Company Facts That Matter

CODE is completely self-funded. We have never brought in outside investment. This is an incredibly important aspect in understanding many of the goings-on and the decisions made in the company. For us, every decision matters, and every decision can be (and usually is) significant. A large project gone wrong can have dire consequences, so we do our darndest to make sure that doesn’t happen.

CODE has been around far longer than most of our competitors. This means that we have made many decisions that worked out. We have also made many bad decisions, but we have been able to make more good ones, which has kept us around much longer than others. This is a fact we are proud of, even if the going wasn’t always easy.

We are also a company that is dependent on outside influences. The overall health of the economy has a huge impact on our operations. After all, our customers can always delay an IT investment by a year or two. How well partner companies like Microsoft are doing is significant, as was more than apparent during the “dark days of Windows 8” compared to more recent times. The technologies we choose to use and support have a huge impact on our overall well-being.

We are in the fortunate position to say that we never had to leave a bill unpaid, and we never had to lay-off an employee for financial reasons. We may have parted ways with people that were not a good match, but it was never because we had to cut salaries. We did go through extended periods of times where leadership had to take serious cuts, Markus and Ellen have gone without paychecks for months at a time, and staff have realized fewer bonuses and raises when we had to tighten our belts. But even in the toughest times of .com bubbles bursting and the economy collapsing, we have been able to carry on and – as cliché as this may sound – emerge in a better position than before. It’s not all puppies and rainbows (or unicorns, as the case may be), and it never is, but we are still proud of our history.

We may have never grown fast enough to make the INC 500, although it was close at one point, but we also avoided a belly flop. It would be an understatement to say that we are proud of that.