One year ago, we founded The Independables (official date: 26th of January as registration date at the Chamber of Commerce). What started with an idea, several meetings, brainstorm sessions, dinners, coffees, and beers later is now an official company. And we survived the first year, despite the fact we started in the midst of the pandemic.

And what a year it was. We have set up our company and performed various activities: defining our business value proposition, our target customers, our services, and partners. A business plan is drafted to state our ambition, our growth model, our projected revenue and margins, and we made agreements on meeting cadences, website, logo and much, much more.

Did everything go as planned? No, not at all. For example, revenue projection, we picked up assignments rapidly and made good progress during our first year, better than expected. On the other hand, finding employees is much more challenging than expected. Furthermore, our website needed revisions due to our updated business value proposition. Based on feedback, we adjusted and fine-tuned where needed, evolving into the company as it is today.

Is that a bad thing? Not at all, the world around us changes, our view of what we could deliver for our customers required some fine-tuning, market conditions changed. We adapted and learned. Especially, that learning part is what makes our job so interesting. Everyone wants to look into the future and predict what is going to happen. But the world around us has become unpredictable, so a flexible mindset and adjusting along the way is key to survive and build your business. We adjusted our proposition to better fit market demand, we created partnerships that add value to both parties.

Setting up a company in times like these is almost similar to leading a project. You create a plan upfront, but 100% guarantee the project will not unfold itself exactly as planned. You need to adjust, replan, discuss, common known day to day project management activities. The same goes for setting up a business.

Celebrating one year of The Independables allows for some reflection. It was a great year and the base we set up for our company is solid. Now is the time to expand and grow. That will come with all kinds of challenges, but no guts, no glory. So if you are triggered by our story, our services we provide, our challenging assignments and want to help build the future, do not hesitate. Reach out to us for a coffee and have a chat. We’re searching for expertise but also the willingness to help build our organisation, to grow and learn. Ambition required!

What is next? After one year of building our organisation, we will continue. Our ambition to grow still stands, and we will continue to deliver high-quality and impactful results for our customers. Persistence and day to day improvements will compound to an organisation that will be different compared to today. How that will look like, we don’t know, but we have a vision. In a year, we can tell more, so stay tuned to hear from us what we have achieved in a year from now.