Reflections & What the Future Holds

On August 16th, 2020, SADA turns the page on 20 years of existence. In any other year, we would bring in our 20th anniversary with a grand celebration. We would host a huge party, with hundreds of our closest friends, customers, and partners. But, this year, circumstances deem it necessary to replace our usual jubilee with something entirely different. Out of this global pandemic, we can't help but reflect on some of the most profound social and economic challenges that many of us have ever faced.  

To honor our 20th anniversary, our contribution to our people, our customers, partners and the ecosystem is this letter. First, we hope this finds you and the people you care about well. We hope it answers some of the questions many of you have asked. We hope it provides you with a lens into how we got here, what we’ve learned, and what’s next. Finally, we hope it highlights our gratitude for everyone in the SADA family past, present and future. 

[If you prefer, you can listen to the audio version of this on Cloud n Clear]

How We Got Here 

Before we dive into what we learned, and what’s ahead, I’d like to share the story about how we got here. By every measure, SADA represents the American Dream. In this case, Armenian immigrants who fled the Soviet Union in 1987 with a child and did everything ambitious, educated immigrants set out to do in pursuit of a better life. They learned the language, sought out new skills, sacrificed leisure, and worked every waking hour to give their child the highest pedestal possible. They chose to start from the bottom in their mid-thirties, so their only son wouldn’t have to.

My father, Hovig Safoian, came from the world of mainframe computing and applied mathematics. He introduced me to technology very early on. I fell in love with technology, even though my parents hoped I would choose a career path of medicine (all immigrant children from Armenia are expected to become doctors. There are no other options). 

My mother, Annie Safoian, worked as a bookkeeper. She was amazing at it. When the firm she worked for relocated to New Jersey, she was out of work for a while. So, she began to tinker with the same computer I learned on - a $3000 386 clone, which they spent more to buy than all of the furniture in the house. Turning zero experience into an amazing small business, my mother did graphic design work for real estate agents and other printers - very few people had these skill sets in the digital world. Here was my mom, making groundbreaking strides as a woman in the industry from the very start.  

In 2000, my father started SADA with three other partners, all friends and family. When the company I was working at, TicketClub.com (notice the dot-com), began to run out of funding (like all businesses in the dot-com era), I decided to move home to help with the family business. At the time, SADA worked primarily in .NET-based software. Using my basic computer networking knowledge, I knew I could add value to the family business. Shortly after, in 2003, my mom’s company, GrafxWorx, joined forces with SADA, taking on the SADA name. I was named CEO of SADA, after the other partners decided they could not focus on the company anymore. 

With no funding, little experience, lots of ambition and just enough naivete, I embarked on a path to move away from the ‘break-fix’ model of computer and networking repair of the time. We adopted a fixed-fee monthly model, better known today as “Managed Services.” I may have invented it (although I can’t be certain, nobody has proven that I did not)! This maneuver created my passion for business models that drive recurring, predictable revenue, while aligning incentives with customers. Waiting for things to break, only to go back and fix them at a high cost, seemed backwards to me.  

Our GrafxWorx roots pulled us into web development in the early 2000s. We had network systems chops, designers, and developers—a novel mix. We started selling required hardware and software, becoming a “one-stop shop” for our managed services customers. We were a Gold Certified Microsoft partner that Microsoft didn’t even know existed. 

Around this time, we realized the managed services approach was very hard to scale. We had a great set of SoCal customers, but how do you manage logistics around supporting customers far away? Do you drive to them all the time to do preventative maintenance and respond quickly when they are down? Thus, “ZEROi” was born. We took a couple existing customers, who had MSFT Exchange, Files and Office, and hosted their applications from a data center located in Downtown LA. We served them with only Citrix and Terminal Server, allowing us to service them centrally. There was nothing on-site that could “break.” We quickly learned how expensive this was to build, and how difficult it was to ensure security and uptime SLAs. So, we rolled them back on-premises. ZEROi failed, but we kept those customers - testament to our relationships and overall value we brought. 

At this time, 2005-2006, somewhere in a random airline magazine, I saw an ad for Google Enterprise, and their Search Appliance. I remember thinking, “Google has an enterprise business?” The idea of starting a practice that could change how our users in companies quickly accessed their information like we all did on google.com was magical.

