By Janus Boye
After 12 months, any entrepreneur should know whether the firm can make it or not. What about after 16 years then?
I started flying solo back in August 2003 and what a journey it has been building a global company and managing a growing international community that matters and makes a difference for members. Just last year at this time, we announced the rebrand and change into Boye & Co with the intention to refocus more on you as a member and a return to our core values of openness, sharing and empathy.
What’s lies around the corner? A big new office with a fountain, an investment round, key new hires, hypergrowth and a new website? Not really.
Busy being born
Before I look into what’s ahead, I want to use the famous Bob Dylan quote, to look briefly back on the last 12 months.
Playing the service design board game at Web Summer Camp 2018
The new Boye & Co identity was really unveiled at the Web Summer Camp in Rovinj, Croatia in August 2018, where our partners at Netgen hosted their annual conference.
While we were busy playing the customer journey and service design board game (as shown on the photo), I did the usual enjoyable task of leading the group, but at the same time, I felt a curiosity and genuine interest from our members in the recent change.
The promise in August last year to make it more about our members and less about ourselves was an important decision to me. Our aim of bringing our members the best networking and learning experience remained unchanged, but it was certainly much more than a rebranding.
The last 12 months has had its fair share of ups and downs. There’s been pain and struggle, so that I've easily been able to relate to Max Bailey (now forever known as the pain guy), but we’ve also welcomed so many new members and grown the community which overshadows the hard work. We’ve welcomed new world-class group leaders, launched new peer groups and introduced regular conference calls.
A personal milestone was also bringing the conference back to the US with the Boye 19 Brooklyn conference in May, where Rachel Lewis from Brooklyn Museum was one of my unexpected personal highlights.
Perhaps most importantly, we’ve tried to do more and do better in terms of building genuine relationships with our members and between our members.
A look towards 2020
As we work remotely, there’s no need for a big new office with a fountain. What does keep us busy is:
New topics including Automation & Robotics, Content Operations & Corporate Innovation to name just three. If you think we’re only a bunch of CMS experts or die hard intranet managers, I’m happy to share, that we’ve come a long way in the past decade and in particular in the past year.
New local groups around Europe and the US, so that you can travel if you like, but also find local experience and connect with peers around the corner.
Inside the Women’s Museum in Aarhus in talks with the museum director to plan out the conference venue for Boye Aarhus 19 in November (photo: Ib Sørensen)
A renewed look at the conference experience: November marks the 15th anniversary conference in Aarhus (every year since 2005), so building on the Brooklyn momentum, we are working to take the conference programming, venue and speaker line-up to the next level. As you might have already seen, it’s goodbye to the traditional hotel venues as we’ll be at the Women’s Museum for the Boye Aarhus 19 conference.
In the bigger picture, we are keen to do our part to build a company and a community that are a force for good in society. To me personally, I’m fine to work hard and travel from time to time, but it’s the scalability of our impact that matters. It’s experiencing how our members and experts alike connect across industries and connect across regions to truly develop better solutions, to further advance their careers and ultimately serve society. That’s why it’s important to keep writing and sharing, to keep our focus on learning from mistakes, to be friendly and down-to-earth and to sometimes even slow down to go faster.
Thanks for being a part of it!