What We've Learned in Five Years in Business
Introduction
As 173tech celebrate our fifth year in business, it is a perfect time to reflect on what we have learned over the past half-decade. The last five years have been transformative for us, filled with growth, challenges, and valuable lessons that have shaped who we are today.
The Unchanging Focus: Business Outcomes
One thing that has remained constant throughout our journey is our unwavering focus on business outcomes. In a world where technology and methodologies evolve rapidly, the importance of delivering tangible results for our clients has never wavered. We have learned that investing time upfront to learn about the business is crucial. This investment pays off by ensuring that our data-driven solutions are not just technically sound but are also strategically aligned with the client’s goals. Our challenge is always focusing on which elements will make the biggest impact for our clients.
Embracing New Challenges
Being a data agency means we have helped companies of all shapes, sizes and sectors. This diversity has been a driving force behind our growth. Every new project brings with it new ways of thinking and new methods of problem-solving. We have realised that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to data. Each business is unique, and our ability to tailor our services to meet these unique needs is what sets us apart.
Taking Best Practices For Granted
Over the last five years, we have put significant effort into formalising our processes. This effort has involved documenting best practices, creating standardised workflows, and ensuring that every team member understands our approach. By doing so, we have been able to ensure that new team members can quickly get up to speed and start adding value to our projects from day one. But we have also learnt that best practices are important not just for the team here at 173tech, they are important to clients!
Most of our team have decades of experience and so there are a number of things that we do naturally without even thinking about it, this could just be the way in which we deal with outliers or structure code etc. We had not even considered how useful this could be to clients in ensuring that they can build upon our work. And so now, passing these best practices on is a crucial part of our projects! Code and data must be understandable not just to the person who created them but to the entire team.
Fuss Free & Friendly
Feedback is very important to us in how we shape our services, and in reflecting on our first five years in business we’ve honed our approach to suit our strengths. 173tech are ‘doers’ by nature, we want to help our clients to rapidly scale the impact . We are all about centralising and modelling your data sources to give you that complete picture and that one source of the truth. Our commitment is always to providing quality work that is impactful to you as a business.
But we have also learnt what we are not. While our team has a lot of experience in strategy and growing analytics for our clients, we are not KPMG or EY. We feel that having 101 stakeholder meetings to try and uncover every element of every process is unnecessary. We never feel the need to compile 2934 page reports. Data is such a fast-moving space and while there is definitely value in a longer-term strategic plan, we typically see more value in focusing on the next 2 years, creating a roadmap of smaller iterative projects, and building data in small steps.
The Next Five Years
As we look to the future, we are excited about the possibilities that lie ahead. We have learned a lot in our first five years, and we know that the next five will bring their own set of challenges and opportunities. 173tech is committed to continuing our focus on business outcomes, embracing new challenges, and refining our processes to ensure that we deliver the best possible service to our clients.