Looking Back to Look Forward

past and future

Last year was exhilarating, strange, painful and adventurous journey for me.

Scaling up is never easy. One has victories and one has defeats. Easy things are easy while hard things are really hard. Culture, focus and right people travelling with you are definitely the keys to success.

 

How did our companies do last year? Nepton grew 28 % and Hoika grew 51 %. Total revenue reached 1.8 million euros. My focus on Dimensional and Centibel remained somewhat fragmented, but they both progressed onward quite a bit.

What about the future? What about that scary and unknown land of infinite possibilities?

We are all humans and life throws surprises to us. There is too little time to achieve everything. If we learn from our mistakes, then making no mistakes is our greatest mistake. Be brave and embrace the future. Go to places, take risks, make mistakes, break things and have fun doing it all.

 

Smart and GTD

joelsmartgetsthingsdoneOnce again Joel is fun and engaging in his communications. His blog was an inspiration to me for well over a decade and this book continues on the same vein.

Joel is clearly stating that you should only hire the best technical talent. In this book Joel describes why this is the only sane approach. He talks about identifying the best and doing whatever necessary to hire them. One can disagree with some of his methods, but I do fully agree with his main argument.

 

 

 

The book includes the famous Joel Test. If you work with software I do strongly recommend you to take the Joel Test. Best companies have score of 12. Ten years ago our company Nepton had a score of 3. Currently Nepton has a score of 10. Still ways to go but we have definitely improved a bit 🙂

Nepton 2013

VictoryThis was quite good year for Nepton. There are still various roadblocks on our journey to true scalability, but we finally seem to have working and scalable sales process delivering our HRM cloud product so that people are happy to buy from us. We also gained about the best reference customers we could have hoped for.

Company revenue grew 43% and went bit over one million euros. EBITDA reached 12% even though we are pushing about 20% of our revenue directly to new R&D efforts. Not so bad I would say 🙂

Predictable Revenue

predictable revenue bookThis book had great ratings and I’m interested on the area, so I pressed the buy button on Amazon. I originally thought this book would have equal parts sales and lead generation, but focus was more on the lead generation side.

This book is reasonably well written and fairly interesting. There are good aspects, but also bad sides to this book. From my view focus is bit too much on US markets and tools. As I have earlier read several books on sales and marketing the amount of actionable new info (for me) was somewhat limited.

Overall this book was reasonably OK read.

Nepton

nepton_tunnusStartups and entrepreneurship are quite familiar to me. My parents are long-term entrepreneurs. My grandfather and great-grandfather built several companies from small shops to sawmills and industrial manufacturing companies. I know how sweet the success can be and how bitter the failures can feel.

Year 2003 was time for me to move onwards. During my time at Satama I had learned tremendous amount. My brother suggested that we combine forces and start operating under the wings of our parent’s company. I had my doubts and hesitated too much, but finally took the plunge. Soon Nepton Oy was born.

Nepton is (so far) the most successful startup I have created or co-created. We started ten years ago by doing IT subcontracting for various clients. One client project semi-accidentally became our first product. We actively developed this product line over the years, learned the ropes and increased our market coverage. Now we employ 10+ people in this SaaS business and are rapidly gaining new customers. Future of this business look quite positive.

During last ten years my main focus has been on different subcontracting projects. My roles in these have been a mixture of technology, design, planning, management and sales.

Many of my projects have been related to Nokia. At one time I was the technical lead responsible for UI layers in all Nokia websites. Later I moved to finance side and together with group of extremely talented people developed and deployed large planning & analytics system for use in global Nokia organization.

Other customers I have worked with or sold projects to include 3, dotMobi, Eläke-Fennia, Ericsson, GSM Association, HP, MacMillan, Microsoft, Orange Group, Otava, Sampo Pankki, Samsung Electronics, Satama Interactive, Sun Microsystems, Technical University of Denmark, TIM, T-Mobile, Vattenfall and Vodafone.