2019 — A year in review / How we went from 4 -12 employees ;)
Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger. Work harder, make it better, do it faster, make us stronger. More than ever, hour after hour. Work is never over. — Daft Punk
2019 is over and I failed terribly.
I was not able to blog. Nevertheless, 2019 was a huge success, with tons of stuff that happened and, like in 2018, I will try to recap the year and will give you a little preview of the many challenges and opportunities that we want to tackle in 2020.
Where to begin?
My last blog post was in February 2018. Back then I made the announcement, that I’m going to tell you more about our future plans. Sorry for not keeping my promise! I will make up for it with this long blog post.
2019 began with a big bang. After several months, two of the most technically adept as well as socially amazing people that I’ve ever met, Flo & Steve, joined as equal partners of Lean-Coders. How come, you may wonder?
On a party, Steve told me, that he had the plan to create his own business, and that he needed to ask me some questions about how to be a freelancer.
This conversation was the trigger for a lot of upcoming events.
Some weeks later he called, to tell me that he is now an entrepreneur as well and wants to thank me with a dinner.
Anyone who knows me knows — I never reject a free dinner.
Back at that time, my plan was, to gather the biggest talents of the it-business under one entity. I met with a lot of great entrepreneurs and freelancers, but all of them rejected my offer.
When I told Steve about this idea during our dinner, he reacted totally different. He had the same mindset as me, which means he is striving for going big and is willing to sacrifice a lot to achieve this goal. His vision was also to rather have a small piece of something big, than have a big piece of something small. And so it began. We held hundredths of meetings and finally settled an agreement to create a company together. But destiny played us a trick. Just when we wanted to close our deal, a new challenger arrived from nowhere. Flo, a frontend developer I knew from a past project called, to tell me that he just recently started freelancing and would love to get some advice.
As soon as the call was over, I called Steve and presented him the crazy idea to throw our plans of a company with two equal shareholders away. Why, you might ask?
The biggest uncertainty we faced, discussing the fusion of our two small companies was: What should we do if we had different opinions on a specific topic? We played around with many strategies and solutions, but actually nothing really played out the way we wanted. Having 3 equal partners, would solve this easily, I thought, so my idea to create a three headed monster was born.
Steve did not know Flo really well and so at first, he was not super amazed about it. But, after meeting Flo just once he came up to me to tell me: “Flo is our guy, he is the chosen one and will bring balance to our main problem.” Our solution was quite simple. 2 of 3 votes will settle all future confrontations.
Due to this decision we had to re-discuss everything again and 2018 turned out to be a very tough and exhausting year. While doing normal business, we had thousands of meetings, discussing the legal aspects of the deal with lawyers but also planning new branches, products and strategies for Lean-Coders.
Start 2019 — A new Hope
After the best Christmas party ever, we were striving for new fields. Two new amazing additions joined our little company. Thomas (Hochi) and Benjamin. Thomas responded to one of our advertisements on twitter to work remotely for Lean-Coders. Flo already knew from working together with him in the past, what a great developer Thomas was and so it was a no-brainer for us to hire him. His impact could be felt from day one. He is leading the frontend team with his huge amount of knowledge, willingness to share his expertise and amazing work attitude.
Besides his normal work he additionally helped out in any way he could.
He never holds back his opinion on how to better solve technical challenges. This highly valuable feedback allowed the rest of the team to get better and better every day. Currently he works fulltime for one of our most important clients, but nevertheless still finds some time to work on a really cool side project, which we will hopefully publish soon.
At the same time as Thomas, we welcomed Benjamin in our team. Benjamin is an old mate of Manuela and this kid got some serious talent. He worked for one of the biggest Austrian startups as a process manager and the transition to be a Javascript Fullstack Developer was enormous. Benjamins strength is his eye for detail. He always brings new perspectives into play, like privacy and security. Today he is the lead developer of one of our products, serving some hundreds of clients a day. Thanks to him I was able to free some time and be more productive in other areas: I still wanted to pursue my idea of bringing together the best talents in the software business as independent entities, sharing/outsourcing the administrative overhead and therefore, allowing them to focus on the one thing they are best at: Creating software of the highest quality.
The idea of launching a franchise system was born. Our plan was to give people our network, assets and knowledge. Together with a lawyer, we created a franchise contract. In addition we had some talks with potential franchisees, but unfortunately, up till now, no one signed up. Due to our many obligations as CEOs we did not put 100% of our focus and effort into this project, but we still have the contract in our portfolio even without any real opportunities in this area.
Our second idea to create a steady income stream was Steve’s little side business, where he created content and was selling books.
