To us, March meant celebrating 5 years since we started the Bytex journey, and we thought this is a great opportunity for us to share some of our learnings and our internal projects. This video is an overview of our efforts, as seen from the inside.
If you want to watch our entire video series, stay tuned on our YouTube channel, as we’ll be posting another two videos – spoiler alert, they’re about amazing internal projects we’ve been working on.
We attached the video script below.
‘Starting a business is never easy, much less when it’s a new territory in terms of customers and revenue models. The hardest part though, for which it seems that we’re never prepared enough, is seeing that business succeed.
Growth doesn’t happen overnight, but if you nurture your business chances are it will evolve as you do.
Celebrating 5 years since we launched Bytex means that, while we’ve accomplished a lot, the real page turner of our story are the lessons we’ve learned and the directions they’ve pushed us towards. Here’s a few of our most important lessons and what we turned them into.
Don’t be afraid to admit your mistakes. They’re a good place to start improving. For instance, in our first year of activity, we relied heavily on one larger customer. When it came to an end, the entire business structure was destabilized, and we had to start over. We’ve learned that putting your eggs in one proverbial basket is a poor business practice because it leaves you liable towards your employees and your growth plans. So we diversified our portfolio.
Business to business is actually business to people. We don’t just think that every customer is important regardless of the project size, but we also invest resources in treating every partnership personally and responsibly, with as much attention to details as possible. We’ve learned to proactively address potential situations in our relationship with customers to ensure productive and long term collaborations. We made sure to be transparent and to challenge communication barriers every time a new opportunity emerged. We also made sure to work with best-in-class professionals who are independent, resourceful and experienced, in anticipation of bigger projects.
Jack of all trades, master of none. Wearing multiple hats at the beginning of a professional journey is a common mistake people make. The eagerness to start fresh bared the burden of nurturing the many needs our company had, and became rather unscalable. Identifying the right person for the right job and hiring specialized professionals is a lesson that allowed us to evolve beautifully on an individual level, while growing powerful together.
Learning and adaptability. We’ve tailored processes to the customers’ stage of development. With Bytex Reusability Initiative we helped our customers to kick-off projects in any technology based on well defined architectures. Not every product is the same. Customising the reusability layer to meet our customers’ timelines made our partnerships go a long way.
Accommodating people’s needs to better themselves is all about trust. We learned that one way to stay competitive is to make sure that you’re flexible enough and that you help your people nurture their passions. It sounds like an easy thing to do, but it is a continuous effort to listen and take concrete steps towards the needs of our crew and to help them work on projects they’re really passionate about.
At Bytex, we’re all in this together in more than just one way. From offering stock options to our people as a motivator to creating a climate of trust, we learned that there are no shortcuts in creating a powerful team that keeps being competitive year after year.
Sometimes, this even leads to cool side projects that have tremendous potential, which we’ll be getting into in our next videos. Until then, make sure to keep an open mind!’
