Today our Web Team celebrates its 5th birthday. That’s five years of a young, rebellious and entrepreneurial band of dreamers and achievers continuously pushing the envelope on all things digital within a multi-billion retail and hospitality enterprise of ginormous proportions.

So it’s no surprise that we’re still the startup within the enterprise, and given our Silicon Valley inspiration and aspirations, we unsurprisingly tend to behave more startup, and less enterprise: a modus operandi that we’re never going to change.

Looking back and taking inventory, here’s what we’ve achieved for the Landmark Group from April 5th 2009 to April 5th 2014:

2 great & rapidly growing E-commerce sites: LandmarkShops.com & Citymaxhotels.com, with the former destined to be the moon-shot as far as omni-channel retail customer experiences go, and the latter on its 3rd and much-improved incarnation.

2 promising transactional sites, both on their 2nd generation: A 100% bespoke enterprise social network connecting over 6,000 fellow employees and ShukranRewards.com, which continues to serve over 5.5 million loyalty program members and counting.

2 useful native apps, both for Shukran, one for the iPhone, the other for Android, and a beautiful iOS7 re-design well on its way.

1 clever responsive mobile app for Citymaxhotels.com, to better serve our growing base of smartphone users as they decide to stay with us.

13 informational sites, re-imagined, re-engineered and actively evolved to better represent our brands online, deliver simpler, cleaner and better user experiences through better design, better content, better technology, better digital marketing and set them up for eventual retail e-commerce success.

That’s 20 digital deliveries in the last 5 years, fortified by healthy portions of new features, feature improvements and the occasional total site refresh. We even managed to buy back the LandmarkGroup.com domain after a 2 year covert operation from a particularly annoying cybersquatter, tossed out the incumbent Cplmg.com, and restored both sanity and relevance for ourselves from a corporate email and branding perspective.

All things considered, we’re most proud of our achievements, even though we’re all too aware that we’re still just beginning. We’ve officially been recognized as a Centre of Excellence within the Group, and continue to build trust with our internal stakeholders and end-users alike with each delivery that we make.

As we embark on Year Six, the one thing we’ve promised to do more of is to have more fun as we continue transforming our businesses and ourselves into a world-class, customer-centric, design-minded, medium-defining omni-channel organization. More outstanding and inspirational guest speakers, more lunch-and-learns, more team movie nights and team drinks, more health initiatives like our current, awesome team yoga program, more skill development initiatives and so on.

It’s all of this goodness that fuels our team’s happiness and allows us to genuinely enjoy the ride while, you know, achieving massive greatness for our customers, Group and many businesses along the way.