As many of our subscribers may know, Megabuyte started life in 2007 as a free blog born in my home office.
Fast forward a couple of years to 2009/2010 and the business was starting to look like …well, a business. First, my esteemed colleague Philip Carse took a leap of faith and came on board, enabling us to expand our coverage into the telecoms sector. At the same time, we decided to focus on properly covering private companies. The strategy bore fruit and with a growing subscriber base and the requirement for more pairs of hands, the decision was made to move the business in our first proper office - a four desk serviced office in the centre of Reading.
Looking back, those few months of change acted as a catalyst for a period of rapid growth and development which has, over the last three years, enabled us to treble our coverage, our client base and our revenues, as well as completely re-engineer our web platform.
Now, with a new influx of analysts due in September, our research team will number eight people and it is time for another step change in the business.
Which brings me to the point of this post. Next week, we will be moving out of our serviced office into our first ‘proper’ office in a building called The Blade (it’s as close as Reading gets to an iconic building). The new office gives us room to pretty much double our headcount again over the next 3 years which will be a crucial enabler of our growth going forward.
There is much talk these days about how knowledge businesses can work remotely and offices are an unnecessary overhead, but I see things differently. Dare I say it, but I am in the Steve Jobs’ school of thinking; an office is a place where ideas are exchanged, not so much in meeting rooms but over coffee in the kitchen or by the proverbial water cooler (you can imagine how much planning has gone into the office kitchen!). As awesome as Skype is, it can never replace this spontaneous interaction.
There is also a school of thought which says that office costs should be as low as possible. I also disagree with this. I ask a great deal of the people who work at Megabuyte: the analysts get in at 7am (or earlier) and are often here 12 hours later. In return, the least the business can do is to provide a great space for them to work. The additional cost of a premium office environment pales into insignificance compared to cost an under-motivated team. After all, when in life is the best thing also the cheapest thing?
To me, this change feels very much like that big (and scary) step in 2010 when we moved the business out of my house. We knew where we wanted to be and had to take a leap of faith to get there. Over the last three years, that leap has been rewarded and we have now reached a level approaching critical mass in the UK market. Over the next three years, our aim is to build the same depth of coverage of continental European businesses in our existing sectors. And this, in turn, will be a pre-cursor to full international coverage over the medium term.
My ultimate vision for the company is for subscribers to use our research platform and events to identify, understand and engage with any technology company that is of interest to them on a global basis. We feel that we have already achieved this to a large degree for the UK market and our mission now is to replicate the model internationally. And our smart new office is just one piece of the jigsaw to help us on the way. Happy days.
PS: If you’re ever in Reading, why not swing by and say hello?