Founder’s Thoughts – Vision for 2024
Fostering Sustainability, Performance and People
Reflecting on 2023
As I sit down to pen this reflection, I'm filled with immense gratitude and pride for what we've achieved at Visuable in 2023. It's been a year marked by significant growth in terms of our brand development, the depth of our team's expertise and the strength of our remote company culture.
The introduction of Team Workations was a breath of fresh air, literally. We’ve done eight mini-retreats which not only offered relaxation but also fostered team bonding and creativity in unique settings. From Bristol and London, through Athens, Italy, and Portugal, all the way to Cyprus, our team co-worked, explored, and adventured together.
As part of our Team Learning initiative, we’ve delivered numerous Design and SEO training and inspiration sessions, watched online courses, and attended industry events, festivals, and conferences. Some of the highlights were the London Design Festival, the Google Digital Skills Training in Bristol, the Reflect Festival in Cyprus, and the DigiMarCon Conference in Dubai. All those experiences enriched our team's experience, promoting a culture of continuous learning, engagement, and development.
Our Team Innovation Projects initiative allowed everyone to take ownership of various aspects of the Visuable brand, developing and creating an impact on an organizational level. Our design team developed a range of Website Frameworks that are now available to our clients, our marketing team rebuilt and elevated our SEO offering so that it offers even more value to our customers, and our internal marketing team created a Friends of Friends Referral Program to reward clients for their introductions. Lastly, our management team worked tirelessly on streamlining our delivery processes and workflows to create a smoother and better client experience. This all-round team effort has strengthened our brand from the inside out.
Our commitment to being a Force For Good resonated throughout the year, with campaigns focusing on gender equality, aid for earthquake victims, and inclusivity. These initiatives allowed the team to do their bit towards improving the world we’re living in.
At Visuable, we’re always focused on maintaining high performance within our team, and this year we’ve invested in upgrading some of the older generation laptops, and added new screens, keyboards, and trackpads to the Visuable fleet, ensuring that everyone is fully geared up to make our client’s brand brilliant, day in, day out.
It has been truly exciting to see the recognition our brand has received in 2023. We’ve received three nominations in the Great British Entrepreneur Awards and one in the Forbes Cyprus Women in Tech Award. I was also absolutely thrilled to be invited to the judging panel for the Drum Roses Awards. These awards are a true celebration of creativity, proving that the best work can come from anywhere, not just the biggest cities. Those acknowledgements have been the highlight of the year for me and are a true testament that Visuable is seen as the powerhouse of knowledge, creativity, and excellence at a global scale, and I could not be more happy to receive them.
As I draw upon lessons learned in 2023, I feel that we’ve done a lot brand-building activity in 2023, and that concentrating on fewer initiatives but with an emphasis on depth and quality, while placing sustainability at the forefront of it all, is what I want to build our company goals around for 2024.
Looking Ahead to 2024
I’ve selected Sustainability as a key focus for us in 2024 because I feel that in today’s uncertain MACRO environment, placing sustainability at the centre of everything we do is what will help us pave the way towards long term business success. For me, this isn't just about environmental stewardship; it's about sustaining our growth while focusing on our team's development and wellbeing and our commitment to product and customer service excellence. We'll explore this theme through talks, discussions, workshops, and experiences that will embed sustainable business thinking deep into our team’s DNA.
Our focus on brand excellence will remain at the essence of everything we do – we’ll continue delivering quality products and customer experiences, maintaining high performance, and winning the hearts and minds of our customers by consistently delivering brand brilliance.
People are at the heart of everything we do. In 2024, we'll continue growing our people into the future leaders that the world needs. This will be achieved by offering purposeful roles and career progression paths, while promoting team wellbeing, engagement, and development opportunities. This year, we’ll be elevating our HR Programs, including Career Progression, Employee Engagement, and Employee Experiences to further support our team's growth, foster innovation, and ensure a balanced and fulfilling work environment.
In 2024, I'm particularly excited about including myself as a participant in the HR Program, as I came to the realisation that I’ve not given myself many industry specific learning or career progression opportunities while being focused on building the company and the team up over the past few years. This certainly has been an insightful experience in it’s own right, however I really miss expanding my expertise within the bran discipline. Therefore, this year, I’ll be zooming in on myself and signing up for a new brand strategy course run by the legendary Marthy Neuimer, an author of the world-class brand education textbook series The Brand Gap, The Brand Flip, and my favourite, Zag. I plan to take all I can from this course and implement all my learnings right back into Visuable brand, while also enriching our Brand Consultancy program with even better brand-building frameworks.
In closing, I'm reminded of a quote by John D. Rockefeller:
“The secret to success is to do the common thing uncommonly well.”
As we step into 2024, I’ll carry this ethos forward while cultivating a highly sustainable, performance-oriented, and people-centric Visuable.
Lidia
More Journals
