherlands, you know, doing Drupal, promoting Drupal, working with Drupal. Fortunately, the pie has become bigger, you know, sometimes there's a bit of blood, but you know, it's still okay, but it will become bloody. So what can you do against it? You can choose a new blue ocean. Let's say you're going to do iBeacon technology development or Google Glass development, something completely different, or you can position yourself as an agency in a corner. We do Drupal commerce. We do purely community websites. So you're there in a corner. And if that's really successful, of course, some shark will follow, but most of them will stay in the middle of the ocean, competing each other. So that's that you can diversify yourself. You can offer new services or you can specialize yourself. So that's part of the blue and red ocean theory. Keep in mind, keep focus on your market. When it gets bloody, make sure you adopt your agency. You know, that's information you're getting. And with that information, you can change your proposition and your strategy. So take that into account and sorry for the wrong slide. When you grow your company and you don't want to get investors, you'll find bottlenecks. That's why I got the right slide here. You'll find bottlenecks. What's happening? So first you have your strategy session, then you have your UX session, and then you've got your front end development, your back end development, and suddenly more work is pouring in. And you have a large development team and only one UX developer. And everybody has, every project has to go through this guy. You know, the guy comes up to you says, Oh my God, you know, I've got too much work. And first, you have to identify and exploit the bottleneck. See if he's truly full. If he's truly, truly, truly full, then hire someone else and make sure that you have your, your hiring team up to speed so they can quickly find somebody else. If you grow this way by identifying bottlenecks and basically get rid of bottlenecks. As soon as it's really, really necessary, then it's possible to grow without funding, you know, without external funding, as we did. And this is the correct slide, of course, celebrate success. It's really important to enjoy the ride. You know, there's there's a lot of hurdles in terms of staffing. That's the biggest, you know, hurdle you'll come across. You have your your your finance issues that will come along. But don't forget. It's fun. It's part of the job. It comes with it. You know, that's part of you being an entrepreneur. You know, and that makes you different from all the people who work at companies, large companies that makes you an entrepreneur, because you can tackle those issues. And if you tackle an issue, celebrate it. But celebrate also your success. If you've launched a new platform, you know, take your guys your staff out to drink, you know, and and have fun, a lot of fun. So celebrate success. Don't forget that. And that's where I want to basically end my presentation. If you have any question, please now. And otherwise, you can find me at the booth. First question. Sorry, there's a microphone here. I've heard. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah, so one challenge we have is that work kind of finds us in a very reactive way. So we make ourselves identifiable as a Drupal agency. And then we get leads in. We win those leads, we get business. The challenge I get with that is how I actually kind of plan my pipeline, because I can tell you what I'm doing for the next six or seven months. I couldn't tell you what I'm doing in 18 months because I don't know what the pipeline looks like. So how did you resolve those challenges? Well, what we do is, yes, we have a pipeline. And we give every new lead a score. We know at which dates what the expected close date is, what kind of percentage we give them is like, okay, this is a 10% you know, we don't focus on that one. But this is an 80% you know, we got to focus on that one because there's 80% chance we can focus, we can close them off within the next, you know, three or four weeks. So if you have that projectory based on your planning, you can look ahead how much stuff you need for your projects. And then you have somebody to hire new stuff, you can work that out. And we haven't done that with flexible stuff like freelancers working for you. They can come in, do the job, but you get less profit on working with a freelancer than working with your own staff. So if you're confident enough in attracting leads, you have your, your, your, your sales team up and running up to speed. You've got your forecasting in order. You can also forecasting the work ahead. Six months time it within six months time it's easy to find new stuff. The only problem is, is do you have the capabilities to train your staff as well? Because they have to adopt your ways of working, do your work with SVN or Git, all this kind of stuff. So, so training is, is part of the, the process as well. And yeah, you have to take into account that if a new developer comes in, if it's, if it's just a PHP developer, you can get them up to speed within a month or