2019 is over and I failed terribly.
I wasn't able to blog. Nevertheless, 2019 was a huge success, with tons of things happening, and like in 2018, I will try to recap the year and give you a little preview of the many challenges and opportunities we want to tackle in 2020.
Where to begin?
My last blog post was in February 2018. Back then, I announced that I would tell you more about our future plans. Sorry for not keeping my promise! I will make up for it with this long blog post.
2019 began with a big bang. After several months, two of the most technically skilled and socially amazing people I've ever met, Flo & Steve, joined as equal partners of Lean-Coders. How did that happen, you may wonder?
At a party, Steve told me he planned to create his own business and needed to ask me some questions about being a freelancer.
This conversation triggered a lot of upcoming events.
A few weeks later, he called to tell me he was now an entrepreneur too and wanted to thank me with dinner.
Anyone who knows me knows — I never turn down a free dinner.
At that time, my plan was to gather the best talents in the IT business under one entity. I met many great entrepreneurs and freelancers, but all of them rejected my offer.
When I told Steve about this idea during our dinner, he reacted completely differently. He shared my mindset, striving to go big and willing to sacrifice a lot to achieve this goal. His vision was also to have a small piece of something big rather than a big piece of something small. And so it began. We held hundreds of meetings and finally reached an agreement to create a company together. But destiny played a trick on us. Just when we wanted to finalize our deal, a new challenger appeared out of nowhere. Flo, a frontend developer I knew from a past project, called to tell me he had recently started freelancing and would love some advice.
As soon as the call ended, I called Steve and presented him with the crazy idea to abandon our plans for a company with two equal shareholders. Why, you might ask?
The biggest uncertainty we faced while discussing the merger of our two small companies was: What should we do if we had different opinions on a specific topic? We explored many strategies and solutions, but nothing really played out the way we wanted. Having three equal partners would easily solve this, I thought, so my idea to create a three-headed monster was born.
Steve didn't know Flo very well, so at first, he wasn't super excited about it. But after meeting Flo just once, he came to me and said: “Flo is our guy, he is the chosen one and will bring balance to our main problem.” Our solution was quite simple. 2 out of 3 votes would settle all future confrontations.
Due to this decision, we had to re-discuss everything, and 2018 turned out to be a very tough and exhausting year. While doing normal business, we had thousands of meetings discussing the legal aspects of the deal with lawyers, as well as planning new branches, products, and strategies for Lean-Coders.
Start 2019 — A new Hope
After the best Christmas party ever, we were striving for new fields. Two amazing new additions joined our little company: Thomas (Hochi) and Benjamin. Thomas responded to one of our ads on Twitter to work remotely for Lean-Coders. Flo already knew from working with him in the past what a great developer Thomas was, so it was a no-brainer for us to hire him. His impact was felt from day one. He leads the frontend team with his vast knowledge, willingness to share his expertise, and amazing work attitude.
Besides his regular work, he also helped out in any way he could.
He never holds back his opinion on how to better solve technical challenges. This highly valuable feedback allowed the rest of the team to improve every day. Currently, he works full-time for one of our most important clients, but still finds time to work on a really cool side project, which we hope to publish soon.
At the same time as Thomas, we welcomed Benjamin to our team. Benjamin is an old friend of Manuela, and this kid has serious talent. He worked for one of the biggest Austrian startups as a process manager, and the transition to being a JavaScript Fullstack Developer was enormous. Benjamin's strength is his eye for detail. He always brings new perspectives into play, like privacy and security. Today, he is the lead developer of one of our products, serving hundreds of clients a day. Thanks to him, I was able to free up some time and be more productive in other areas: I still wanted to pursue my idea of bringing together the best talents in the software business as independent entities, sharing/outsourcing the administrative overhead and allowing them to focus on what they do best: Creating high-quality software.
The idea of launching a franchise system was born. Our plan was to provide people with our network, assets, and knowledge. Together with a lawyer, we created a franchise contract. Additionally, we had some talks with potential franchisees, but unfortunately, up until now, no one has signed up. Due to our many obligations as CEOs, we did not put 100% of our focus and effort into this project, but we still have the contract in our portfolio even without any real opportunities in this area.
Our second idea to create a steady income stream was Steve’s little side business, where he created content and sold books.
Similar to the franchise system, this project did not become the huge success we had hoped for. The books took a lot of Steve’s time, and he did an amazing job, only to find out that without fake reviews and bought followers, the revenue is just too small to justify the time/money it costs to create the content. That’s why we put this idea on hold as well.
