How Big Do We Want To Grow? - Mid-Term Vision of O&B

Butch and I were once talking about "how big do we want to grow"? Given that we grew from two to over twenty in less than a year, that was an urgent question to answer. Definitely, neither of us wanted our company to be another Accenture - thousands of anonymous coders in a bureaucratic environment.

Our vision is to have a crack team of fifty or so people. We'll retain the good mix we have of not just sharp software engineers and architects but also expert business analysts and project managers. We'd like to be a consulting company in the true sense of the word "consulting" - people brought in to lend expertise to special problems, and not the code-monkey-for-hire-per-man-hour type of consulting company. We want it small because we want to take part in the experience of learning as a team - being able to assimilate the learnings we get from our projects, be it business domain knowledge, technology or process, and have it permeate throughout and be retained by the entire organization.

On the slightly longer term, we'd like most of the current people we have now to be the leaders of future subsidiaries that we'd like to set up around products or specialized services. For example, if we build an ERP-type of product, we'll eventually spin it off as a separate company and have the core developers, business analysts and marketing people to be the initial leaders of this new organization. We'll still retain the fifty-person core consulting group - we'd probably have people wear two hats as officers of a subsidiary and advisors to other consultants - because we'd still like to retain the cross-pollination of learnings from one group to another.