2019 Summary A Summary Of 2019: Predica Is 10! But What’s Next?

As January begins, just like every year I get more sentimental than usual and tend to look back on the last year’s successes as well as setbacks.

2019 has been special, as we passed our 10th anniversary. Last summer we had a magnificent company-wide event to celebrate this milestone. What surprised and touched us, the founders, was an extremely funny, but also moving and tear-jerking video, prepared for us by the whole team. It was an exceptional gift and a sign of appreciation that further fueled our motivation.

Predica is 10, and we celebrated this milestone with a blast!

Predica is now 10 years old. Each year has been profitable and each year we’ve achieved growth. This, in and of itself, is a great accomplishment. In 2019 we managed to reach over 50% growth in revenue and the number of employees, which again surpassed our goals. It is thanks to the combined effort of all our people, which now reached 240.

In this article, similarly to the 2018 summary, I’d like to share not only the successes, but also the setbacks we had and the ambitions we have for 2020. I hope this gives you some insight into certain mistakes to avoid, and if you are our employee, partner, client, or maybe you’re just interested in what we do, you can find some details on what to expect in 2020.

Things don’t always go according to the plan

We had several challenges that surprised us in their scale and difficulty. Growing as a company means you will face new challenges at each new stage defined by the number of people, the complexity, or the sheer size of business.

The key things we learned the hard way in 2019:

• Predica US— Establishing a new subsidiary in a new geographical environment is very hard. Although we’ve done this in the past, the United States brings some new challenges when it comes to culture, scale, and the competitiveness of the market. Fortunately, at Predica we feed on challenges, and seeing our US branch grow thanks to the hard work and the commitment that are starting to pay off, is beyond exciting!
• Large sales opportunities—with the growth of your company, your opportunities will grow, and you need to learn how to win them at a new level.
• Large projects—with the expansion of business (enterprise clients) comes more significant projects. Be prepared to change the way you deliver them or learn it the hard way. We did.
• Managing overhead costs—even a successful company might fall. Make sure you have your costs in check (and cash flow in control).

1. Predica US

Predica started doing projects for US-based customers as early as 2012, but had no physical presence there till 2018, when we officially established our office in California under the leadership of Voytek Junak. We know that with our organizational maturity, technical excellence and global experience (23 countries and counting!) we can deliver exceptional quality on the US market too, but to achieve that, we needed local presence and a local branch. Now, just one year later, our impact and recognition in the region are growing. In mid-2019 Pete Orologas joined us to help drive business in the US and although we are still in the “pioneering phase”, we are starting to see the market take shape. 2020 will really be a make or break year for Predica US….we believe it will be make!

Below you will find some of the challenges our Predica US team has had to overcome.

Voytek and Pete enjoying Microsoft Inspire in July last year

Distance

Flying to the US is not the same as flights within Europe, where most of our staff is still located. Plus, the majority of our projects, as they transform critical parts of large organizations, require face time with customers to lead them by the hand through these transitions. Our solution to this is to plan well ahead, do remotely whatever we can, and most importantly, we already started to build out our local consultancy presence (with relocation and local hiring).

Time zone

We had to adjust and move some of our people to different work schedules to accommodate for our US-based customers. Fortunately, we have some ‘owls’ in our team who appreciate flexible work schedule and enjoy to working in a different time zone.

Language

All of us at Predica speak English, it’s our official language, all documentation and policies are in English as well, as we have employees from 10 different countries. However, unlike in Europe, all Americans speak native English and are not used to hearing different accents. This did impact our high-profile conversations onsite or via video, as well as our online video material. We provide intensive American English pronunciation lessons for our key consultants traveling to the US, and for our cornerstone video content we have a native lector.

Business culture

We were surprised to learn how differently Americans communicate to Europeans. First off, Americans love the small talk at the beginning of every conversation, as building relationships in business is a priority. It’s all about people and kindness. Afterwards they move quickly to details, but you are expected to have a short and sweet pitch that clearly presents what you offer—consultative selling that is our bread and butter seems to find less ground in the US.

Market size

Last but not least, the US, or even a small part of it like southern California, is a huge market. We noticed a great demand for our way of doing IT projects in medium and large businesses. However, the competition is also strong—the number of Microsoft partners, all with loads of experience under their belts, is astounding. Companies like ours are usually 1,000 FTE—like everything in the US, it’s simply bigger! But we are not afraid of competition, as we know that what we bring to the table is unique (such as our Predica Way mindset).

But all this is a great learning experience, a possibility to grow our capabilities and become a more resilient company. We are not stopping, and we’re sure that 2020 will allow us to plant our feet firmly on the US soil.

Dashboard in a Day workshops organized by Predica in Sunnyvale, California

2. Large sales opportunities

As we grow, we find ourselves involved in larger and larger deals. This requires new skills from our consulting team (we have no direct sales team!). Enterprise sales is a tricky game, and we found ourselves loosing 3 major deals this year. Even though our offering was solid, we did not do enough ‘legwork’ in relationship building with prospective customers. It’s a great lesson learned, and we will surely invest in this in 2020, as we knew these customers would be a perfect fit for what and how we do it, they just did not know it 😉

3. Large projects

We did, however, manage to win a few really large projects (1M+ USD). And as with all types of new endeavors, we hit some roadblocks. We found how critical expectation, stakeholder and project management are when it comes to these cases. We made some costly misses in these areas, and are now ramping up our project and engagement management skills to be able to run such large projects more efficiently and already see some major improvements. 2020 is likely to bring some similar scale opportunities and we are now prepared for them.

As the project stats from Azure DevOps show, it was quite a ride!