Success is a process not a Result

Technology is the fastest growing industry today. With growth comes experience and with experience comes institutional knowledge. As a lifetime learner, I want to soak up as much insight from other experts in the field as possible. So, I attend conferences.

Last month, I had the privilege to attend The Payoneer Forum which sought to answer the essential question: How can an IT agency with only a few immature freelancers create successful processes to become a leader in the market?

The first memorable concept was a simple one: teamwork allows for growth and progress. To further explain, Yaroslav Golovach, founder of Codemotion, brought a visual example. Imagine you’re white water rafting on the Nile. You’re on a team of paddlers who each have to work together and communicate in order to push the raft forward and avoid dangerous rapids. If one member of the team makes a mistake and the raft flips, team members do not have time to identify the one who made the mistake. Instead, they each must figure out how to fix the mistake and continue forward. The same can be said for IT teams. In growing a business in technology, there will inevitably be mistakes made. Rather than identifying and punishing the guilty party, the team must ensure that they’ve recovered and are moving forward toward growth.

The next set of ideas was given by Andrey Gayday,CEO of GetBetter) who spoke to the increasing trend of remote work and the barriers that it creates He mentioned that to make your client more confident in their partnership with us we have to create the illusion that we are in the same office. To do so, Mr. Gayday gave us these simple rules: :

• All calls should be with video, even if the client doesn’t turn on his/her camera, you still should.
• You should provide the status of tasks and inform your client that you are working on some task even there is no result yet.
• You should be involved in the project and propose some thoughts and improvements that are out of scope of your current technical specification but can improve the product.

Mr. Gayday’s tips are simple, yet incredibly applicable and important, especially for companies like Speed & Function who have many remote engineers.

Though each speaker had different tips on growing a small tech business, every one emphasized the importance of communication. In fact, Sinan Ata, the General Manager at Crossover, insisted that more than half of working time in a distributed team can be spent on communication.

With these tips, I was inspired. Learning of these processes of internal and external communication has validated our commitment to frequent and thorough communication at Speed & Function and has given me new tools to renew that commitment. In fact, I’d like to rethink the well known proverb, “Happiness is a journey not a destination” and instead say, “Success is a process not a result”. To build our successful business, we need to focus on successful processes. Growth and profit will inevitably follow.