With the end of the year rapidly approaching, many reflect on what happened in 2018. Continuously reminded by the holiday wishes and the jolly spirit omnipresent in every downtown street and building, I naturally dig into my memory banks even more so than I otherwise do. 2018 was a big year for us, lit up by little bubbles of light promising a bright future.
After months of exploration and negotiation, we gathered around our shared vision and in May released the next version of Xodiac with 3 founders: Varinder, Peter and myself. Not only did this radically change our company structure, more importantly it expanded the ways in which we can help our customers succeed. Instead of making agile coaching our core activity, expanding allowed us to provide a set of complementary services that put a bigger dent in achieving our mission: making every team thrive.
We soon after landed our first shared engagement and with that learned how we want to engage with our customers. All of us had been in situations in which it was hard to convince an executive team of the investment required to transform teams to continuously and sustainably deliver better results. We built a model that allows us to calculate the benefits over time of the investments made, providing meaningful insight into strategic investments over a number of years. We now believe that measurability and proof are core to our value proposition.
A few months later we realized we needed help. In October we hired Tona to strengthen our team and give us more capacity to grow the business. With Tona came the need to think about how we want to engage with our employees. Since we are in the business of making every team thrive, we took extra care to setup ourselves to thrive as well. We thought hard about what would make us – as employees – proud of our company, what would make us feel appreciated and what would motivate us. We discussed these things with Tona, refined it and cemented it in our employment agreement.
As we grew our business, we also created solid partnerships with communities interested in improving workplaces, with customers interested in our vision, with companies providing complementary offerings and with people interested to join our team.
All of this kept us busy during this short year and left us with a ton of satisfaction and infinitely more appetite to dive into the new year. In 2018, we built the foundation for Xodiac to thrive, we can’t wait to see what’s next!
Happy holidays!