7 Steps to Establishing Successful Software Development Company

Building a successful software development company today is nothing less than challenging. Today, in order to attract and retain top talent in an organization, we need to hire professional business coaches or organize fun workshops to keep the employees motivated.

Here are 7 important steps:

1. Building the Core Dream Team

The team is always number one! Having the right core team sets one on the path to success! One needs a leader who inspires people and attracts the best experts to the company.

Having someone well-known in the IT community means he is dedicated to growing experts, not just inducting the first person he finds and allocating him or her to a project. Additionally, a strong project manager and software architect are essentials to a winning team.

2. Focusing on Key Technology or Business Solutions

The mantra 'anyone in the company can do anything' works only initially. This becomes a weakness as the company matures in the IT space. Also, with very different skillsets, there will be more people sitting on the bench, thus lowering profit margins. This is because one cannot get sales-people to look after all the different types of technologies/projects. So, focus on a few key technology or business solutions!

3. Establishing a Tough Interview Process

Once the core team is in place, the next step is to only allow the right people to join the company. For this, there needs to be both a tech interview and a 'cultural fit' interview. A tough interview leads to two things:

• It helps one hire the strongest experts.
• It makes for good PR. Once experienced misfits are turned down, strong candidates will be hungry to see how they will rank in the interview process.

The "Culture Fit" interview ensures that the engineers being selected will not only fit in the culture but are also good communicators and team players.

4. Building a Partnership and Business Development Network

No business is bigger than its clients and partners. This means a company needs to focus on staying close to its clients. Having great partnerships will give a company access to interesting clients and projects. If one delivers high-quality software, one will soon become the number one option for them. However, one should keep in mind that this is a tough process that requires a lot of dedication and hard work.

Companies will not repose trust in the beginning, at least until a successful project has been shipped to them.

And that is the reason why an organization should focus on starting with small projects, deliver the right results and then once in the trusted zone, a valuable and long-lasting contract is inevitable.

5. Company Culture is Important

Company culture incorporates the company’s values, why it follows them and what initiatives it creates to support them.

In short, what is needed is:

• Values of the company: Both internal and external. Internal values are the ones that help people work better and the external ones are the ones which attract/retain clients.
• Initiatives to support them: Creating events and platforms in this direction.
• Finding ways to promote the culture: For instance, writing blogs, making videos or organizing events to showcase what has been achieved.

Having a good company culture is beneficial in many ways. For example, when the management of the company gives personal attention to every team member with weekly face to face meetings, understanding when there are personal issues, etc., people find great satisfaction in their workplace and hence they recommend their friends for new positions. And by also adding bonuses for recruited friends, the company spends very little on recruitment.

6. Keeping Pace with the New Technologies

A technology company has to be constantly on the move, adapting to changes, as technology focus shifts every five years.

The moral of the story is that the company needs to rely on its tech people.

7. Keep an Eye on the Bottom Line

Being good at technology does not create instant success. And delivering great projects without making the profit is no way to move towards success. At the same time, a company needs to be able to provide the most cost-effective option. A Business Intelligence Dashboard which monitors income, expenses, and profit helps to:

• 1. Identify which projects are more profitable
• 2. Keep an eye on expenses
• 3. Stay competitive by knowing minimum daily rates

One can calculate this by keeping track of all metrics in the company: salaries, social benefits, rent, sales cost, internal initiatives, training, sick leaves, holidays and so on. Additionally, in this way, the budget of each department will be known.

With these simple and practical steps, it should be more feasible, if not easy, to build a successful onshore or Offshore software development company!

Jessica Cyrus has started her career as a QA- Engineer at Nexsoftsys,which is a software consulting company.