\We paid $10K (a fortune to us at the time), to join Google’s partner program. We obtained a search appliance to test, build upon, and sell with. We developed some pretty cool connectors to Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory. The Google Enterprise Team was impressed. Their team was around 50 people back then, but we had believers! Scott McMullen, Jeff Ragusa, Dave Giourard, and Michael Lock. To this day, I feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude to them. We were tiny, and unknown. But they saw something special. 

We sold ZERO search appliances. None of our customers with smaller headcount (5-100 employees) could afford or justify a server with a $30,000 price tag.  

However, Google had an upcoming product launch and were impressed with our MSFT platform expertise. They didn’t know anyone else like us in the ecosystem. In 2006, Google Apps for Your Domain went live, and SADA was launched onto the world stage. We immediately began doing work for customers who were 100 times larger than the profiles we were used to working with. Our scope expanded outside of SoCal, and we began executing projects all around the country and all over the world. No one else knew how to deploy Google Apps at that scale. Most of our customers were in education, public sector, and telco. Northwestern University was the 2nd University ever to deploy Google Apps for students and alumni - and it was SADA who took them there. 13 years later, they are still running it. 

In 2009, as soon as we could sell and implement Google Apps (G Suite) to commercial customers, we did. Google’s ‘mid-market’ team had just two salespeople - Mike Sutherland who covered East, and Mike Lee who covered West. They trusted us. We closed some great deals! This was the start of our commercial business with Google.  

Around the same time, a couple of people from Microsoft called and said, “Hey, you’re a Gold Certified Microsoft Partner; why are you making such a splash with Google?” It was easy: if you wanted cloud email, Google had the only answer. Low and behold, they were launching BPOS, which became Office 365. They didn’t have many partners who deployed what would become millions of users on cloud email. They recognized our hunger, and saw clarity in our vision. They too invested heavily in us during the early days. Eric Trimble and Jane Dickson saw something in us that nobody else from Microsoft had. Judson Althoff, Jenni Flinders, Dave Willis, Vahe Torrosian, and Margo Day decided to put us on the big stage in the world of Microsoft in meaningful ways. 

All of a sudden, we were a top partner in both ecosystems. We divided into two separate sales and delivery organizations, both to increase specialization and to minimize conflict in the field. We never wanted the Microsoft or Google sellers to think we would sell customers anything other than their respective products and services. That’s ride or die. This was a rare dynamic as most partners (true to this day) are “agnostic.” It worked. It continues to work.

For the next 10 years, we ran both a Google Cloud and Microsoft Cloud business (with some other key partnerships mixed in), with lots of growth and accolades along the way to show for it. However, in 2019 we announced we were going to go “all-in” with Google. The reasons behind this have been well documented, so I won’t go into that now, but for that decade, in both ecosystems, we kept performing in ways the market didn’t think we could. Punching above our ‘weight class’ became part of our brand. 

Since we started with basic networking and email, no one thought we would figure out Voice. When Skype for Business and Teams became a thing, of course we became experts in Voice. We didn’t have a lot of cloud infrastructure experience, but when Azure became important, it represented the majority of our pipeline before we sold the business.  

With Google, starting from Search and then G Suite, we insisted on going to market with Maps in 2011 - 2013. Conventional wisdom supported the notion that this business segment was best served by GIS specialists, not cloud companies like SADA. The same pattern repeated with GCP. Time and time again, we were told we could not be great at “the next thing” if we were exceptionally good at “another thing.” We never believed that.  

That’s one of the things that made us unique. Maybe it all goes back to how we started—we didn’t know what we could not do. We believed we could figure out tough engineering problems and invent new business models. We had strong instincts about where the market was going. We trusted data, but even more than that, we trusted ourselves and our gut.  

By every measure, our belief in our abilities continues to serve us. Our success can be seen in back-to-back global accolades from Google Cloud, market validation by CRN, Inc 5000, and other respected publications that set the standard in our industry. Rest assured, SADA’s accolades are backed up by growth of over 65% CAGR for 15+ years. 

