In our fourth year as a company, Spaulding Ridge has already accomplished amazing things. We’ve doubled in size and are at an extraordinary 450 bandmates, many of whom are in international offices, including Toronto, Calgary, London, Stockholm, Paris, Jaipur, and the Philippines. Our revenue has grown 70% YOY – no easy feat, especially in the middle of a pandemic. We’ve worked with more than 700 clients to solve their key business challenges and transform their organizations for peak operational efficiency.
It amazes me, all that we’ve done.
Amidst all this success, I do have a personal favorite metric: our 87% retention rate.
Many consulting firms are known for being “revolving doors” – employees joining and leaving at alarming rates each year. In particular, during this time, many are seeing their retention rates dip even further, as low as 50%.
When I started Spaulding Ridge, I knew two things: I wanted this company to be a force for good and I did not want it to be a revolving door. As we developed the idea that grew into the Spaulding Ridge firm, I pulled inspiration from several places, from The Ideal Team Player by Patrick Lencioni, and from the Father of Management Thinking himself, Peter Drucker, who said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” It’s by no means a new concept, but the effectiveness of being Culture Forward is plain to see from where I stand.
Through the starts and (faux) stops of COVID, the Spaulding Ridge team has stuck together and shown devotion to making our Culture Forward focus ingrained in every aspect of the company, demonstrating their hungry, humble, and smart mindsets daily. They’ve hosted extra knowledge-transfer sessions with clients, volunteered in our local communities, and put in extra effort to welcome new bandmates as they join the firm.
It’s beyond my wildest imaginings.
I remember writing this post last year, on Spaulding Ridge’s 3rd birthday, and including our goals for the following year, for 2021, and I felt like I was dreaming big, wanting to grow by 50% – one year later, we’ve actually grown by 70% while maintaining profitability.
When you do the right things, hire the right people, and focus on the Culture Forward mindset, things really do fall into the place, whether reaching goals, partnering with the right technology, or finding the right clients.
Speaking of which, without our clients, none of this would be possible. As we scale, our clients have continued to trust us, demonstrating their support for our best-in-cloud strategy. Not only that, but they continue to ask more of us – help road-mapping their cloud journey, help with data and analytics, and we’ve happily risen to these challenges. We’ve recently expanded our Cloud Advisory and Advanced Data and Analytics practices to further the ways we can assist clients reach their goals because that’s what we strive for day-in and day-out.
As the world continues to migrate to a best-of-breed cloud strategy, we’re already a step ahead – we’re there. But our work is nowhere near complete, nor will it ever be. We’ll continue to evaluate our technologies, develop optimized combination solutions, and foster partnerships with only the best-in-cloud technology so we can continue driving competitive advantage through rapid digital transformation for our clients.
Leading this firm continues to be a humbling experience for me. I look forward to year five as we approach our initial goal of surpassing $100M in revenue and grow our global presence even further with 500 bandmates.
The forecast is looking bright – it’s going to be a momentous year.
