That’s me—back when I still had hair, when I knew how to get bored, and waaay before coronavirus—on a roller coaster. That seems to be a fitting way to describe the year 2020.
Sure, no year has been exactly boring here at Optiweb, but none of them can compare with this one! It’s difficult to summarize the entire year in a few bullet points, but I’ll try to extract the most notable events:
- Cyber attacks
- The biggest personnel changes so far
- A huge step forward in financial analysis
Cyber attacks
After the first quarantine, our world collapsed in a couple of weeks. First, there was an intrusion into one of our largest online stores, and then an intrusion into our Facebook business account. The first involved credit card fraud, and the second involved intruders burning through a few millions—you read that right, millions—of our clients’ advertising money.
Both events shook us to the core. Despite our security policy being at the level of most Slovenian companies up to that point, it was clearly not enough, so we had to take it a step further.
First, of course, we took care of our clients. We arranged the reimbursement of all monetary losses incurred due to the Facebook intrusion, and helped external institutions tackling the credit card fraud in order to mitigate the error and prevent similar scenarios in the future.
What followed was a detailed investigation of our own processes. In collaboration with external partners, we devised and implemented advanced preventive measures, with which we strengthened our security to an extremely high level—of this I’m certain. We’ll get to the “how” of it in a separate article, because we wouldn’t want such a thing to happen to anyone! This year, we also started optimizing older projects upon switching to a different platform (Magento 1) and changed the security rules for all of our websites—we’re especially dedicated to educating others in this topic.
The biggest personnel changes so far
I always stress how important our personnel are to us. Because they are.
Like every year before it, 2020 marked an increase in financial compensation, this time by approximately 10 %. On average, each employee received a 10% higher annual income due to an increase in salaries, bonuses, holiday allowances, etc.
However, it’s the nature of our business that personnel come and go. There’ve been quite a few such changes at Optiweb this year.
Some didn’t feel like they belonged anymore due to different views, some we didn’t really get on with anymore, and some simply chose to go down a different path. There’s nothing wrong with any of that—if anything, I’m sure it’s benefited both sides. At the same time, I’m grateful to everyone who was part of Optiweb’s story—no matter why they left. Each of them added their own piece to our puzzle, to which I can only say: thank you sincerely!
However, each departure means an opportunity for someone else to arrive and breathe some fresh air into the company. This year, for example, our teams grew by the largest number of senior personnel to date. I can easily say that this marked an outstanding shift in the field of human resources. The energy of experienced people who think strategically and know how to approach complex problems has been a complete game-changer. Allow me to highlight four key team members in particular:
They all have a lot of valuable experience, but at the same time they’re people in the truest sense.
Another novelty was our geographical diversity. We’re currently scattered across Slovenia, with two colleagues coming from abroad as well: Ljubomir from Serbia and Anida from the Czech Republic. The latter will officially join us in Slovenia in February with the help of a work visa! :)
Can you see yourself among us? We’re always in search of a new team member to spice things up! Join us now by applying to our talent pool!
A huge step forward in financial analysis
Surely, you heard the expression “data is gold” at least a 1000 times this year. But just in case, here it is again. :)
One of our main goals for 2020 was to organize our financial analyses. To finally start monitoring on a monthly or weekly basis where we’re losing money, and find all discrepancies. Only now do we see how badly we needed this.
As a result, Ana (our CFO) and Anže (head of the WP team) laid some excellent groundwork, which we now update and upgrade on a monthly basis. First, we collected the financial plans of all team managers for 2020. Then, we compared these plans with each team’s actual financial data, as seen in our monthly P&L (profit & loss) statements. Now, the only thing left to do is to monitor where improvements are needed, where we’re wasting too much time, where we need more personnel, etc. – all on a monthly basis. All this data is invaluable and the results are already improving.
At the same time, we adopted the so-called “open-book management” approach, whereby we present financial data to everyone in the company every few months. In order for this sharing to be useful, we also educate our colleagues about what different information means. As you know, € 400,000 of profit can be seen clearly in the balance sheet, but how much of it goes to you and how much to your personnel is an entirely different story …
Well, these were our top 3 guidelines this year. Nevertheless, let me take this opportunity to highlight a few other key changes and events:
Culture & HR
- As the first quarantine hit, we immediately switched to fully remote work and merely adjusted it a bit during “calmer” times (such as the summer): individual teams would work in the office for 2 days and then switch to working remotely for the rest of the week. For the first time, remote work was also joined by other remote activities, such as internships, onboarding, and team building. Even St. Nicholas arranged a Zoom meeting with our young ones right from his home office. :)
Once the pandemic is over, we intend to continue like this.
