The Washing Machine of success?

We're just into our fourth year of trading, so we're in the 48.9% of businesses that survive for this length of time in the UK.

We started the business in our loft office at home in 2011/12 and we've just moved into our swanky new 16 person office in Wigan in the North West of England where we're currently employ 11 staff.

The last 3 years has been a bit like a washing machine cycle..... probably.

We began thinking that we'd be Salesforce consultants and that there would be tons of work, such was growth that we'd seen in that business. There has been much work but not where we first thought, but very closely allied.

We had our ideas or 'clothes' if you like, we shoved them in and we kicked off the cycle. Our interactions or lack of interactions with partners soon rinsed our ideas and made us see more cleanly that the problem in the Salesforce ecosystem is dirty data (perhaps as it ever was).

Fortunately myself and Miranda, the founders of the business are pretty old.... when we met we found that what we had in common other than a love of online Scrabble, was that we'd both started our careers working on DEC PDP 11s.

We found that a skill-set developed twenty mumble mumble years ago is just as relevant today as it was then i.e., SQL, Oracle, Pivot Tables etc etc.

For the last 3 years, we've been in the wash cycle. Across 50 projects or so, we've been cleaning, integrating and mastering customers data to give them a 360 degree customer view, with organisations with as little at 75 Salesforce licences to enterprises with 13,000 licences and 29 ERP systems.

We've completed projects in the US, Canada, Brazil, The Netherlands, Ireland and of course the UK.

By sticking to task, working hard and making sure customers are successful we've more than survived. It's dawning on us now though although we think we've worked hard that we're just about to enter the 'spin cycle' and we might need a bigger office......

Martyn Leman