I’m not a great one for anniversaries but I thought I’d mark the fact that Business360 kicked off ten years ago this month.

It’s been an adventurous time. We started right as the dot-com boom peaked (the market turned in March 2000), sucking away financing options for start-ups, and soon after that 9/11 helped tip the US into recession in 2001. And here we stand today, slowly riding out of the worst recession since the Great Depression. How’s that for timing!

But while we haven’t attained Google-like growth, we’re doing fine: our client base is up, revenues are rising and with new products and services about to launch, I think things look better than ever.

Looking back over a decade you realize how some things have changed and here are a few that strike me:

• We were a crowdsourcing innovator. We didn’t think of it as crowdsourcing at the time (it was 2000 and the term didn’t exist) but it turns out one of the first services we offered relied on an early form of crowdsourcing – we opened team rooms to let people from all over the world compete to answer business questions our clients had, selecting the best material located. It’s something we still use – when you have a tough question you’re researching on the web you often get a better result, and much faster, if you have 10 people searching for it rather than just one – this is true even in these post-Google days.
• Outsourcing research/writing/analysis is now commonplace. Earlier this decade there was a lot of noise about companies outsourcing information and research services. Much of it centered on whether it was wise to outsource and the prevailing view from professional researchers in the US and UK was that it wasn’t, that it would destroy the profession and yield poor quality results. Today, these concerns have largely gone; outsourcing of these functions is now standard practice and large companies that outsource this work are way more common than those that don’t. That’s not to say that it always works – there’s a lot of work that shouldn’t be outsourced and even more that shouldn’t be offshored, but that still leaves an awful lot of work that is best completed externally.
• Outsourcing research trials have gone away. Over the years we’ve been involved in a good number of trials, usually competing against our competitors, although we sometimes didn’t know that until after the fact. The most rigorous by far was run by Goldman Sachs – it lasted longer, took in way more vendors and systematically covered a lot of territory (and I’m pleased to say that we came out top on this one). Other trials that we’ve taken part in were very poorly executed, some entailed just a small number of tasks, some imposed silly restrictions, like preventing vendors from discussing requirements with the requestor, or disqualifying certain sources etc – some of these we won, and some we didn’t. We don’t see many trials these days. Things proceed more organically – companies ring us up and we talk about what we can and can’t do, and the usual course is to gradually get to know each other on a number of projects. Things normally grow from there.
• You don’t always need financing. As a company we never secured formal financing - we had a small amount of seed capital and a family member put in a little too. Instead, we’ve bootstrapped. We watched pennies and grew as our clients started to trust us and gave us more work. And that’s largely how it is today. Most of our work is repeat business and most new clients come from personal recommendations. All of which has meant we’ve learnt to be very flexible and responsive, and that’s been a good thing – giving clients what they want, how they want it, faster, cheaper etc has pushed us forward. On the flip side, lack of capital has meant we let a lot of good ideas slip by.
• Virtual working and working from home are now well-established. When we started, the idea of building a business where all the work is completed remotely, with everyone working from home, was offbeat. More radical was the idea that we could deliver high quality services to top companies with teams of people assembled from around the world that never meet, don’t talk to each other and don’t talk to us or the client. I still find it shocking. To be sure, there is a lot of communication with clients and between a lot of people at Business360 and ClickNwork, the site we built to manage workflow, but for many things we do communication beyond email or IM isn’t needed. So, for example, we have researchers and writers that have been with us for five or more years and that work with us on a daily basis, but who we have never met or spoken to, not even over the phone. But with good online and email based training these people deliver services (research, data gathering, data entry, some document preparation…) to Fortune 100 corporations, banks and hedge funds. That still strikes me as radical. Something I want to do in the couple of years or so is go on a tour to visit a lot of these people and see how it all happens – that would be interesting.

One constant throughout the decade has been rapid change and we’ve had to evolve fast to keep relevant. On that score we’ve been investing a lot in some new ways of doing things and we’ll be pushing some of them out the door soon. In another ten years time I’ll be able to say whether they were a success or a flop. Stay tuned!