To the clients, partners, vendors, board members, business coach, and employees at C3,
Taylor Vossler, Abigail Lebioda, Ryan Dengate, and myself have the honor of presenting you with our year-in-review. As more people become curious about our success and want to know how their effort has helped propel us, we’d like to share our results and talk about the direction we’re going in.
Later on in this letter, we’ll talk about numbers and widgets. But more importantly, we’ll talk about our people first. In 2022, the year of the Great Resignation, we’re happy to report that we had no employees exiting the business. In several months this year, the quit rate among Americans exceeded 4% as the supply of worker demand vastly outstripped the supply. That is a historically unprecedented number. At this rate, every company would experience, on average, 100% turnover every 2 years. Deeply rooted in our values at C3 is the desire to retain top talent. We’ve all worked in organizations where management simply replaces outgoing team members with a shrug and a call to HR. Of all the failures I regularly witness in corporate America, the lack of intentionality in retaining top employees is the most appalling. These are the employees that raise the game of the people around them, who sell the lion’s share of revenue, who continue to up their game, and who capably lead others. We have these people, and we will do everything in our power to retain, empower, train, and challenge them. When we get inquiring calls about whether we’re for sale, we think of them and politely say, “No thank you.”
From ’20 to ’21, we grew from 16 employees to 22. In ’22, we grew from 22 to 32. That growth of 10 people consisted of
- 4 technology consultants – 1 in Indy, Detroit, Chicago, and Richmond, VA
- 3 marketers including our Dir of Marketing, Abi Lebioda
- 3 more folks in a range of operations and engineering roles
Our revenue growth this year was very good. That growth came in a few forms. Four clients accounted for 50% of that growth. Those four opportunities represent our largest project ever, our largest IaaS project ever, our largest UC deal ever, and our top 2 largest security deals ever. These products set along with SASE/SD-WAN saw significant growth in ’22.
Another initiative accomplished in ’22 was the creation of an advisory council. Our advisory council was created for a few reasons:
- Guidance from IT leaders on what products and services are gaining momentum
- What economic and market conditions are like in their verticals
- The additional value we should provide but are not providing today
- Deeper relationships with key leaders
- Influence in the communities our council members operate in
Our successful ’22 sets us up well for ’23. There will be more focus on developing the talent and growing the productivity of our existing C3ers. We’ll do this with better planning, processes, and a commitment to a fully implemented sales and marketing tool. In ’22, headcount grew by 10, but we see ’23 coming closer to 5. As always, we will be incredibly picky about whom we decide to bring aboard. We focus only on individuals that fit our culture and are committed to staying with C3 for the long term (but not necessarily in the same position).
We are a one-brick-at-a-time company that shuns big bets. It means that there won’t be any years of 100% or 200% growth. We’ll take our predictable 20 % to 45% growth per year. Even the higher end of this growth number can present significant challenges that we’re reticent to take on.
We sincerely appreciate all of you, our C3 stakeholders. We can’t do this without you believing in who we are and what we do. Thank you.
