Hello Veevart Team!
Happy New Year! I hope you had time to rest and spend time with your loved ones. I start the new year full of hope, focus, and energy. Our main goal this year is to reach $3M in ARR, $3.4 in Income, and finally get over the weight produced by the required investment made in 2023, but that was needed by our organization.
Lots of exciting things coming this year!
This year we’ll start receiving income from Stripe and Square, which adds another revenue stream to our flywheel.
We’ll also be re-arranging our fiscal structure - which will allow us to distribute shares to all our team, and share the progress and wealth that we produce as a company.
We will now have a Support Team which will enable us to take care of our clients in a better way.
We now have a fully dedicated team to support our ambition on Courses.
Huli will go live which will surely open a new set of both opportunities and challenges.
If everything goes as planned, we will move from our current office into a new space by the August/September horizon (we want to eliminate the security and parking issues we are currently facing).
Last year we re-did our Core Values and narrowed them down to three:
We are seekers of excellence and efficiency.
Work with Strategic Intent.
Our focus and obsession is the success of our clients.
I love them, but I think that as a CEO, I can do a better job of linking them to our daily work. And so, you’ll hear me talking more about it as the year progresses.
With that being said there are a couple of themes that I want us to focus on this year, and that are also aligned with our values:
Churn
Churn belongs to everyone in the organization. It is not only Customer Success: it starts with me, sales, our product teams, implementation, and finally customer success. What I have seen is that the pains expressed by red and orange accounts are pretty telling of the deficiencies that we have in our product and processes.
We will be working with CSMs and the Product Team to evaluate how the cases affecting these accounts are prioritized and find the optimal way to implement them. I will also be trying to visit these clients, along with the CSM and Product Team, so we can look at them at the face and tell them how we are going to get them to the next level.
Speed
Sometimes we forget speed is part of the equation. If Company A makes a high-quality product at an F speed at a specific cost, and Company B makes the same high-quality speed in half the time at the same cost, which one is the better company? We need to take a look at what we are doing and always be thinking: How can I do this faster?
A good example of this is our Implementation Team: We had one headcount to add to our implementation team, and we could have hired another person, but instead, we hired a developer to help us automate the data migration process from our competitors. If we are successful in this endeavor, it will be a game changer for the company for the new customers that we’ll on-board, and for the department.
Communication
We are only as good as the knowledge we can share, and how effective we are in our communications (think about it - A paraplegic/quadriplegic individual is someone whose nervous system experienced a breakdown: communication from the brain does not reach its final destination). We must avoid these paralysis. This goes from the informal communication that happens between our departments to the formal communication that needs to go into communicating performance and management.
It is normal that as a company grows, breakdowns in communication start to appear. But we need to identify the situations causing these failures and build processes or routines around them.
A good example of this is the Performance Evaluation process that we saw this week. This came from a breakdown in communication started by me - so I’m dissolving the problem by creating a quarterly cadence that we can all use to communicate performance. Another example was the Poor Client Product Fit matrix we produced at the end of the year which uncovered unexpected treasures to tackle. Frustration Logs are also super helpful, please use them - the management team follows up on them, and your frustration gets documented.
Please take the time to reflect on these three items and share with your team (and me!) the opportunities that you see to tackle these three important items.
I look forward to working with you on making things happen for ourselves and for customers. Let’s get to that next level in our path, and continue to grow outwardly and inwardly.
Big hug to all,
Antonio
