Curtain up!

From the very beginning, The Agile Monkeys has been a “stealth company.” We’ve been pretty opaque, writing almost no public posts, not going to many conferences as either attendees or speakers, and having a minimalistic website. This was a decision we made early on, to spend our time working instead of filling it with what everyone else expects from a technology company. For many years we didn’t even have a marketing person. We invested zero in ads, growing solely by word of mouth by making our clients extremely happy every time so they would recommend us to our next client. This has worked splendidly for us, and we’ve grown from being just a couple of crazy guys to a company of more than 44 people, with consistent annual revenue growth of over 50% and year after year profitability.

We have never been a startup, if a startup is something that burns someone else’s money until it either fails or takes off. We don’t believe in overnight success stories, either, because they’re casino stories. In every casino there are overnight success stories: someone who hit the jackpot one night and became rich. But 99% of the people in casinos lose everything they bet. Overnight success stories are what make people keep betting and losing, because they believe that eventually they can become one of those nice stories. We’ve always run away from that model. It’s extremely risky, the probability of success is exceptionally low, and we have a responsibility to ourselves and our families, who depend on this company being able to pay our salaries every month.

Instead, we chose another direction: bootstrapping. And now, after nine years, we can say we’re in a sweet spot. We don’t owe anybody anything, and we’re still the ones who are defining our future. In the past few years we’ve started to open up to the public a bit: we’ve started to publish some posts, and we’ve gone to a few conferences — not because we’ve changed our minds, but because they’re a tool for us. We only go to a conference when we have something to say or when we want to meet someone, and we only post things that we’d write internally anyway. Our priority is, and always will be, our work, giving the best service possible to our clients, and working hard on our products.

Our priority is, and always will be, our work, giving the best service possible to our clients, and working hard on our products.

During all these years we’ve developed a very special company culture. We’ve put our team above everything else, even money. When there are problems, we all help, and when there are successes, we all feel like we’ve succeeded. We have a no-blame culture where anyone is allowed to make mistakes and the most important thing is how WE fix it, not who caused the problem in the first place. Everything is built around trust, to the point that we don’t care when or where our team members work: we understand that people’s energy depends on a lot of factors and all we ask is that they do their best, because, by definition, nobody can go beyond that. We want energized people who rest properly and have healthy lives, and we understand that we are humans who are sometimes living through situations that make us less productive. We know that our “best” in those situations will be lower, and we accept that, because we have a team to help us. As soon as everyone in the team is doing their best, the greatest possible outcome will emerge naturally.

We’ve had the good luck of finding the most talented, responsible, and hard working colleagues ever, and they are the reason why our model works. The team is the key, and we’ve become very skilled at finding more great people and teaching them to work this way, too. One especially good thing about our culture is that it’s contagious, and once you try it you can’t imagine going back to the classic 9-to-5 work-in-an-office-space with the false-happiness kindergarten-like perks.

Most people don’t believe us when we talk about how we do things. In fact, some of our colleagues actually tell us after they’ve spent some time with us, “I thought you were lying during the selection process, like all the other companies I worked for did before.”

The thing is, we’re realizing that we have something very special and we feel it’s time to share it. First, because we’ve grown to a point where we can’t keep training every new person individually, and second, because we think that it can inspire other people and also attract prospective clients or future team members to our company.

So this is the first in a series of articles about The Agile Monkeys culture, about how we think, how we do things, and why they’ve worked so well.