Our 4th Year In Business

December is not just end of the year for us at A.Y. Technologies. It’s our birthday as well, and it’s now becoming a tradition for me to write a post about our year in retrospective. It’s a perfect time for me to look at our year and reflect on the journey we had before we look forward to a new year full of challenges and opportunities.

If you are new to our blog, I suggest you quickly skim through my posts in 2016, 2017 and 2018 to understand our journey. Here is a short version:

• We started in 2016, It was our year of growth. We quickly grew to 5 and then 8 members. We had to change our offices twice inside the first year.
• We struggled in 2017. We went from a successful company to a company that was losing money. We learned a lesson about perseverance and we turned the ship.
• 2018 was the year of learnings for us. We learned about Sales and Marketing, Customer Support, Development and Financials, we had to learn to keep moving forward.

Now let’s have a quick look at 2019. We started the year with the learnings of 2018. We had more processes in place. We had a bigger team. We offered more services. We moved to a bigger office in the Seymour Building. Everything was bigger in 2019, but we quickly learned the value of “Focus”. Although we teach this to all entrepreneurs who go through our Roadmap Workshop, it seems we had to learn it for ourselves. We had to bring back the focus to what we do best and how we do it. We had to focus not only on being “Bigger” but being “the Best”.

It’s easier said than done, but it was crucial for us. We had to turn down clients that were not the right fit. We had to limit our services to what we can do best. We wanted to stay at the top of the charts, but we couldn’t be the best at everything. So we picked our battles! We decided to focus on Startups and Entrepreneurs only. We know we could be the best at serving this niche. We just had to make sure others know that as well! I’m glad that we were able to do that very well. Now that I’m writing this blog we are in Top 3 Vancouver’s Best App Developers, Top 5 Vancouver’s Best Web Developers and App Developer Market Leader in Canada.

These achievements didn’t go unnoticed south of the border. This year we had many clients from United States and had a record sales in both Canada and US. We achieved this not by offering a bigger suit of services or by being everything to everyone, but by focusing on what we do best and making that our highest priority.

Growth comes with an inherent risk. The changes that comes with growth can break a system that was working before. That’s why we were very diligent in our growth this year to make sure we are not going to break A.Y. Technologies. One of the symptoms of a broken system is when you lose team members. I’m happy to say that we didn’t lose any team members this year which was a great achievement. This is specially important because I believe what we achieved this year was impossible if we didn’t have the great team we have right now. That’s why I want to finish this post with a big kudos to every one at A.Y. Technologies that made this year possible.

Thank you and see you in 2020!