We are a small company.  We make no apologies for that.  As our competition continues to raise millions of dollars in funds, give away their services to snag market share, and hire at a maddening pace, we have decided to take a different route.  We believe that the real value we have to offer our customers is that we can help our customers get the most business value out of their public cloud strategy.  In order to deliver on this promise, we need to staff each and every project with high level, experienced technical and business consultants who have the knowledge, experience, and proven track record to lead our customers down that path.  Although we are focusing on AWS projects, technical design and implementation skills are not all that is needed.  We need to also bring business acumen and project leadership, as well as maturity and experience to be able to take full accountability for our customers’ success.  We can’t do this if we are hiring 10 new people per month. We can’t do this if we are sending inexperienced new hires out to lead customer projects.  We can’t do this and grow fast at the same time. So instead, we have decided to grow slowly, which means staying small for now.  Every hire will be an experienced industry leader with a track record of success.  We will also avoid at all costs hiring full time staff when what we really need is project-based subject matter expertise.   Of course we could make higher margins if we bring these people on full time, and keep them busy.  But to keep them busy the workload has to exactly match our current project mix.  If it doesn’t, we have two options..

1. Put them in roles for which they are not a good fit
2. Leave them on the bench

The result?  Poor customer experience and unhappy employees.  Rock star employees don’t like being put in a position to fail, and they hate sitting around doing nothing.  In fact, this staffing model tends to weed out all the top performers, who quit and go where they can add value in their area of expertise on a consistent basis. Further, this leaves behind the guys that are fine with failing to deliver, or fine with sitting on the bench.  These are not characteristics that we desire in the talent that works with our customers. So instead, we will remain small, with a core team of Rock Star principal consultants, and leverage top tier subject matter experts from our trusted partners in their respective areas, and we will settle for lower margins, successful projects, and delighted customers. Some of our customers will see our headcount, revenue, and scale as a weakness. We are not the right partner for them, and that is fine.  Some will see it as a strength, and those are the companies with whom we will do great things.