Blog

As the year comes to a close, it is a time to reflect on what has been gained and what needs to be done, or better said, given back.

I am the type of person that focuses on tangible things, and I tend to pay little attention to the intangible things. Yet the older I get, the more I realize that what is intangible matters more to people than the tangible things—but my mind and heart are torn. A business needs to accomplish specific tangible results (profits and progress) while people (customers and employees) need to feel the intangible results (appreciation and service). Ideally the two can be accomplished together.

Ideals are what most of us strive for—but rarely accomplish all the time. It would be nice to be able to reach all of our goals, but some have to be sacrificed for others. In reality, both life and business are all about the sacrifice of one thing for the gain of something else. I look at the season of Christmas the same way. The act of gift giving is an expression of sacrifice. We spend time and money (sacrifice) as an expression of appreciation (thanks and gratitude) for someone else. The entire story of Christmas is based on a sacrificial gift, and the spirit of the season is one of gratitude. Such things are intangible, but they create tangible results in the hearts and minds of millions of people—both young and old. But it really isn’t a sacrifice because it brings huge intangible rewards.

2015 has been a year of sacrifice and rewards for DevDigital. One of our objectives this year was to improve our infrastructure to support growth. We accomplished that with the build out of our own project management platform called DevTracker, and soon to be an enterprise application product for businesses to use. We also made a major upgrade to our servers and moved them to two different locations for security and scalability.

Additionally, we implemented quality control methodologies to our software development processes, and instituted a formal marketing initiative to better communicate with our customers and the general marketplace we serve. We have also added staff, instituted training, and added several major enterprise projects of national scale. It has been a very busy year, to say the least.

So as I prepared to write this year-end story I began to think about how many of the sacrifices we made will create gains in the coming year. Ok, forgive me, but everything in my world has a business slant to it—so my frame of reference is oriented to that perspective. But really it has significant application, so allow me to elaborate.

• Any business that doesn’t improve can’t serve its customer and thus loses value
• Any business that doesn’t appreciate its employees and provide them with better tools loses its ability to serve
• To build a business takes sacrifice and one must appreciate that to understand it. Sacrifice comes in the form of time, money and effort for a purpose.
• The greatest gift a business could ever get is a recommendation from a satisfied customer or praise from a happy employee
• The best appreciation an employer can get is a thank you from an employee
• The greatest reward an employee can get from an employer is recognition, respect and pride of workmanship
• The best gift a business can give a customer is outstanding service and higher value
• The best gift an employer can give an employee is an outstanding place to work with a rewarding culture
• The best gift an employee can give to an employer is outstanding service to the customer
• And the best gift an employer can give his/her family is time
  
  

It is the season to give and receive. Thanks to our employees, our customers, our partners and our families for all the gifts of support throughout the year, and I hope we were able to give back the same and more. In 2016 we promise to aim higher and hope you do as well.