Last night the FM crew went bowling for our 5 year anniversary. We’re running a skeleton crew with many folks “working” from home today.
Last year, for our 4 year anniversary, I wrote a “lessons learned” post. This year I want to address some questions we get: Where are you headed? What’s the next 5 years look like? What’s the plan?
I was asked this recently at a UX networking event and my response, “Hopefully more of the same”, seemed obvious to me, but surprised the asker. Sometimes there is a presumption in the technology world that things need to be bigger to be better and that having 40 employees is somehow 4 times better than 10. We don’t buy into that hype.
We’ve built a company based on bringing nice, smart, talented people together to work on interesting projects for great clients. Why would we change that? Sure we will grow a little, perhaps in the next few years we might go from 12 to 20 designers. But we don’t have some global domination plan, we’re not opening an office across the country, we’re not looking for a big consulting company to buy us, and we’ll never try to become a “full-service agency”.
We’re Chicago-based, we’re boutique, we’re niche, we’re focused solely on UX, we like working together, and we like our clients.
So we’re staying right here. And there is nothing wrong with that.