Zælot
Engineers as a service.
After six months we doubled operations. This was a major milestone because it allowed us to continue to add new capabilities and get more developer specializations. we are now just 10 people shy of our 40 full time people goal. At this point we will discuss the next milestone.
After nearly our first full year of operations we grew to 14 full time team members. This was a major milestone because it allowed us to add new capabilities and get more developer specializations. Our goal by end of year is to have 40 full time people.
We ended up growing during covid as the world shifted to remote work. We were already setup for remote work so we were able to quickly adapt with very little change.
After steady growth the four cofounders decided to create a new single c corp entity.
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Companies are often judged by their quarterly earnings growth. At some point, some businesses reach a saturation point-they are simply not going to grow much faster than the rate of population and GDP growth. Buying a small firm in another market allows a corporation that has been successful in growth to grow that new subsidiary, perhaps more efficiently than it was going to grow on its own (especially because financing that growth will be easier), and the parent company gets to show all that revenue growth. The m&a institute provides an excellent article https://imaa-institute.org/carve-outs-new-darling-ma/ , which is based on takeovers and mergers of various companies. You might be interested to read about it. Good luck!
We had been consistently growing with one of our customers. And then Covid happened. I remember being frustrated asking myself, "How could I not have seen this coming?"
Our largest customer significantly scaled back due to Covid. We knew this wasn't a great idea to rely heavily on two customers, but we didn't expect it to be a problem so quickly.
We were fine operationally because we had decided to be a remote first company, but we realized we needed to do better at sales. It was a hard lesson but a valuable one.
We met another startup in the area who was getting started out. They were what we thought would be a good customer, a small self-funded startup. We worked with them for a bit but quickly realized we needed to get more efficient at the business end of things.
As mentioned in the 'E-Myth Revisited' we were struggling to balance between manager, technician, and sales.
After consulting with a lawyer and an accountant we decided to setup an LLC beginning Jan 1.
Even though we wanted to get started on products we felt it would just be too expensive with the capital available to us to form a C Corp. And we had no desire to raise external capital - we felt too much money would be problematic.
Cofounders got together and decided that we were going to have a go at this full time.
We initially decided we were going to focus on an in house app that we thought had potential. So we had been planning on ramping up our team for mobile development.
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