Leap of Faith
Growing the Agency.
For the past few years, I had been dabbling with iOS and web development. After a while, I realized that I had potential to turn this into a real business. I had talent that people valued.
In the beginning
After receiving an Apple WWDC Student Scholarship in 2011, I focused on meeting new people, seeing which of them had a mobile project in mind, and how I could execute on those opportunities. I was able to continue and pay for my Software Engineering degree, while working on the business.
However, it always led to the same result; a result that I’m sure other freelancers know quite well. We land a contract and we feel great. A contract deposit and, suddenly, I can pay rent, catch up on bills, and even take my girlfriend on a date night. But, then it hits you. The responsibility to execute on your promises enters the front of your mind. The features that you originally thought would be easy to implement in an evening turn out to take three weeks and then they’re ‘not quite’ what the client was expecting. Sure, you eventually figure it out, but your profit margins get smaller with every revision.
It was time for change.
The leap of faith
In May, I decided it was time to bring partners into the business. I needed more design and development bandwidth, which would allow me to focus on the business. I had a few candidates in mind, but two of them stuck out far ahead of the rest.
Aleem Haji and I had worked on a few projects together during our time at Western Engineering and in one of my previous companies. As one of the smartest and most focused people I know, he would be easily able to take on the leadership role as VP Engineering at Inner Geek.
Ella Spin was a local freelancer and lead designer for project that I was working on at the time. I was instantly inspired by her creative ability and the professionalism that she brought into her projects. It was time to bring her on board as VP Creative at Inner Geek.
With Aleem, Ella, and myself, the three pillars of Inner Geek were in place, but we couldn’t stop there. Based on our collective experience, we could easily handle the development requirements of most startups in the region, but we struggled with enterprise-level software projects.
It was time to grow.
We quickly expanded the engineering team with Hassan Farchoukh and Forrest Chauvin and the operations team with Courtney Besley. In the next month or so, we learned a lot about who we were individually, and how we were able to collaborate and innovate as a team. Oh, and we grew into our first office; a quaint 300 sqft dev cave with no windows and 2.5 electrical receptacles.
That’s right, we had more employees than outlets.
With a solid team foundation and a few weeks of corporate stabilization, we decided to host an internship and some of the most talented engineering and creative students in London. At one point, we had 13 of us working from that same 300 sqft office on Wellington. A tiny space can in fact host a lot of fun.
And for those of you wanting me to go into more detail about the internship, I will. Follow along for more on that in a future blog post. One thing I will mention for now is that, from the internship emerged three more Inner Geeks, Adam Pypstra, Brittany Toonen, and James Harquail. They easily proved their worth to us during the internship and we were glad to offer them full time positions in our team.
1… 3… 6… 9… employees. All in the span of 5 months.
Anyways… now we’re a strong and growing team of nine and gathering significant traction with clients from around the globe. Of course, I couldn’t have done this without the passion, patience, and perseverence of everyone at Inner Geek. I thank them every day for believing in me and my dream as we accelerate towards building the next generation of digital experiences.
Was it easy going from being a freelancer to leading a nine person development agency in less than 6 months? Hell no!
Have I learned a lot about the process and how I can continue to improve Inner Geek as a leader in the digital space? Of course.
How do we continue to lead the world through an industry that is rediscovering itself every day? We evolve.
Evolve with us.