Similar to the franchise system, this project did not become the huge success we had hoped for. The books took a lot of Steve’s time and he did an amazing job, only to find out, that without fake reviews and bought followers the revenue is just too small, to justify the amount of time/money it costs to create the content. That’s why we put this idea on hold as well.
Despite all these failures we created assets which could help us in the future.
And even though things did not play out the way we had hoped, we will keep our mindset that it’s better to try something and fail, than to never trying at all.
In the middle of the year Stefan came back from his year in civil service. He joined us in old strength and helped us manage new projects with new clients. He did not miss a step and he is growing as a software developer day by day. Manuela also made amazing progress as a software developer. She was already a design genius and keeps improving her skills in this area, but she also stepped up her javascript game as well. Niki, as always, is our superstar. You can drop him any technology or challenge and I am pretty sure he solves it. This man is not human, he is a machine.
Last but not least we also had a great addition in our back office. My wife Roberta joined our group. She helps us with her expertise as assistant. It was a big step for Roberta and me to let Lean-Coders enter even deeper into our private life, but it was the right choice and it is great to see her finally having a job, where she finds a purpose and in which she can evolve in the direction she wants to.
She also took over a lot of my past agendas, e.g.: creating invoices, checking timetables, administration of sick leave, and all other kinds of bureaucratic matters. For all CEOs that meant, that we could go on with our newly generated plans.
In general, I am very proud of the pack and I cannot wait to see all the progress we will achieve in the next couple of years.
Middle of 2019 — The Force Awakens
One of my best friends invited me to a Tony Robbins seminar in London. Man, this was a life changing experience.
I was always a dream chaser and wrote my goals and targets down, but this seminar was mind blowing. After a fire walk, plenty of hours of jumping around, hugging people and screaming my soul out, I was energized more than ever.
One of the most intriguing things that I took from it was to find a tutor, pro or coach that challenges you. So, I was scanning my Facebook friend list and wrote only one message to Gerald Eder. This guy is a selling machine and one of the greatest entrepreneurs I know. After Gery wrote back, Steve, Flo and I met for a business lunch with him where he scanned our assets and skills. After amazing tips, we convinced him that it would be awesome to have him as our mentor/coach. From then on, week after week he showed us our flaws and shortcomings. It was not cheap, but it took us to another level in our decision making and to grow as group together. Heading full power in our expansion and trying to create value after value, our financial struggles also came into play. We were never in big troubles, but we had to pay a lot of taxes upfront, so cashflow was always on the bleeding edge. A big thank you to the whole group but especially to my co-owners, which were sacrificing everything and showed me again, that my choice to work with them was the right thing to do.
Still, in all the time we had great fun with our amazing group. Our quarterlies are legendary, and every event was special for me. With the help of Gerald, we were working every day on ourselves and we knew that we still had a missing piece.
In the meantime, Samuels decided to leave Lean-Coders because he wanted to focus more on his final school year. Due to this we had a gap in our support/maintenance work. With some luck Elias and Flo were willing to join our team. They are great talents with a bright future. Their current main goal is to finish their study about AI/NLP/ML. They will play a big part in our new strategies in the next couple of years.
End of 2019 — The Seller strikes back
Back on my first day as a naive entrepreneur, I had a challenging occurrence with some contractors. Due to my unawareness, I was attending two interviews for the same client but with different contractors. This was an unspoken no-go and so one of the contractors was really pushy and aggressive. The other one was really nice and told me, I should not worry and that we should have lunch together. This event was the first meeting of many to follow with one of my most favorite contractors in time. Even though we never worked together, we met from time to time and discussed future trends and technologies. This is the short story, of how I met Tahir. After one of Gerald’s sessions we discussed the option to add a seller to our group. All of us owners are technology professionals, but none of us is a seller or negotiator. Like everything in my life, after several days of planning how to find the right person for this position my telephone was ringing. Tahir was on the other side of the line and told me that he will leave his company and wants to leave the country to build or find something new. Long story short, Tahir, Steve, Flo and I were all in to go again to a lawyer to add a fourth owner. Tahir came, saw and conquered. We created new meeting formats, brought more feedback from our people into the game and focused on finding solutions for it. Thomas was one of the loudest voices for the wish to work together more collocated and less distributed with different customers. Hence Tahir found us a space and our CEOs and Roberta surprised everybody with our first physical office.
This was 2019 in a nutshell. Tahir is now managing all of our contracts and we adapted our focus again. Together we created a big vision to empower people. In different mission statements and goals, we will create value over time in any kind of aspects to deliver top opportunities for software developers and hopefully soon for all kind of people.
Cheers,
Christoph aka Uter
