Let's talk about where Velentium is headed as a company. We've talked about why - changing lives; how - the three values; who - right person, right seat, and our name - Velocity, Momentum, and Ingenium; and now where. Where is our company headed?
To give you a quick glimpse into our goal structure – we have quarterly, one-year, three-year, and ten-year goals as an organization, a monthly company-wide meeting, weekly meetings within scrum teams, and daily standups within projects to ensure everybody stays on track. But they all funnel into our ten-year goal. As of 2019, our new ten-year goal is to have a thousand people on staff.
If we have a thousand people on staff, we have a thousand families that we're influencing for the better. I hope that excites our new hires, because we don't want to be a company that's stagnant. If we keep growing at roughly 20% year over year, very soon there will be management, technical leadership, and mentorship opportunities for our employees.
Depending on their preference, an employee could go down a management or technical track, but the ability to lead and mentor and grow junior people that are coming in has always been our goal. We’ve strategically hired subject matter experts in critical areas with a follow-up goal of hiring junior personnel they can train.
Junior hires are great because we have the opportunity to groom them in our culture. But we also want seasoned employees who have been in other jobs, because then they can see why our culture is different. A Chris Gates or a Randy Armstrong that have been in the industry for decades with experience across numerous jobs will say, "What is done here is happening differently." And the reason it's done differently is that from the top down, and from the beginning to the present, we’ve built our company around culture.
We tell every new employee, “Velentium is not going to be at your deathbed. You make a choice each and every day whether or not your spouse and kids will be, so remember what really matters. Your spouse, your kids, your close friends, they matter. This job matters, but it's only a job. We hope it becomes a passion and some of your friends and maybe even your family end up working here. You can always get another job, but you can’t replace your spouse, your kid, or a good friend.”
Companies are inanimate beasts that will devour as much of your life as you allow. We can't worry about whether you are working until two in the morning, and we can't keep you from doing that if you want to. You need to decide to have a life instead. In interviews, we ask, "What do you do for fun? What are you passionate about outside of work?" Because we want people who are passionate outside of work. People who have full lives and many interests are whole individuals, and that's who we want to work with.
We are all about people, which is why we care whether Velentium is profitable. We're not about profit for profit's sake, but profitability allows us to invest in growth, growth lets us hire more people, more people means more families, and our ten-year goal is to positively impact a thousand families.
In the next post, we will go into some detail about the core competencies Velentium has to offer its clients.