Beetroot: Summarizing 2015
2016 is already running at full speed, and it’s time to make a few summarizing points about 2015 before it’s distant history.
It’s been a long year, packed with exciting steps forward and achievements but also with challenges we have maneuvered through and lessons learned. Starting the year, we had our Odessa office, an Academy in Poltava and seeds planted for development offices in both Poltava and Kiev. In overall, we were around 45 team members.
By the end of September we had become 75 persons before splitting up with our by far largest client, separating 40 team-members from Beetroot. It was a blow for us, but not completely unexpected and done in an organized way with highest priority on everybody keeping their job.
Team wise, we miss great people, but we also feel that the Beetroot Family concept has become both stronger, deeper and wider-reaching thanks to transparent and clear communication throughout challenging times.
Business wise, the split freed plenty of capacity for us, which we now use to step back up. December 2015 was our best sales month in the company’s history and we are now back to over 50 team members based in three offices and with a growth rate of around 5 persons per month.
The overall growth of 2015 was more than 100% for the third year in a row.
We truly feel that we have built an amazing team of individuals and the Beetroot values of equality, personal responsibility and trust have shown its colors so many times the past year.
Our dedicated team model has proven to give minimum hierarchy and a close connection between the team members and their respective clients. It’s also been a year of lots of fun together with activities such as ski trips, breakfasts, fikas, office warming parties, after works, bowling, ice-skating, volleyball, movie nights, beach parties with plenty of songs sang from the newly created Beetroot songbook.
We have also organized some “work and play” activities for the IT communities with a major tech-meetup in Poltava with more than 100 guests and the IT-karting Championship in Odessa with 20 companies testing their speed compared to others.
Beetroot’s CEO Andreas Flodström also just recently became selected as an advisory board member of the new IT Cluster Odessa, with member companies representing 60% of the IT employees in the city.
Not least, Beetroot has taken a big step in our social vision of helping people to get employed in the IT field in Ukraine thanks to winning a UNDP tender for educating internally displaced people from Donbass and Crimea.
60 motivated students are currently studying hard in Odessa and Poltava to become Junior Front End developers and we are super happy to have the honor to perform this program on behalf of the United Nations and the government of Japan.
Some other numbers and facts about Beetroot 2015:
- 56 new recruits (including the demerged team).
- Current gender balance: 40% women, 60% men.
- We have an average employee satisfaction of 95/100 in the most far-reaching public online survey giving us 2nd place in Odessa and 1st in Poltava among IT employers.
- We had clients from 12 countries throughout the year.
- We have been mentioned in media around 40 times, mainly in Ukraine and Sweden (DN, SvD, DI, Breakit etc).
- Our Academy won prize as a the best regional initiative at the Ukrainian IT education awards.
- A total of 84 students studied at Beetroot Academy (including students in the UNDP program).
- We have outgrown our offices in all three locations in Ukraine and moved to new, bigger (and even cozier) ones.
- We have opened a small office in Stockholm increasing our closeness to our Swedish clients.
Whats next?
2016 has started with high spirits and we feel that this year has the potential of becoming the most interesting and exciting year ever! We will stay sharp, focused and motivated and aim to do another year of at least 100% growth with the help of our three front lines.
- Dedicated teams – Continued main focus and more than 50 % of what we do and where we grow.
- Beetroot Academy – Continuing teaching the next generation of developers in at least three locations.
- Project delivery – An increasingly important part of Beetroot, delivering lots of different web and mobile projects with both in-house and partner teams.
We also hope that 2016 will be a year when the team spirit is high, we will see plenty of new faces and continue to keep an extremely low turnover of both clients and team-members. Keep posted, more interesting news coming soon…
Finally a BIG thank you for all you hundreds of wonderful people who make this possible!
Source: Beetroot