- Another product of remote work is my CEO address to my colleagues. At the end of each week, I put together a video about what’s been going on, to introduce new colleagues and projects, make announcements, give praise, etc. The address has been very well received, so I’ll make sure to keep it up!
- With our skill assessment tasks renewed and applicant pool adjusted, our selection of new employees is easier than ever. We also improved our onboarding process by updating our to-do lists, making sure newcomers are ready to take on their first challenges.
- We prepared uniform monthly reports for all our team managers.
- There’s way more planning going on, both finance- and HR-wise. This makes it easier for us to organize work; it helps us keep track of how much personnel we need as well as how much room there is for new projects.
- We finished writing Optiweb’s 2030 vision—to be presented in the first weeks of 2021.
Development
- Our PIM (product information management) service became even more important. We implemented it on nearly all of our new, substantial webshops (such as Pikapolonica, Mass, SAM, Mali Zakladi) or, in the case of Big Bang, turned it into an individual product.
- Intense work on our projects strengthened our technical competencies, especially regarding hack protection, webshop speed optimization, and optimization of back-end synchronisation with webshops.
- We improved our server and outage monitoring, put together clear steps for improvement, and started updating our deployment processes.
- We’re getting more and more familiar with event sourcing using Kafka. We’re talking about a field that covers the issue of integrating information systems from different sources that occur with all of our bigger clients.
- We were among the first in Slovenia to set up an e-commerce site using the Shopware platform. The platform has its drawbacks, of course, but we’re sure to overcome them during our next projects, thus proving right our hypothesis that Shopware can be our new platform for the e-commerce solutions segment.
- Following our goal of even faster and more user-friendly websites, we switched to a new way of developing our websites using the Gutenberg tool.
- With our help, quite a few notable websites came to life: Mass, SAM, Pikapolonica, Mali Zakladi, Inotherm, Renault, Sparkasse, and Kras.
- Google Data Studio became our number-one tool to measure the results of a new website. It gives us exact data about which channels generate sales and potential customers along with where we can improve our presence. It does wonders for us as well as our 52 clients—for whom we began preparing interactive “real-time” reports.
- Our corona project, “Domača trgOWinca”, received tons of compliments. The best thing about it, though, is that we helped many shops not only retain their employees, but make them even busier and add new colleagues to the fold as well!
Marketing
- With one of our clients, we reached our personal record of monthly online sales: 1 million € on the Slovenian and Croatian market.
- With some of our clients, we charged for our marketing services in % of their online sales. By doing so, we reached over 100.000 € of annual provisions.
- We achieved outstanding advertising and SEO results on 10 different markets: Germany, Austria, UK, Poland, The Czech Republic, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia, and Slovenia.
- At the beginning of quarantine, our clients needed to transfer their business online ASAP. To meet their needs, we set up 6 Shopify webshops and started marketing them in less than 3 weeks.
In addition, we’re proud of the following nominations, achievements, and public recognition:
- 4 Websi awards for our clients’ projects;
- 2 nominations for the DonatMg project from Digital Communication Awards (DCA);
- A nomination of our CEO, Miha Lavtar, for the “Vitez Dela” (Work Knight) award from the SBC organization;
- A nomination for “best corona project” (Domača trgOWinca).
For those of you who live by the numbers, let me summarize 2020 this way:
“So, Miha, what’s going to change in 2021?”
2021 will be the first year we’ve prepared a spectacular strategy for. Our goals are numerous and, to be honest, a bit far-fetched, but we’ve almost always managed to exceed them anyhow. What can we say, you need to spice things up with a pinch of ambition! :)
We divided our business strategy into 4 main pillars that complement each other:
- Our colleagues’ happiness and progress;
- Our clients’ happiness;
- Improvements in structure and processes;
- Profitable growth.
Same old, I know. But what matters is what’s behind these pillars! More about that some other time, though … ;)
There’s no doubt in my mind that 2021 will be a success—I’ve never been more sure of anything else. Why? Because I’m surrounded by an amazing team that will help me get there! Dear all, I very much look forward to it.
A happy, ambitious (and a little less turbulent) new year, everybody!
And to make sure we didn’t get bored during the quarantines, there was always a special “homework” to be done!