Only 9 companies in the history of the list have made it on Inc 5000 14 times, like SADA has. 

This growth is all organically driven, with no slow down in sight. For that, I AM VERY GRATEFUL!

And…after 20 years in business, we're just getting started. More on that later... 

What We Learned Along the Way

It’s fair to say, we never expected to get here. Even if we had, there is no way this was all part of some “master plan.” I would be lying if I said that we strategically laid out a 20-year plan to get where we are today. It took a ton of grit and hard work not only from the family but from each and every employee that has passed through the doors of SADA. We experimented a lot. We pivoted regularly. We had strong convictions, but loosely held when necessary. 

One thing has been consistent - the absolute desire and commitment to be ‘best in class’ in everything we do - that was there in the beginning, and is paramount today.  

Through the foundation of everyone’s tireless work, we were able to capitalize on incredible timing and yes, some luck. Along this journey, we’ve learned a few things that I, at least right now, believe to be universal truths.  

1. It’s Important to Be on the Right Side of History

There was nothing in our pedigree or experience that suggested the likelihood of SADA being revered as thought leaders in the new cloud paradigm that took shape in the mid-2000s. It’s more likely that because of our small footprint in the industry, our bet on cloud didn’t feel like a massive risk. Sure, every customer we migrated to cloud email meant one less traditional managed services customer. Even though we could no longer charge to maintain their on-prem email systems, so what? The market shift was undeniable! 

It wasn’t difficult to grasp the concept that making several smaller bets to test hypotheses, markets and technology stacks was a good idea. We understood and appreciated that our industry has no respect for legacy. It only respects innovation, and embraces the reality that the only constant in life is change.  

Companies and industries across the broad spectrum of business should have “gone big” into the G Suite or Office 365 trends in the mid-2000s, but very few did. 

2. Niches Are Powerful Because Fewer Competitors Are Better Than Many

When you’re small (SADA is still very small with around 250 employees, but a lot of people think we have 1000s), it’s important to carve out a niche. If you’re in a business where you want to be good at everything, or the lowest cost provider, that’s a very hard goal to attain.  

When you can’t differentiate your superpowers, it all comes down to rapid scale (which requires a tremendous amount of capital) and price (which requires extremely high levels of efficiency). We were self funded, and wanted to stay that way. Yet, the market continues to shift rapidly. So, how do you build extreme efficiencies in a market that “moves your cheese” monthly? You can’t, unless you are willing to perpetually lose money. This was not something we were willing or able to do. 

We picked a lane and became the best in the world at it. Then, we expanded our offerings, but only in ways that felt natural and adjacent. We tested some, but never went too far in pursuing “shiny objects.” We took small risks when the ROI seemed to be there, but never took risks that compromised the economic viability of our company. 

Before we truly found our niche, we tried all sorts of new angles. There was a time we thought we wanted to get into the Voice business when Voice became Data (the IP telephony transformation). As it turned out, Voice was not quite adjacent enough. We had to wait until Voice became Cloud.  

3. If You Are Not the Brand, Align Yourself With One “Ride or Die”

Small, unknown, regional, self-funded, immigrant, inexperienced CEO with a philosophy degree—how do you make a name for yourself? Make alliances with the biggest names in the world, and perfect execution on the value chain that other big brands bring to market. 

We were not Microsoft. We are not Google. We are, however, a very significant part of the value that customers received (and continue to receive) from these brands. It’s not just an affiliation, it’s an obsession. SADA is “ride or die,” and that makes all the difference. From day one, we could ONLY be successful by making our partners successful (which requires us to make customers successful first). 

The recognition that comes with this level of alignment is more valuable than any branding we could have done in the early days. That is…until you're big enough. Six years ago, we finally gained the bandwidth to direct efforts on SADA’s brand, with a real focus on Marketing and Inside Sales. After a certain size, we could not lean solely on being brought customers from outside our organization. When sourcing your own business, building a differentiated brand becomes more and more valuable as you grow. The market wants to know what you stand for, especially as others enter your space. Differentiation in the eyes of your team members, your existing customers and prospective new business opportunities is critical. 

