Looking back on 2018, it’s been a year of great growth and excitement for us at Walpole Partnership, and we’re prouder than ever of the team that we have built here. We’ve welcomed a lot of new faces, with Ian Jenkins, Lee Hasnath, George Sharpe, Brij Kishore, Prakash Singh and Mahejabeen Budebhai all becoming part of the Walpole success story. We’ve also been able to help Pradeep Agrawal and his wife Richa join us in the UK by sponsoring their visas. We’re hoping to expand the team further in 2019, and we’ll bring news on that as soon as we are able.
In January, we took the time to consider our goals for 2018 and we’ve tracked our progress on these throughout the year. Let’s take a look at how weve done.
Firstly, we knew we wanted to maintain our Core focus of CPQ. It’s safe to say we have been able to do this and our reputation as niche experts for this critical part of the sales enterprise IT landscape seems to be growing all the time. We’re a great believer of sticking to your knitting and not spreading ourselves too thin. Our partnerships with other organisations like BPI OnDemand, Engagement Factory, Borlas, Mannai Corporation and CapGemini has allowed us to focus on what we do well and surround ourselves with experts in other disciplines. We are CPQ, and were pleased to be known as the go-to team for that.
We also tried to spread our influence and grow the business. The expanded team has allowed us to do this, and our special thanks go to Ingmar Hermans and Antoine Jansen for their ceaseless travels around Europe, the Middle East and beyond. We’ve also sent our delivery team to places as far flung as Qatar, Sweden, Russia and most countries in-between this year and everyone’s willingness to get on-site with our clients when needed is brilliant. We are a Global Small Business (to borrow a phrase from the wonderful Daniel Priestley who knows more about growing a business than anyone else we know). It’s been a successful year all round for us on this goal.
We stated that we wanted to solve problems for others in new and interesting ways. We’ve certainly hit this goal successfully in terms of the launch of our innovative new managed service offering and we’ve taken on our first clients who are taking advantage of this. We are able to offer clients true CPQ-as-a-Service – not just the software, with no up-front implementation costs – solving their problems as a long-term partner. One area which we hope to develop further next year is offering and delivering more in terms of vertical solution information. We’ve laid the groundwork by delivering our eBooks for CPQ in Manufacturing and Telecoms but this is just the start of our plans to deliver truly progressive content, tailored for specific industries.
Finally, we made a pledge to give back to the communities we’ve operated in and it is now a company goal to give 1% of our revenue to charities that our team are involved with. This year we’ve made donations to Kids In Sport and have also supported two charity golf days (played in by one of our employees) with proceeds going to the Lincolnshire & Nottinghamshire Air Ambulance and Birmingham Children’s Hospital. It’s really important to us to fulfil this goal and it brings us so much happiness that we’ve been able to help these great causes.
All in all its been a great year for us, for CPQ and we hope for the people we’ve worked with in any way. If that includes you, then we wish you and your families an enjoyable time over the festive period, and if not then we look forward to getting in touch in 2019 to see how we can make your lives better too.
