Every Drupal consultancy has the same issue: You start by doing projects for customers, and it’s fun. Then you notice that you’ve done the same thing over and over again for years. It’s still fun most of the time, but sometimes you start to feel like a hamster in a wheel. You’ve got mouths to feed and mortgages to pay, and you need to sell your people with a high utilization rate to make any money. Even if the profit is good most of the time, the uncertainty and the ever-short sales pipeline is tiring. If you stop sales, the company goes belly up in less than six months. Could you do this for 20 years? Probably not.

You need to stop being about projects.

Wunderkraut is the biggest Drupal consultancy in Europe with 150 people in nine countries. We do a lot of projects, but we are by no means about projects. When we formed the company by merger in 2012, the aim was to have the best project model and practices in the world of agile web consulting. We’ve done a pretty good job at that and have a shiny track record with happy customers, but we still noticed that the issue in the first paragraph remained. Fortunately we had a lot of the right blocks in place to stop building our business on projects. We started slightly pivoting the business into something else, and it’s been great.

There are a number of ways to stop being about projects. The approach we have chosen is to use agile and lean methods to shrink projects into fast jumpstarts in the cooperation, or at least focus on the long run on the first day of the project. Existing customers are kings and new customers can be taken on board if there’s available bandwidth.

In this session we’ll open our way of thinking, our tools, our sales approach and our team building philosophy to help others implement the same transition adding their own flavor in the formula. Why? Well, we’re not a big bad corporation. We’re the dudes who got big in size, but refused to stop being fun. And we believe that sharing these learnings will do good for Drupal in the global competition against other ecosystems.