We’ve maintained our “ride or die” alignment strategy with our exclusive partnership with Google Cloud while building our own brand and sourcing our own business. While highly unconventional, there are many, many good reasons for this. Not all are well understood, and we like it that way. 

4. Over the Long Term, People Are Everything

Culturally, we always loved people. We would do anything for our people. That comes from the Safoian family roots (my mom provided catered, homemade lunches to our folks back in 2002, 2003, 2004 way before Silicon Valley did). 

We see our people as an extension of our family, more than anything. This business is ONLY successful because of our people. When we talk about our strategy these days, we focus on mastering these three things, in THIS order:

1. People Experience
2. Customer Experience
3. Partner Experience

Without the first, you can’t master the second. Without the second, your partners don’t see the value in what you do.

In the last few years—and even more so in the midst of this pandemic and beyond—as CEO, I obsess over making our people experience at SADA absolute best in class. At every touchpoint in the entire employee lifecycle, from the first recruiter call to the offer (or rejection) to the 1st week, the 1st month, 1st quarter, 1st year and 10 years down the line up to the very last day, I want everyone to think, “My time at SADA was the most valuable in my life both professionally and personally.” This is the end goal.

We spend an immeasurable amount of time and effort on these endeavors. Our People Operations team launches and maintains several related and integrated programs to deliver the *growth mindset* we know the market expects. Over the course of your time at SADA (regardless of tenure or years of professional experience, soft skills and hard skills), we want you to experience Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs, some optional, some required. 

Our benefits keep getting better as we emphasize work-life harmony. This is a huge undertaking at a company of SADA’s size, growing so quickly, but we care, and we make it a priority. 

If our team members decide to move on from SADA, we want it to be for one reason only: they’ve done everything they could achieve here, both professionally and personally. That’s it. When our team members end up at places like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Deloitte, Okta or wherever, we are PROUD of that. As such, we’ve recently launched a formal alumni network. The SADA alumni are our legacy! 

I don’t believe leaders have pre-set limits on what they can accomplish and how much they can grow. Many companies approach this with the mindset of, “Well, this leader never had a sales team this big, or a team this big, or this much responsibility, so let’s go out and find someone from the ‘outside’ that has a background in this.” I have always thought this to be the wrong approach to building talent. Everyone can be coached; everyone can grow and become 1% better each day. I am living proof of this; I have never run a company of SADA’s size. Instead of dwelling on this, my mindset is to identify what I need to do to make sure I stay prepared and qualified for what SADA will be ten years from now.  

It’s important to create a healthy mix of existing leaders with years of experience under their belts, new executives in roles that didn’t exist before and people early and mid-way through their careers. Elevating people from within as much as possible and bringing in new and diverse teams to spur continued evolution and creativity is key. Then, just rinse and repeat (all the time).

The newest part of this strategy is the launch of SADA University (yes, we will get a cooler name). Think of SADA U as a paid, three-to four-month onboarding program for junior talent who get to cross train with existing SADAians into other roles within the organization. It’s the REAL DEAL. We have a dean with an actual curriculum, a program, tests and expectations. The first cohort is in session right now (all data engineers, and all women with the exception of one dude). I can’t wait to scale it as we prove the model!   

Moving onto my executive partners, the EMT. They are everything to me and the engine of all our business operations. They are the right mix of people who grew from within, people from the outside, and from all walks of life. We are in the trenches every day, taking our experiences from other places and applying them to a market that has no pre-set rule book. Investing, challenging, creating and executing; we are “ride or die” for each other, and it’s truly magical.

My parents (the founders, my family and my rocks), are fully engaged. They come through and show up for all of us, exactly how we need them to. We’ve recently added outside, independent board members to the mix to hold me and EMT accountable, while giving us exceptional strategic guidance, and insight. Holding an otherwise self-funded, private company accountable in this way is an exceptional show of responsibility for the future of SADA.

People will eternally be the most important part of how we differentiate ourselves. If we don’t do this better than others, we can’t be the best in the ecosystem. Period. 

5. You Can Become the Best in the World at Something You’ve Never Done Before 

Can you guess how many times we were told we wouldn’t be able to do “X”? Can you guess how many times we were told that the only way to get into practice “X” is to acquire a company that already does “X”? Obviously, this feedback was complete bullshit.

