What a year
2019. Wow! It will calm down one of these days, maybe when I retire.
What I enjoyed most about this year is that we really moved to the next level. We increased our geographical spread, number of clients, and Nimblers, and we achieved all this significant growth by sticking to our lean, independent approach that allows us to benefit from ‘just in time’ decision making.
We’ve all worked really hard this year, and it’s so pleasing to see the fruits of our labour achieving great things.
In March, with our friends at Side by Side Creative, we presented the Taro Pumps case study at the Sheffield Digital Showcase. This was a service design led MVP where we custom built an Amazon-style platform, and upskilled a legacy Indian Dev team through our code camp model too!
We then followed a storming Quarter 1 with the hire of Joel Emery, who joined as our Head of Commercial in April. Joel’s focus is split between our People and Clients and he’s been a great addition to the team!
In May, I was shortlisted amongst some amazing people at the Sheffield Digital Awards. For me personally, it was so humbling to have been nominated for this by multiple clients.
Into new territory
After targeting it behind the scenes, we were over the moon to announce Manchester as Nimble’s third community. We started working with 3 new clients in Manchester over the summer, and are happy to say we will continue to do so as we go into 2020! Our entire client base has really continued to grow this year with a real mixed bag of interesting projects from helping accelerate small start ups to giving bigger blue chip clients that extra firepower.
I was lucky enough to have the chance to take some time out for a trip to California over the summer with my family. This was awesome, and a testament to our BizOps team, not only was nothing on fire on my return, we’d actually won even more new work.
That was certainly in part down to how Dan settled into the COO role to effectively run the day-to-day business. Massive congrats to him and a big thank you from me for how he’s seamlessly handled that transition.
Bulking up our BizOps function
With the ramp up of new work, it’s been great to execute our plan to bring in an Ops Specialist, and Victoria really has hit the ground running and become that & so much more with her passion for content writing, marketing. social media and events.
As we start to increase our social media presence, we have also been continuing our support of mental health awareness, taking a deeper look at issues like anxiety, depression, and burnout/stress, and getting conversations going across the online platforms. This is something we are committed to, and we will keep talking about mental health in a bid to encourage others to keep talking too.
As we sped into Q4, our need for a website that reflected our people, services and brand in the present day really was rising to the top of our product backlog. So I was thrilled that we were able to deliver our new website using the React skills of our Front End Principal Mr Laurie Nicholas.
Helping people
Finally, after a fair bit of work behind the scenes (using our research tracks), we also launched #nimblegivesback in Q4 – which is aimed at giving our time, money, knowledge and skills to get behind causes that we feel passionate about as a team.
From sponsoring local events such as Front End North Sheffield (a local conference providing industry insights, at an accessible cost), to setting personal challenges to raise money for local charities, we are absolutely committed to giving something back to our community and those who can really benefit from our help.
As part of #nimblegivesback, we have selected 5 different charities to support, each so deserving of our commitment and support. Two of these charities are particularly close to my heart;
1) The Sheffield Autistic Society – this is an inclusive charity who supports individuals of any age who are on the Autism spectrum. This is a local charity who do some very valuable work supporting people on the spectrum, their parents and carers.
2) The Children’s Hospital Charity – This is one of only 4 standalone children’s hospitals in the UK and actually treats patients from all over the world. The charity helps with funding which is always a challenge. As well an emergency department they also specialise in brain injuries, bone reconstruction and sleep therapy for children, and offer an outstanding level of care with limited resources. As a proud Dad of 2 daughters, I feel it’s so important to support causes like this.
So now it’s time for a well deserved rest with friends, families and loved ones, before we recalibrate and go again for what’s shaping up to be a very promising 2020!
