2021: The Year of Growth
I can say, without any doubt, that 2021 was not just another year for Vega IT! We had by far the highest growth in both size and revenues and most significant investments in our company's culture and the quality of our services.
What started as another Covid-19 year turned into a remarkable expansion of our business with a 300% growth in manpower and more than 200% growth in revenues. From around 200, we became a 600 people strong company and our revenues grew from 9 to over 21 million euros.
Was it purely our effort? Not really. The demand for our services was huge across the globe and we just used that opportunity to grow our business. Of course, a lot of investment in the quality of our organisation and its processes had to be made before we were able to do so. Most importantly, we made a big investment in people at Vega IT.
Intrapreneurship
I believe that the most important strength of Vega IT in the past years was the fact that there were three of us who owned the company and were leading it.
It was all about different perspectives and support that the three of us were giving to each other. Now imagine the power of an organisation owned and led by more than 30 partners!
Vega IT partners
Yes, more than 30 amazing and inspiring people can now call themselves the partners at Vega IT. This is what makes me happy and genuinely proud!
A Learning Organisation
A few months ago I joined a group of colleagues for a specific leadership training held by an external trainer. During the last break, she approached me and said that she had been analysing our company while she was holding training sessions at Vega IT for a few months.
She said that her strongest impression about our company is that it’s a true learning organisation. And I can’t agree more!
Saša Popović
We had different kinds of professional training sessions available for our colleagues throughout the year, a bunch of people in the role of a Development Lead to oversee their work and professional development, an army of mentors supporting those who wanted to grow faster and all different kinds of other resources available to support them in their efforts to reach their full potential. I strongly believe that only an organisation that keeps on learning continuously can be successful year after year in this fast-growing world of technology.
Tech-wise, we created a new role within the company this year called Co-CTO.
Our aim was to help our CTO manage and continuously refine the technical side of the work in our fast-growing organisation — bring the quality of our work and deliverables to even higher levels and introduce new technologies and services to our partners.
Did we only experience success throughout the year? Not really. Two larger investments into new service and product offerings (cyber-security and gaming) failed this year. We used the “if you are going to fail, fail fast” principle and did our best to learn from the mistakes we’ve made. But, at the end of the day, there were still many more successes than failures. And experiencing failures was also a success in a way, as this helped us see clearly the mistakes we’ve made and learned invaluable lessons we can rely on in our future business endeavours.
New Offices
To support the further growth of our organisation, we opened a few more beautiful offices in several locations in Novi Sad. On top of this, we also opened offices in two new cities: Niš and Podgorica.
The aim was to use the potential of those places and hire great software engineers that chose to live and work from their home cities. At the same time, we wanted to support their local communities and that's why most activities are run by local teams. Both offices are managed by our colleagues who recently became partners at Vega IT and who were very happy to get such an opportunity, without having to relocate.
Corporate Social Responsibility
This year we continued to follow our vision of making the world a better place.
It felt great when we were able to further support the local healthcare sector, give scholarships to talented young people who needed it the most, build software for non-profit organisations, contribute to the local startup ecosystem, contribute to the local educational system and much more.
During one of such campaigns, we gathered 30 companies and planted trees across five public kindergartens together.
GreenIT 2021
Another achievement worth mentioning is that we built software for eleven non-profits this year through our Code for a Cause initiative. I was proud to see how many of my colleagues voluntarily chose to take part in many of these efforts and I’m looking forward to seeing more of this enthusiasm in the coming years.
Code for a Cause 4
Final Thoughts
In 2021 we held three strategic business retreats with the aim to further improve the quality of our services and internal processes. We also made high-level plans for the upcoming five years. All of this looks very exciting and I’m sure we’ll enjoy the ride.
I believe our willingness and readiness to grow and develop will enable us to work on even more interesting projects, further improve our organisational culture and make our colleagues feel even better at work.
Finally, none of the successes we have achieved in 2021 would have been possible without many of my colleagues who did their best to support the company throughout the year and our partners/clients who unselfishly helped us achieve great results. Thank you all.
I wish you a healthy, happy and prosperous 2022!