This happens often when you’re known in the industry to be the best at a particular thing. People take on the absurd belief that you can’t do something else equally well. It’s a bias we’ve battled for 15+ years. Although, these days, we don’t hear it as much… 

This does not diminish the importance of entering into well-aligned markets and choosing the right practices to build capabilities in. For us, the litmus test is very simple: Is this an offering our partner is building a solution for? Is this cloud? Do our customers need it? 

Then, we deploy what we call the “Micro Investment Strategy.” I have given talks on it. It’s a “build it or buy it” debate that always happens. Not all of them work, but many of them do. Here is a list of things we would have never built capabilities in if we listened to conventional wisdom:

Microsoft Business Unit

• Lync / Skype for Business / Teams. Reason Given: You don’t know Voice. Result: At one point, SADA was deploying 10% of all of the Teams activations in North America. 
• Dynamics CRM Online. Reason Given: You are not an existing on-premises Dynamics partner. Result: We built a small team and sold some major deals. 
• Azure. Reason Given: You only know email. Result: It became the majority of our pipeline and highest revenue growth at the time we sold the company.

Google Business Unit

• Enterprise Deployments of G Suite in the Commercial Space. Reason Given: You’re too small; the only big deals you’ve done are in education and the public sector. Result: The Colgate moment changed everything, not just for SADA, but for G Suite’s credibility in the general Enterprise game.

That’s me jumping up and doing an air fist pump the moment Mike Crowe name-dropped SADA on the biggest stage there is for our ecosystem. I fully understood what that moment meant. 

• Multi-Regional Significance and Relevance. Reason Given: You’re an LA-based company. Result: See above, and it’s only accelerated since (see just ONE of our many recent NYC wins). We are doing great work in multiple regions.
• Google Maps. Reason Given: Maps is a direct business. You can only partner if you’re a GIS consulting company. Result: SADA has the largest Maps business in the world, 3 times that of the second largest player in the space. Our first Global Level accolade was the 2014 Global Partner of the year for Google Maps. 

This would not have been possible without Paul Asoyan, Rosemary Cremesti,  Manik Dhar, Jay Remley, Francisco Irao, and Justin Knight.

• Google Cloud Platform. Reason Given: GCP is not for resellers/MSPs. It’s difficult. It’s big. It’s complex. You’re a G Suite and Maps partner; you’ll never get it. Result: The largest seller of Google Cloud technologies in the world, two years in a row. Also, GCP is now our largest business by far. 

Thank you Thomas Kurian, Rob Enslin, Kirsten Kliphouse, Janet Kennedy, Thomas Gourand (who believed in us in GCP before anyone), Carolee Gearhart, Aimee Catalano, Nina Harding, Katy Da Silva, Kyle Campbell, Kishen Gopinath, Brent Mitchell, John Jester, Jason Martin, Patrick Schablitzki, Atul Nanda, Nirav Sheth, Rob Harper, Seth Siciliano, and Eric Rosenkrantz, Mark Flessel, UrsH?lzle, Javier Soltero, Lauren Miskelly, John Veltri, Oliver Parker, Michael Clark, Jim Lambe and Alano Medonte (breaking into Canada is not easy), Jim Anderson and the best Partner Development Manager of all time - Ahmed Shama, for an amazing partnership. If I truly had to capture everyone, it would be hundreds of names - apologies to those whom I missed. This is just those who we’ve been very deep with the last two years specifically. 

We know we’re not easy. We’re trying to colonize Mars (in equal terms of ambition in our space). You inspire us every day. You make us want to be better every day. 

Nobody in the Google Cloud ecosystem looks like SADA. Nobody has eight or nine-figure businesses in Maps, G Suite, AND GCP. And, nobody can both sell those technologies AND deliver them with best-in-class, enterprise-grade, professional services, and managed services capabilities. Talk about a niche...

