Cake Day Now a National Holiday

You know things are going well at the company you work for when an off-and-on-again cake-day gets promoted to a full-tilt off-the-clock potluck extravaganza. I remember when “Cake Day” meant someone baked a few cupcakes, or passed around a sleeve of Oreos. While it’s a downer that not everyone can make it to the gathering because of our various locations, I take that as a testament to our growth and success. Just as encouraging and vexing at the same time is getting a response of “who?” to a list of birthdays for our company in a given month.

SolutionStream is growing, and not the risky kind of “someone loaned us a bunch of money, and we’re hiring 50 people to spend it on” kind of growing. I spoke with Chad Atkinson, our Managing Partner to get this thought about growth, employees, and the present state of SolutionStream. After working in the same field for many years Chad joined SolutionStream with a mandate to carry the company forward.

Since then the company has increased in size and billings 10-fold and according to Chad, our brightest days are in front of us. We work in a very interesting and volatile industry. Clients hire us to build solutions. Sometimes they are new companies, their hopes, and dreams riding on the promise of our software. Often we’re hired by well-established companies and we’re asked to help finish or fix an existing project. Either way, people come to us looking for miracles. Time after time, SolutionStream delivers.

The volatility comes in because of the wave-like nature of our work. A client’s project may demand 8 employees to work full time for 6 months. We hire to fill out the team and get working. 6 months later the project is completed and a grateful client bids us farewell. We now have 8 employees that need a new contract... Luckily our sales team has been working with new and existing clients, planning for new contracts. We move 4 employees to an existing project and 4 more to a new project. When that’s been settled, our previous client calls and says they want all 8 of us back! Multiply that by 10, and you start to get a picture of the juggling act that SolutionStream must do to keep things moving. This is the key to SolutionStream’s success.

Photo credit, google