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Revenue distribution

During its first years, Refactory worked to create a healthy revenues distribution and we suggest you do the same.

Customers distribution

This is customers revenue distribution and customers count during the years:

  • 2018: main customer 67%, top two 85%, active customers 5
  • 2019: main customer 33%, top two 58%, active customers 9
  • 2020: main customer 38%, top two 64%, active customers 14
  • 2021: main customer 29%, top two 45%, active customers 15
  • 2022: main customer 24%, top two 43%, active customers 20

As most “spin-off” do, Refactory started with an overwhelming dependence from the existing companies that it spinned off from and very few other customers. It was a necessary evil that allowed us to be profitable right from the start, but it was clearly something that had to be fixed as soon as possible.

So, slowly we increased our customers base and shifted our revenues. We’re very satisfied of the current customers distribution and we’re planning to further improve it in 2023. We achieved this by several means:

  • we monitored and limited time spent on any given project, regardless of how big the backlog was
  • we refused projects that were too big and may actually have strained our limited workforce resource, giving an immediate economical result to the detriment of the overall distribution
  • even when our workload was high we always kept some time to nurture new contacts, most of which then became new customers.

Services distribution

We also focused on our service types revenue distribution. Our business model (which I will talk about in a future post) is partly made of fixed, recurring revenues and partly time & material based. Needless to say, increasing the recurring revenues is a good thing. Let’s see how it went:

  • 2018: T&M 97%, recurring 3%
  • 2019: T&M 85%, recurring 9%
  • 2020: T&M 78%, recurring 10%
  • 2021: T&M 76%, recurring 14%
  • 2022: T&M 80%, recurring 11% (thought the actual recurring value went up, as we saw a +42% revenue increase)

(*) the sum is not 100% because we have a separate line of service that may be counted as “recurring”, but I wanted to show the numbers for our “core” business (maintenance, support and evolution of existing software projects).

I’d say we’re doing fine 🙂 This happened because:

  • we defined clearly what our recurring services offer, so that it was easier to sell it to customers
  • we improved our infrastructure and knowledge so that we could gradually improve our offer and increase prices
  • we invested time upfront in new recurring services (i.e. new customers) knowing that we would reach results later.

Once again, we refused to “choke” on immediate economic return and looked ahead.

Conclusions

If you want your company to last, you should closely monitor your revenue distribution and act accordingly. We did, we feel we got to a good place, we keep moving.

Foto di Daniel Öberg su Unsplash