I hope my point is coming through clearly. Don’t let anyone tell you what you can or can’t accomplish. Experiment safely; there are dozens of things we tried that didn’t end up serving us in the long and short term. None of these experiments broke the company. If we had not experimented with strategies we believed in (for both our customers and adjacent market needs), we would not have continued to grow 65% CAGR. This year, we plan to grow by 100%.

6. Growing a Company in a Market That’s Growing Is Easy; Win a Bunch of New Customers Every Year, and Never Lose Your Existing Ones

Honestly, this is the playbook. After we win a customer, we put in 10X more effort than we did to retain them. To win a customer, you need excellent marketing, proven pipeline-sourcing abilities, great sales teams, fantastic legal expertise, pre-sales engineering, and so on.

But, to keep them, you ALSO need best-in-class teams in the following areas:

• Project Management 
• Professional Services and Engineering 
• Change Management / Adoption / Training
• Technical Account Management 
• Customer Success
• Client Partner Executives 
• Account Management 
• Enterprise Support 

In order for these teams to deliver excellence, you need excellent leadership. Those are the hard facts. There are soft elements like accessibility to executives at the top, responsiveness, and willingness to talk to any customer at any time (that includes me). Here is my Google Voice # 818-492-4410; call or text me any time. That’s how we roll. Don't let your executives get too far removed from customers. That never ends well. 

If you do a fantastic job at creating raving fan customers, it’s far easier to call upon them when they are needed to help you win a new one. Keeping customers gives you investment capacity to fund the continued expansion of people, coverage, and capabilities. It’s a wonderfully virtuous cycle. It’s been the cornerstone of how SADA works, and that will never change. 

7. Deliberate Incentive Alignment Creates Indestructible Virtuous Cycles 

I’ve never understood business models that are a zero-sum game and/or behave as one. Personally and professionally, I strongly believe when two or more things come together, it’s always possible to create new value, and that operating with a scarcity mindset is in fact destructive. I’ve always believed it’s possible to create scenarios where everyone wins. 

This is how I feel about the work we do at SADA. The nuances of how our business works, at the most fundamental level, are intentionally designed to produce multi-way wins. 

It’s virtually impossible for SADA to make any money (let alone grow) unless we drive more value to our customers than we get. And it’s impossible for us to be successful unless we make Google Cloud successful. We can’t just hire someone and not be completely dedicated to making them thrive. We can’t just sell a solution to a customer, charge them a lot for our services, and leave. 

This value must be delivered at all times for everyone we serve, including: 

• Our SADA team members
• Our Customers
• The Google Cloud organization

If any of the people, companies, or partners we serve can’t win, this model is rendered unsustainable. This is how the Cloud business works for customers. It’s the best of the Managed Services mindset (shared risk, shared reward, customers for life), but 1000x bigger and more impactful. 

The go-to-market cycle goes like this: 

Then the question is, how do you ‘kick-start’ a virtuous cycle? Part of it is just in business model design. The other part of it is in an inherent philosophy:

Give First

We don’t try to charge as much as possible to customers. We don’t try to pay our people as little as possible. We don’t try to get more from Google than we give. No! We give, we invest, we promote, we do the work FIRST.  

If you want to build a forever company and create an unbreakable virtuous cycle, aligning incentives correctly is imperative. 

8. It’s All About You, but Not in the Way You’re Thinking

There are many celebrated leaders, CEOs, and Founders who took their organizations to the top by leaning in on a cult of personality. Whether or not they were ‘good people’ is unclear. Now, if you’re Elon Musk or Steve Jobs, it’s fine. There are people who are so exceptionally gifted that they can be highly productive like this, and it works. And thank God for them. The world would be very different without them. 

They are the exception, and most of us, myself included, do not fall into this category of people.

There are many stories of leaders who believed THEY were the company and made it completely about them. Driven by an immense sense of responsibility, lots of stress, and potentially blinded by early success and admiration, they get very full of themselves. The Ego takes over. They believe they can behave with no regard to those around them, and the world will bend to their will. It can work for a while, but inevitably, it breaks. It breaks them, and oftentimes, it breaks the company.  

Indeed, company leaders feel a tremendous amount of responsibility all the time. This often leads to forgetting the criticality of staying grounded. We forget the necessity of kindness, humility, self-care, sleep, diet, exercise, family, healthy outlets for stress and so on.

