The Annual Christmas Letter 2023

Dear Reader,

It's that time of year again. The annual, and now expectedly belated, Christmas letter.

True, it has actually only happened once before - but when a kind person told me they were looking forward to this year's letter, I felt obliged. So this is written especially for him and my dear Mother who has been an avid reader in the past. Again, in the spirit of reflection and posterity, here's the Christmas letter.

I'm writing on a plane flying over the above pictured Iceland, thinking about what I can share that will sound appropriately impressive. Any good Christmas letter regales readers with tales of far flung holidays, awards, home renovations, charity work, children and pets.?So I'll indulge you with nearly all that, focused mainly on the biz but also sharing highlights from home too.

I need to point out that conceptually this was a good idea, in practice I'm not sure it works, but we're both here now, so let's run with it.

Petz

Our darling pet Zebra, BWZ , is now 4 years old and continues to thrive -?growing 35% YoY. There are now 50 Zebras in the BWZ dazzle (for the uninitiated, that's a bunch of zebras). We snagged a lot of incredible talent last?year and they're all doing so well.

Prizez

If they were a class, the dazzle would be top. We're so proud of them all. After years of wanting someone to notice us, we won a few awards this year; #30 in The Globe and Mail Fastest Growing Company list , winner of CMI Media Group 's Best Digital Publication for The Digital Project Manager and winning Digiday Leader of the Year for yours truly.

At home, sadly the same can't be said for young Ted, our new pup in town. We're sending him to boarding school to smarten him up.

Kidz

Next up, and obviously second to pets and prizes, let me tell you about our dear children. We hatched a couple of new baby sites this year - thecmo.com and revopsteam.com and have got some exciting plans for new site launches in the year ahead. It's early days but we're excited about growing the portfolio of 12 publications and communities we're building to help people win at work.

Personally, no hatching happened. Kate, 9, likes to play ukulele, write musicals and dance. Lucy, 7, also loves to dance and sing, loves to cook, and watch baking shows. Both continue to be a source of surprise, delight and mess.

Renoz

We did some extensive home renovations this year. First up we launched our new publishing platform which powers our entire portfolio of sites. We also made our first acquisition, of Crozdesk, integrating their ad tech into our ecosystem and launching softwareselect.com - our B2B SaaS vendor lead gen portal for lead gen across our portfolio.

Personally, we didn't actually do any home renovations because we did them the year before when we painted the house an exciting hue of grey. I did fix the garage door though - there was a loose screw which I tightened.

Charityz

We were also lucky enough to be able to help out some charities this year, giving away more than than $500k. There's not really a parallel home story here, sorry, but I'm proud we've been able to increase our giving year on year.

Holz

This year we went to Mexico and wish you could have joined us. With Covid finally over(ish) we took the entire BWZ team to Mexico for a retreat. It was great to meet the team in real life to connect, collaborate and celebrate together.

Personally we were finally able to pop back to the UK for some Hula Hoops which was very relaxing.

Lowlightz

But as well as the highlights, it's worth acknowledging that of course it wasn't all good news. Here's the schadenfreude for you all:

• We discovered that our entire org structure wasn't scale-able and so restructured. That was painful.
• We discovered that evolving our learning product offering is a big job, so we didn't quite get around to it. That was disappointing.
• We discovered Google's algorithms are always up to mischief and keep us on our toes. That was a lot of hard work.
• We discovered we're not immune to macro economic recessionary pressure. That meant many of our advertising vendors scaling back marketing spend, and orgs reducing their L&D budgets which impacted our learning product sales.

Don't worry though; I'm ok, we're ok. The silver lining of things not going entirely to plan means you get to put it back together better than it was before.

We've got big plans for the year ahead, 2023 is going to be a good one.

Love Ben