Our journey so far
Long time no post. A lot of things have happened since I jumped on the helm as the first full-time Maverick! It’s about time I shared an overview of what has happened over the first 7 months of this new company.
When the recruiting campaigns were launched by Talented, there was quite a bit of initial fuzz thanks to the bold marketing. There were a lot of applications waiting for me when I joined Talented, tasked with making this new thing happen. It took me a couple of months to figure out how to do this effectively, trying to make supply (potential recruits) and demand (consulting gig pipeline) meet as often as possible. Unfortunately a lot of great talents slipped my grasp while figuring out how this could work best. Late 2018 was getting difficult for me with 0 people recruited still and always having to explain why that is. Then, late December, good things started happening.
How our recruiting works is that when I find an interesting, motivated candidate, we make sure he/she has an excellent consultant CV. Consultant CV is somewhat different from the one you’d be using when looking for a new job. I have a great template that is easy enough to fill and anonymous – I feel safer using anonymous CVs for people who technically work for someone else still. Once the CV is done, we set the parameters together (location, context, techs, price) and start fishing. When we find an interesting project and the customer buys into the CV, actual contact info is exchanged with the permission of the candidate. A meeting takes place between the customer and the candidate. If everyone is happy, only then we sign contracts. This way everyone knows what to expect and all risks are minimized.
Simo was the first to join, quickly followed by others. Three really experienced developers started as Mavericks consultants in February. Simo is developing a streaming app for a big media company. Marno is doing embedded Java and Aleksei is building a cool game streaming service. In April, Samuel joined our ranks to work on one of Finland’s first Flutter projects. Soile started in the beginning of May, orchestrating an internationalization project for a major software consultancy. Currently we are a team of 6 people and I’m hoping we’ll double our headcount by the end of the year.
Besides successful recruitment and sales, other interesting stuff has happened as well:
- We reached our first milestone of being profitable independently.
- Mavericks Software Oy was founded in early 2019.
- Our new, proper website was just launched.
- We are now in the process of transferring all business from Talented Solutions Oy to Mavericks Software Oy, the final step of becoming a real, independent company.
What will happen next? Well, we’ll keep on sharing the office with Talented. We’ll work closely with them in search for great projects. There will be ownership program for the early bird Mavericks – not too late yet to join it. We’ll be good going like this until we’re 20 or so – then we get to decide how to proceed further!
I feel good being a Maverick. It’s great to build something that feels fresh and different. It’s great to see there are lots of people that really buy into our way of building a consultancy. Above all I love challenging the status quo of software consulting 🙂