Stoneridge Software CEO Reflections on 2019
Stoneridge Software in 2019 had an amazing year of growth and focus as we continue our quest to revolutionize the business applications space. When I think back to the major events in 2019, here are the top things that come to mind:
Continued Growth
Similar to 2018, we added a tremendous amount of new talent to our team. We onboarded 80 new team members to grow our overall total to include 180 people in 24 different states. We now have 59 remote team members, including one who lives on a boat off the Atlantic coast. We have grown our business across all of our key focus areas with significant additions to our Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain team, as well as our Dynamics 365 Business Central and Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement teams. It's been great to be able to attract and work with such a strong team.
Explosion of Dynamics 365 Business Central
Dynamics 365 Business Central has had a tremendous amount of momentum in 2019 and we've been leading the way in delivering on-time, on (or under) budget implementations on Business Central. We're up to 13 clients live on Business Central today with many more in the works. We've more than doubled our Business Central team this year and the role of Vice President of Small and Medium Business to lead us through this positive change.
Agriculture Solution
We announced the start of a new company in 2018 - a product-focused company building solutions for the Agriculture enterprise called Levridge. We've put a tremendous amount of work into Levridge this year and we're excited to share that we'll be bringing our first client live on the software on Feb 1, 2020. We've completed the Ag retail and Agronomy modules and we're nearing completion of our scale application and equity/patronage module as well. An added bonus was seeing a client start using our scale software already - it's fun to see it out in the wild.
Learning and Development
A big part of our focus in 2019 has been on growing the capability of our team. I spent time at our last company meeting talking about the Growth Mindset (as outlined in author Carol Dweck's book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success) and how our team has that in spades. To make sure we're capitalizing on opportunities to grow our skills and abilities, we hired a Learning and Development Coordinator to work with our new set of managers, ensuring each team member is creating a development plan to assist everyone progressing towards their full potential. We also started a Customer Engagement and Finance and Supply Chain academy this year that brought in 11 high-potential resources to our team and allowed us to develop and curate training material to build out great consultants from people with previously limited experience.
Recognition
One of our core values is "Enjoy Our Work" and we're continually trying to make Stoneridge the best place to work in the country. We've received several regional honors in this regard, however, our team now has a more significant national presence. To that end, we applied for our first national best place to work award and we were pleased to be rated highly enough by our own employees that we were honored in making the list as an Inc. Magazine Best Places to Work.
We've also achieved top 25 status on the Top Value-Added Resellers (VARs) list with both Accounting Today and Bob Scott's Top VARs list. It's a great trajectory of how we've been able to grow from a startup in 2012 to one of the major players in the industry in just seven years.
Hustle
Overall, it's just been a very busy year. We've worked hard to figure out how to implement Business Central quickly and efficiently. We've nearly knocked ourselves out building a tremendous amount of agriculture software. And we've increased our chances to interact with clients in many ways. In 2019 we wrote 168 blogs, presented nearly 100 webinars, and started a new interactive livestream event called "Confab," which is drawing in great interest in the latest technology trends and learnings. We also held our largest ever Stoneridge Connect conference in April and we're looking forward to an even bigger event in 2020.
Thank you to everyone who's been a part of such a successful year and for the continued trust our clients place in us every day to help them empower their businesses. We are looking forward to an even better 2020.
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