two, but he won't be a Rockstar Drupal programmer yet, because he has to learn his modules. But if he's a Rockstar programmer already, yeah, you can hire WebChick, you know, you, you can starter, you know, quite quickly. So find a balance in that one. All right. That's a question. You mentioned that you made the decision not to do full, full service at a certain point, focus on web development. Yeah, well, at, at, at that time, at that time. Yeah, because we had a limited amount of time. And how did you fill the gap for the services that weren't part of? Well, that was really in the early stages. Yeah, that was really in the early stages. So, so pretty soon after that, we started to promote our other services like strategic advice, to consultancy, advertisement, all that kind of stuff. And we hired to write stuff when demand, you know, when, when we partner at all in the early days. With affiliates. No, well, on some parts, we got a job. That was really funny, actually. I'm at this client and I knew they wanted an advertising campaign. So I thought of, you know, OK, we have to create a few banners, a billboard. And then this, this, this girl sits down with me and she says, OK, you've got to think big. And this is external consultant sitting there as well. And I'm asking the question, how big? And then they showed me the Apple TV commercial, the first one. And I'm looking at it. This big. Yeah, this big. So I'm like, OK, so I sat down with the team and created this, this campaign with 3D characters. Absolutely. It was commercials with 3D characters flying through the air. And it was a woman based on the how to say it, a computer game model. And it was just awesome. It was radical at the time. And we worked long hours again to do that one. But we didn't have the developers in-house to do all the animations. And we worked together with guys who also worked together on track. So it was massive. Yeah. So, all right. Now, what kind of software do you use for planning long term? So your pipelines make rather than on a per project basis? Are we we have a CRM system we call we use sugar for that one. And basically every leads we turn into sugar and we create a report every week. So we go through all the leads, you know, and then basically come through, you know, like, OK, you know, how much time are we going to put on how much effort going to be put on this one and that one. So we come through them every week, you know, and then we say, OK, this is a lead, but it's not interesting for us or there's too much effort going into it. We can get any margin on that one. So we scraped that off the list. Always the bottom of the list. You got to scrape away. Yeah. If you use the microphone, then it's recorded. Yeah. Thank you. What do you see as a healthy ratio between innovation and paintwork? Well, yeah, that's a difficult one. It's always a challenge. Sometimes, you know, there's a lot of work coming in and then you have little time for innovation. Not more than 5 percent of your work should be done on innovation, because depending. It totally depends if you're a product company and you want to outstand your competition and you're, as I said, a product company. Yes, you should invest a lot more in innovation, because if you stand still as a product company, you die. If you are a Drupal web agency and you build Drupal web platforms, yes, innovate in front-end and back-end development or create new modules and things like that and share them with the community to get your credits there. So I think innovation about 5 percent max, they'll be healthy. You mentioned at some point you needed a coach. Yeah. Why? And what were you looking for? Well, at the time I was taking too much hay. I don't know how to say it in English, too much hay on my fork, you know. As I said, I was selling a television program which was it was a great idea still. But, you know, they believed in it, but it was ridiculous for a two-man company to create a TV program that would normally be done by the BBC. So we were thinking too big at the time. And what he did, he sat down with us and he said, OK, how much time do you spend on sales? How much time do you spend on hiring new people? How much time do you spend on? So he made a full list with percentages behind it, not ours, percentages. So he we said that we come through the list and I gave him percentages of how much time I thought I was working on projects. And he came up to the realization that I was working 200 percent of my time, which was not feasible, you know. So I should have worked like more than the ridiculous hours I already made. And I was not working effectively at the time. I was basically working on projects that would not gain traction like the television program. So we started focusing and focusing on actual growth, on the actual needs of the company and, yeah, getting things done, as I said earlier in my slide. Some more questions. All right. Thank you very much for coming. So if you have any questions, we have a booth downstairs. And if you want to experience Google Glass, just let me know. There's one at the stand as well. Thank you very much.