bvoip hit our 10 year company anniversary earlier this year! We still need to bring out the pizza and beer and celebrate that milestone with the team. Since it's the end of the year, it's a good time to sit back and reflect on some of the lessons learned along that journey. Like most other businesses, we didn't get where we are on a straight line. It was more like a few roller coasters welded together, maybe even one that you have to lay flat in too!
This story could really be an entire Netflix docuseries, however we consolidated some of thoughts for the purposes of making this an easy read!
Our Team
We surely have no case study on the right or wrong way to succeed in this category. I'm sure you have heard it before, but we will say it here now, not all personalities work well together. That being said, for any company, let alone a technology company, people are the nucleus of your plans, execution, and ultimately success or failure.
It is important to constantly watch for talent to bring onto your teams, and it's important to work with the people you have to grow individually and as a group. Just like a sports franchise, I am partial to the NFL, every year the roster is put together by the front office and it may look great on paper, but then that roster needs to meld and mesh together to try and achieve the ultimate goal, in this case, to win championships. If you are not progressing towards that goal season over season then changes are made, and slowly but surely those changes reach the front office and new management eventually comes in to try again.
One thing stands out while talking about this topic. For us, hiring from within the IT and Managed Services Provider (MSP) industry brings a certain "tribal knowledge" into the company that is hard to create with people who come from outside of the "sandbox." When someone who has been in the trenches and lived the life of an IT / MSP moves over to this side of the vendor/partner dynamic, it feels a lot more comfortable when everyone is talking the same language, has similar experiences to draw on, and understands the day-to-day we are ultimately trying to enhance for our partners.
I truly believe the way professional sports play out in the public eye are lesson can be applied to even the smallest companies. We are no different here at bvoip. After 10 years, I must say while there is some science and surely some luck required when talking about this topic, I am happy to have the group of people that we have here at bvoip. Like a sports franchise, I'm sure a year from now that group will look slightly different, I definitely appreciate two things overall, first, the willingness to learn and get better, and the want to do a good job at your role. If you can win at those two things, better things usually come behind it.
Our Parnters
I'll start off with another saying you have probably heard before, not every customer is a good customer or the right customer. This is a very true statement and we have come across our share of great, good, and not-good fits here at bvoip along the way.
We are a channel-only company, which means we live and die with our partner community. While we have been extremely fortunate over the last 10 years in business to have a very good "churn" rate, parting ways is never a great feeling. One thing we have come to learn from our journey is we don't want to lock partners into long-term agreements for various reasons, one of which is if it's not a good fit. We understand that happens and we don't want to force anyone to stay in a relationship that doesn't work well.
The customer is "not always right" but they are important nonetheless, after all we came from the IT services and MSP world. We get it, you have challenges with your end customers just like any other business. While we don't agree with every situation, we can surely do our best to find a fair and amicable outcome in most cases. If everyone is willing to find middle ground and be reasonable, usually the outcomes are what you want rather than the alternative.
All of that being said, we have the most partners we have ever had at any one time in our company's history. We are very fortunate and extremely thankful for all of you and we really do wake up every day and strive to do better, build more things, and create more success stories for all of you.
Technology
It's amazing how many things get created every day. We live in an amazing time period in the history of our planet where the innovation of new technology is coming out so fast that even in our lifetime, we will see the things that we only thought were possible through special effects in the movies.
One thing we have always strived to do is to listen to our partners and from your feedback build new features, products, technology, workflow, etc. Building new things can be hard at times, and honestly, it being hard is part of the reason we spend time doing it. One thing is for sure, the IT and MSP community that we serve have a lot of wants, opinions, and expectations. The best thing bvoip or any other company that serves this community can do is to listen, constantly innovate, and work collaboratively to get great outcomes for everyone. If there is any other word that should be used here on this topic, it's probably transparency. If everyone involved is true to that word, a lot of the time I've seen wasted behind the keyboard can be used to move forward rather than getting stuck in place or even moving backwards.
Business
Building a business from an idea to being 10 years in is not easy, especially when we did it the bootstrap way. For anyone that isn't familiar, bootstrap means you never took outside funding and instead did things the "old fashioned" way with a lot of time, sweat, blood, and tears. In the IT and MSP arena, there is no shortage of money if you want it. We have all seen many businesses at every stage take outside VC or PE money. There is something to be said for "doing it on your own" and while it is not the fast track by any means and takes longer in most cases, we don't regret the path we took to get to this milestone.
There is a little bit of satisfaction in making it this far and not having to be run by someone else's playbook or make decisions based on shareholders or outside investors. It definitely gave and continues to give us the ability to be creative, scrappy, and unreserved in some of our efforts. As we grow and mature and bring in new ideas and faces to our company, I'm sure our some of our approach will adjust and change but you never know what card we have up our sleeve!
Community & Collaboration
Like any town or city, every industry has a community that helps guide the path for where we are all trying to go. The IT and MSP industry is no different to other industries like doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc in that way. However, even though there are several communities that come together to make one large city of IT and MSP's around the globe, it is different from other industries in that it isn't REALLY active. For years, the "castle mentality" where everyone was your competitor thrived and to some degree it still does today. Over the course of our journey, we have seen that idea take a little bit of a back seat to something that looks like a bunch of companies coming together to learn how to get better as a group. The whole "rising tides raises all ships" cliche comes up often. While just like the middle and high school days that everyone remembers, people tend to gravitate to their click or group. There is a larger focus on trying to mature and grow the profession from within rather than waiting for outside forces to dictate what should or shouldn't be done. To that end, some of that is unavoidable, as compliances from other industries do surely creep into the story and maybe soon new legislation too.
We think part of the DNA or recipe of any company that services the IT & MSP community is to be willing and active in the conversation. Over the last 10 years, we have done incredible things across the globe with all of you. I hope many of them are memorable. In all seriousness, we love working with most of the people in our industry, and thank you to everyone who is willing to be collaborative with us. I wish more people took that approach, honestly.
Mindset
The "human condition" means many things. Every day brings new good and bad experiences and challenges. Hard things are usually not easy. It can take a toll on you physically and mentally. We have always tried to sew a "go-getter" mentality within bvoip and still do. It's important to celebrate the wins and in the same way, diagnose the loses as a group.
There is always a lesson to be learned and there is always a way to get better. Going back to the locker room or professional sports theme we started with, you can have a strong locker room or there can be dissension in the ranks that can break any team apart. Constantly communicating is the base foundation to understanding how to work with each other and build things up rather than tear things down.
We have learned it's important to pay attention to the morale of our team. A happy team usually results in a good or even great experience for our partners Vice versa, if someone is having a bad day, that could turn into a bad interaction that then turns into a bad result too.
What's Next?
10 years is an amazing milestone! Once the beer and pizza is out of the way, we feel there is a lot more for us to accomplish. Thank you to our early partners who took a chance on us while we were still getting our footing, we know it wasn't always a smooth ride but we believe your bets all did pay off.
To the rest of our partner community, thank you for continuing to trust us to deliver. We are not perfect but we definitely strive to be. To the greater IT and MSP community, thank you for giving us a place to start and grow something from scratch. We hope to continue to contribute and do our part in continuing to make this sandbox grow and move forward. To our team, thanks for growing together. I know it's always interesting, but isn't that better than boring?
