An interview with Bo Pedersen, Marketing Manager at Seven Peaks Software (Thailand)
How are you and your family doing in the COVID era?
Both my family and I are healthy and doing well. The only impact of COVID-19, family wise, is that this year's Christmas will be over a video call. Not the Christmas we have looked forward to, but we have to adjust due to the world wide pandemic.
Can you tell us about how you joined Seven Peaks Software?
I joined Seven Peaks Software in August 2019. I sent an unsolicited application to Seven Peaks Software, and by that moment the company never had any marketing or business development employees. The company reached 35 employees and the time has come to invest in growing the company as it has now established its mature state and the concept was proof. We've built Seven Peaks Software to be an all encompassing experience. We achieve this by bringing everything in house and training our teams on what matters most to our clients, this helps us engineer the right solution to our clients business needs. Since I joined Seven Peaks Software in August 2019 we have expanded the marketing team and we started to offer digital marketing services, as we saw our client base had a need for this.
What makes Seven Peaks Software unique from others in the field?
What makes Seven Peaks Software unique comes to being a family. We care about our employees' work life balance. To strengthen our internal 'life at Seven Peaks' we'd many social activities, such as Muay Thai Tuesday, Running Wednesday and Thursday Lunch. We also have regular Friday bars either at our office with xbox, Playstation, board games. Special themed Friday Bars such as Oktoberfest and Christmas are also initiatives to getting together. Next month we are going for a company outing on a Catamaran yacht.
But besides all the social activities, we are an engineering first company, and our biggest strength is that we are mainly seniors working here. Our leadership team are all engineers and have an engineering first approach. We are primarily senior engineers which ensure the delivery of the best possible quality every time. And this is important for our clients, which is mainly local and international enterprises. You can clearly see that quality is everything when it comes to our clients, as we are their trusted technology partner. 3+ years is our average client engagement - we believe in long term partnership with our clients and win win solutions.
Has the coronavirus pandemic affected your business and if so, how are you adjusting?
In the early phase of the pandemic we worked from home. This coursed some changes in our internal process, but we were well prepared as many of our clients were from overseas so we already had the experience with this on the client facing model. The timing of our work from home period was actually perfect, since we were moving into our brand new office, and had to build the interior of the office while the employees were working from home.
Not even the pandemic could halt the progress of Seven Peaks Software. The outsourced software development outfit saw 20 percent growth year-on-year in the first half of 2020. While this wasn’t as strong as we had hoped, the positive momentum was still welcome during a time when many other firms are struggling.
The biggest impact COVID-19 had on us was in regard to staffing. We had been hiring five new people monthly between January and March. Once lockdown hit, most hiring was frozen until recently.
What do you think are the major trends in your field?
In Thailand there is over the last 2 years a lot of focus around Industry 4.0, which is also backed by the Thai government under Thailand 4.0 initiative. This means a lot of companies are focusing on digitizing their business and processes, resulting in a lot of new opportunities related to digital transformation and cloud migration and development projects.
What are the keys to customer success and satisfaction and has that changed in the era of COVID?
Thailand’s lockdown saw Seven Peaks Software undergo a transformation that we believe will allow the business to continue its organic growth. Things have started picking up in August and we were fully booked. Confidence is growing and spending is increasing in Thailand. Our keys to customer success and satisfaction is still to deliver high quality software solutions to our clients as always.
How would you see your company ten years in the future?
In ten years we will be 20 times bigger, and we will have expanded to new business units. We will still be a industry leader, but we might expand to new markets.
Any final thoughts?
Our growth has been mainly organic and it has been better than we could have imagined. Part of this is because we took our time to build a good foundation. Our next step strategically is to have more people available so we can capitalize on all opportunities. In the past, our hiring has been based on demand and the need to increase capacity. Of course, this can be limiting. Now our goal is to build up both the capacity and staffing sides to continue our growth.
Bo Pedersen
Website: www.sevenpeakssoftware.com
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