Balance, living the core values of SADA, and leading by example can have positive, long-term effects on everyone, with outsized results.  

So yes, it IS all about you. If you’re off your game, everyone suffers. Be assured, after a certain period of time, or a certain level of success, YOU ARE NO LONGER DOING THIS FOR YOU. You’ve done well. You’ve built something great. But now, 1000s of organizations and 100,000s of people are depending on you, including the people who work for you.  

If you can’t sustain this brand of leadership, pass the torch (with a solid succession plan in advance), but never let success get to your head or make you complacent. It’s the death knell of any successful organization. I’ve seen it dozens of times. At the brink of break-out success, a leader will overstay their welcome, overextend themselves, break down and take the company down with them.

As long as I’m in, I’m in 100%, and I’m leading by example. I’m committed to taking exceptional care of myself so I can bring MY best to the people who depend on me. The moment I can no longer do this, I’m out. But, rest assured, I’m very, very far away from that. People ask, “Why not sell the company and just live happily ever after?” 

I can’t. I’m too happy and fulfilled being the CEO of SADA. We have too much to do, and I have too much passion for what we do. Most recently, we really took the time to define this burning desire in terms of our just cause (à la Simon Sinek). We feel duty-bound to stay in the game.

Our Just Cause Is Why We’re Still In The Game

After 20 years, and what is now a significant sphere of influence, we’re more driven than ever by our Just Cause. We feel duty bound to move the world forward, starting with our own people, who reach new heights every day, personally, competently and economically. And, guess what? 250 people today, we’ll be 300 by the end of 2020, and 500+ in a couple of years. That’s A LOT of people we get to take on this journey with us who get to do meaningful work they can be proud of. Increasing their happiness, sense of achievement, and seeing the results of their impact on our customers firsthand.

We’re in the midst of the largest paradigm shift in the history of time, and it’s not just about moving to the cloud. It’s about how and, to what degree, our customers get to transform by virtue of this journey.

This is amplified by the current pandemic and economic uncertainty. COVID-19 has created a digital compression algorithm that has rocked the business world. Digital transformation had become something people poked fun at until the pandemic. Now, the choice for every traditional enterprise customer is clear; become a digital business or die. You no longer have 5-10 years to do this— you must do this NOW.  

It’s now ultra clear what being a digital enterprise means. We have 100s of these types of customers. These organizations are experiencing something completely different than those who didn’t make these changes. 

There is magic in working in Google Cloud. Nobody chooses to buy Google Cloud technologies and then not implement. It never happens like it used to with enterprise software. And no customers who deploy Google Cloud technologies (nor the people who make these decisions) stay the same. They are forever transformed, and always for the better. 

There is unlimited demand for this kind of work for the foreseeable future, 10 years+ as far as I can see. We can’t stop now.  

Now, more than ever, we are going to play an even larger, more visible role in the most profound technological narrative and society at large. In alignment with our core values, we committed to the call for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, focused acutely on improving inequities in the Black community and women’s rights. I am the father of two girls, and I have been largely influenced by strong, successful women (my mom, my aunts, my grandmother, my cousins). You’ll see systemic changes in how we show up for these issues. Our impact will be felt for years to come. This is not a short-term trend. 

Being Black in America shouldn’t come with a price tag of oppression and inequality. It’s completely unacceptable, and we can make a difference. In addition to external recruitment efforts, like our recent alliance with the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE), we will commit to internally developing and mentoring a diverse and inclusive talent pipeline for SADA and others. That’s the idea behind the launches of PartnerCareers.com and SADA University. These initiatives are bringing authentic change for the future footprint of inclusion to our industry. 

We realize the game we’re in is an infinite game. It’s very early. We have to stay in the game. The work we do means too much for us to stop, or sell the company, or slow our growth. The market needs us. Our thousands of existing customers need us. Some of the brightest and best minds have a home here now, and into the future, where they will be given the opportunity to have an outsized impact on customers and the people that work there.

So cheers to the next 20 years. We’re building a forever company in an infinite game. We’ve done a vast amount of impactful work so far, and we have lots more to do. 

In gratitude,