Over the past few months I've been speaking, interviewing and connecting with a lot of successful business people in the Joomla industry and wider and have learnt a lot in terms of how they grew their businesses and the strategies that they employed to gain great growth and stability in their companies.
With these learning I stumbled upon opportunities that have pushed PB Web Development up to what I believe is the next level and progression for the business.
2008 Global Financial Crisis
In 2008 when the global economic crisis hit, our little web studio saw a huge rise in demand. More and more businesses were finally tuning online and moving their large advertising budgets from print and TV to longer term investments and directing that all to websites. This is where we saw our first big boom in growth in regards to our business.
We ranked well for various search terms and were able to convert and produce brochure styled websites very quickly for our clients while also keeping the majority of them as long term customers supporting them along their journeys of growing their own businesses too. We hired our first employee, employed interns and started growing and expanding our service offering.
But for the next few years we didn't grow much more. We started getting larger clients and more interesting projects but for whatever reason we didn't grow in terms of capacity, taking on more talent and delivering more for our clients. It did take awhile for us to realise that our goals and plans of growing PB Web Development weren't quite going in the right direction. We're designers and developers not business strategists, but we had to do a little learning and growing.
Currently
As I mentioned I started talking and meeting more and more successful business people not only here in Sydney, Australia but also abroad. My own venture into podcasting opened the doors up to some many other people in the world and allowed me to speak to some brilliant business people, strategists, and marketers.
Creating systems has been something I've been working on with the team for a long time to help streamline our work processes, consolidate our knowledge and help increase the amount of work we can take on while servicing our current customers with care.
I spoke to Gary J Brooks, a serial entrepreneur, in Boston last year where we talked about how he grew his company Cloud Access. He told me that partnerships was one of the biggest things that allowed him to grow his business. He found the opportunities with his partners where he could add value to their company and leveraged customers or networks to build the business. This is what lead to the opportunity that allowed him to start and grow Cloud Access so quickly from its launch.
Ronni Christiansen was another business leader that I spoke to, actually I did a podcast interview with him in regards to his Joomla based agency in Denmark called redWeb. I asked how he grew his business so well over the years turning it from a one man show to a 50 person company. His main advice was talent retention. Being able to get great talent in the company and retain that talent was one of the key drivers from day one in his company. He spent and invested money into finding the right staff and retaining their knowledge within the company.
Our Business
This lead on to our own business.
In the last month we were presented with a great opportunity. One of our clients which focuses on sales and marketing had just lost some of their development staff members and were looking to fill those gaps. This is when Interactive Investor invited us in to meet with the team and see if we can fit in with what they were already doing.
Our lease at our current office had expired, we need a larger space and this offer seemed too good to be true.
So now, teaming up with our new partners, we have potentially increase our offerings, have more resources to pull upon in the areas of sales and marketing where we lacked in strength, have a stream of work from our partnership coming in and our partners can continue selling, marketing and creating new business opportunities for their own business leveraging off our skills and knowledge. Essentially allow us and themselves to do what we both do best.
This partnership between PB Web Development and Interactive Investor will prove to be beneficial not only to the companies but also to all of our clients and customers that use and rely on our support and services.
Cheers to a new stage and era.