Today is Steelray’s 20th birthday, which is old age for a software company. As I reflect on that fact, one question comes to mind:
How?
How on earth did we make it 20 years? In between all of the mistakes and false assumptions and questionable decisions, we must have been doing something right to get here. After some thought, I came up with a list of “pillars” that have supported our health and longevity.
Financial Health. Just as people need water, food, and oxygen to survive, a business only survives with cash. Not running out of money has always been top-of-list!- Happy Customers. You don’t achieve and maintain financial health without customers. Having happy customers who like us and our products has been the difference-maker. We are so grateful to you and know that we need to continue delivering exceptional products, service, and value to you.
A Mission That Matters to Us. Our mission is to make the finest software for project schedule visualization and analysis.
- By “finest,” we mean the most useful and most usable software products in the market.
- We make the best tools for the best practitioners. For 20 years now, we’ve applied our team’s expertise in project management and building software products to build and offer solutions that provide great value to you.
- We realized that great schedules come from great schedulers, so making better schedulers through our software is part of our mission.
- What We Do and Where Matters. At some point, I realized that how you spend your workdays is as essential as any of the other pillars.
- We want to work on cool stuff.
- We want to be an excellent place to work.
‘A’ Players. As cliché as it sounds, the single biggest thing I’ve done to make it 20 years is to hire and develop a team of ‘A’ players. I am eternally grateful for the team we’ve built. Nothing else I’ve done has mattered more to our journey. Because when the project management landscape undergoes change, and a whole new set of skills is required, I’d rather have a team who have the brains, skills, and mostly attitude to embrace change and pivot quickly to the new reality. The alternative is firing and hiring, and who wants to work for a company like that?
As I write this, we are self-quarantined and have replaced working in the same office with online meetings, webcams, and screen sharing. The conferences we planned on going to have all been canceled, so we’re not able to see our customers in-person. I am missing the office and the conferences and look forward to the day when it’s safe to come out and play again.
Mostly I want to say these two things:
- Thank you, Steelray customers. Let’s celebrate our 40th together too.
- And thank you, Steelray team. You are the best!
Go ahead and treat yourself to a slice of cake today!
