The Rollercoaster Ride
Year End Message
I wish I knew at the beginning of this year that we are going to end like this.
We were presented with a completely different challenge in Jan 2022 with crazy market where there are more jobs and less candidates. Being a start-up with limited resources, we could not give similar hikes. To be able to retain employees we had to do some restructuring by letting go people in technologies where there is no demand like manual testing when the market is good so they could get a job elsewhere. We have managed to give decent hikes for our employees and retained majority of them by ignoring profits for a year so we can see through this period.
In January we had kept 3 goals
- To retain our top talent by offering them some hike plus making sure they like to work for GSS by giving a good work life balance.
- To get our first domestic clients.
- Start a new stream of work other than Dotnet.
I hope we have succeeded in point 1, definitely achieved point 2 but failed in point 3 and we will be carrying that forward to next year. We now have enough capital to be able to accomplish that.
By Midyear when clients starting to move from growth to profit booking, our clients downsized the teams. At one stage we had 75% of our staff on bench.
Since we were always sub-contracting from our partners, we never invested in a sales team. We have decided to use our in-house admin team to make the sales as they know the company better than a new salesperson. So, our admin team started making calls all around India and with their efforts, we have managed to place all our bench resources on projects in India. For the first time, our revenue from Indian clients exceeded UK revenue for few months.
In this entire process, I want to thank our Senior developers especially, for their support in attending multiple interviews for different clients. “Managing such challenges is possible only when we come together.”
We have shown an incredible growth pace over the Second half of 2022. By end of 2022 we have managed to achieve 100% utilization levels which has never happened before for GSS.
With a satisfying end to 2022, we are expecting a great start to 2023 with 2 new projects kicking off and hoping our Freshers to start contributing in the first half of New Year.
Vision for 2023
- To continue the growth rate.
- Enter at least 2 new markets among USA/Canada, Middle East or Australia/New Zealand.
- Hire a new sales team
- Improve developer equipment one at a time.
- Venture into new streams like Salesforce, Data Analytics etc.
- Retain all our existing clients.
- Grow senior team and making sure we retain all our current staff.
- Focus on improving skillset of existing employees.