We Are Mobile First
At the start of a new year, we all like to set ourselves shiny goals and make grand plans for the year ahead in order to make it the best one yet. The very same situation occurs within businesses. In today’s post, I’ll be explaining how we prepared our business for the new year and I’ll also be revealing some exclusive news too!
In order to prepare effectively and efficiently, we started our 2019 planning way back in October 2018. Here’s what we focused on…
If you’re familiar with our company policies, you’ll know that we distribute 10% of the company profits among our employees.
December’s payroll, including the 10%, gets sorted by 15th December at the latest so that everybody has the money to make the most of the festive period.
We like to evaluate our performance across the year by conducting feedback sessions with both our external customers and our employees. The objective is to find out what our strengths are, what positive steps we’ve taken, what we should thus continue doing and, on the other hand, where we might need to improve.
This analysis allows us to draw up a detailed plan for the following year. For example, on an internal level, we have decided to put more effort into team building. We’re also planning to organise more meetups in order to establish ourselves within the local developer community.
We also needed to consider our projects for the year ahead. What existing projects would be continuing? How might we increase the volume of work – by either starting new projects or by increasing the size of ongoing ones?
This is obviously very important to consider as it helps us to make a more accurate financial plan and also informs us of any hiring we may need to do in order to make the projects a reality.
Once we’d assessed which projects would continue throughout the new year, and considered the possibility of new ones, we were then able to work on our financial planning.
It’s extremely important to know the incomes and expenses of your company in order to maintain a healthy cash flow. Having a clear idea of where you’re headed as a business can also help you plan for the future, from hiring new members of staff to consequently having to search for bigger office space.
Our extensive business planning allowed us to conclude that the size of our projects was increasing and we’d thus need to hire more staff members and acquire a larger office space to accommodate this growth.
That leads me to our exclusive announcement! We’ve moved into a new office space!
There are so many things to consider when looking for new office space, beyond whether or not you can afford the rent prices. Here are some of the things that we considered when looking for the right fit:
We wanted to stay close to the thriving developer community in Barcelona.
We needed to consider our existing work and staff levels, sure, but we also needed to make some projections into the more distant future.
In addition to a comfortable space for our employees, we needed to think about client visits too. We needed a larger meeting room as well as additional workstations.
Confidentiality is key so we needed to ensure that we had a private space to work on projects in a confidential manner.
We don’t just work on apps and software development here at We Are Mobile First.
We also develop hardware, as seen in our work on Ed Sheeran’s loop pedal, and we also have plans to work on other types of projects in the future – such as VR.
Based on our team’s feedback, we plan to hold more team building events and meetups throughout 2019 so we needed additional space to plan and host these events.
We wanted our team to feel at home so we needed somewhere that had areas that were more skewed towards entertainment, relaxation, personal development and fun.
After considering all of these requirements and analyzing the many options, we finally decided on the location of our new offices. We have, thus, moved to Aticco MED – a co-working space that meets all our requirements!
We’re now part of the thriving co-working community here in the city, as well as still being close to the developer community too, and we’re also now in front of the beach! The office is spacious and, as it’s a co-working space, we have the flexibility to increase or decrease the size of our workspace with ease. Clients are also able to visit and use all of the public co-working spaces too and we also have private offices for more confidential meetings. We also have our own laboratory to work on our crazy ideas!
Our planned team activities for this year can take place in our meeting rooms, or any of the common spaces or auditoriums, so we have plenty of scope for organising bigger meetups in the future – especially after the success of our first Hackathon. Between the beach views and the extensive amenities and services, we’re set for a pretty fun and productive year!
In order to avoid wasting time during our move, we decided to hire a professional organiser and it was one of the best decisions we’ve made to date! Professional organisers help people and businesses design organising systems and processes to optimize space and time, increasing both personal productivity and efficiency. Our professional organiser, Maucha, selected and categorised everything, packed carefully, handled the transport and unpacked and organised everything at the end. We finished work on Friday, as usual, and by Monday morning we were all moved into the new space and ready to start a new week!
It took the pressure off and meant that we could focus our energy on other projects, like how to make 2019 our best year yet!
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That’s a brief outline of how we prepared our business for a new year. We can’t wait to put all of our planning into practice! What planning did you undertake for 2019? What are some of your goals for the year ahead? Tweet us at @WeAreMobile1st and we’ll be sure to retweet your responses.
We Are Mobile First is a digital product agency based in Barcelona. Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Medium to be notified of our future posts and to stay up-to-date with our company updates. We share weekly posts on everything from 10 reasons why we love Barcelona to 6 things to consider when picking an app developer.
(Image credit: Attico MED)