Despite all these failures, we created assets that could help us in the future.
And even though things did not play out the way we had hoped, we will maintain our mindset that it’s better to try something and fail than to never try at all.
In the middle of the year, Stefan returned from his year in civil service. He rejoined us with renewed strength and helped us manage new projects with new clients. He didn't miss a beat and is growing as a software developer day by day. Manuela also made amazing progress as a software developer. She was already a design genius and continues to improve her skills in this area, but she also stepped up her JavaScript game. Niki, as always, is our superstar. You can throw any technology or challenge at him, and I'm pretty sure he will solve it. This man is not human; he is a machine.
Last but not least, we also had a great addition to our back office. My wife Roberta joined our group. She helps us with her expertise as an assistant. It was a big step for Roberta and me to let Lean-Coders enter even deeper into our private life, but it was the right choice, and it’s great to see her finally having a job where she finds purpose and can evolve in the direction she wants.
She also took over many of my past agendas, e.g.: creating invoices, checking timetables, managing sick leave, and all other kinds of bureaucratic matters. For all CEOs, this meant we could proceed with our newly generated plans.
In general, I am very proud of the team, and I cannot wait to see all the progress we will achieve in the next couple of years.
Middle of 2019 — The Force Awakens
One of my best friends invited me to a Tony Robbins seminar in London. Man, this was a life-changing experience.
I was always a dream chaser and wrote down my goals and targets, but this seminar was mind-blowing. After a fire walk, plenty of hours of jumping around, hugging people, and screaming my soul out, I was energized more than ever.
One of the most intriguing things I took from it was to find a tutor, pro, or coach that challenges you. So, I scanned my Facebook friend list and sent just one message to Gerald Eder. This guy is a selling machine and one of the greatest entrepreneurs I know. After Gery replied, Steve, Flo, and I met for a business lunch with him where he assessed our assets and skills. After some amazing tips, we convinced him that it would be awesome to have him as our mentor/coach. From then on, week after week, he showed us our flaws and shortcomings. It wasn’t cheap, but it elevated our decision-making and helped us grow as a group. Heading full power into our expansion and trying to create value after value, our financial struggles also came into play. We were never in big trouble, but we had to pay a lot of taxes upfront, so cash flow was always on the bleeding edge. A big thank you to the whole group, but especially to my co-owners, who sacrificed everything and showed me again that my choice to work with them was the right one.
Still, during all this time, we had great fun with our amazing group. Our quarterly meetings are legendary, and every event was special for me. With Gerald's help, we worked every day on ourselves and knew that we still had a missing piece.
In the meantime, Samuel decided to leave Lean-Coders because he wanted to focus more on his final school year. Because of this, we had a gap in our support/maintenance work. Fortunately, Elias and Flo were willing to join our team. They are great talents with a bright future. Their current main goal is to finish their studies in AI/NLP/ML. They will play a big part in our new strategies in the next couple of years.
End of 2019 — The Seller Strikes Back
Back on my first day as a naive entrepreneur, I had a challenging encounter with some contractors. Due to my unawareness, I attended two interviews for the same client but with different contractors. This was an unspoken no-go, and one of the contractors was really pushy and aggressive. The other one was really nice and told me not to worry and that we should have lunch together. This event was the first of many meetings with one of my favorite contractors over time. Even though we never worked together, we met from time to time and discussed future trends and technologies. This is the short story of how I met Tahir. After one of Gerald’s sessions, we discussed the option of adding a seller to our group. All of us owners are technology professionals, but none of us is a seller or negotiator. Like everything in my life, after several days of planning how to find the right person for this position, my phone rang. Tahir was on the other end and told me he would leave his company and wanted to leave the country to build or find something new. Long story short, Tahir, Steve, Flo, and I were all in to go again to a lawyer to add a fourth owner. Tahir came, saw, and conquered. We created new meeting formats, brought more feedback from our people into the game, and focused on finding solutions for it. Thomas was one of the loudest voices for the desire to work together more closely and less distributed with different customers. Hence, Tahir found us a space, and our CEOs and Roberta surprised everyone with our first physical office.
This was 2019 in a nutshell. Tahir is now managing all of our contracts, and we adapted our focus again. Together, we created a big vision to empower people. Through different mission statements and goals, we will create value over time in various aspects to deliver top opportunities for software developers and hopefully soon for all kinds of people.
