Axiom Solutions - Sharing our business journey - 4-year update

My co-founder Joe and I started Axiom Solutions in the middle of the global pandemic. We were both working full-time jobs at the same company and wanted to find more ways to work together. I personally had always wanted to have "my own thing," so starting a business seemed like a logic conclusion. Four years later and here's how things have been.

Starting small

At first, I really didn't know if I wanted to have an IT services business, but it was a skill we both shared and, frankly, I didn't have any better ideas. It solved the initial goal of finding more ways of working together. Joe and I, while we have a large overlapping IT skillset, have had very different work experiences to complement each other. Joe has really focused on more of the people side of business, and I've really focused on the technical side. We communicated well up-front, knowing we wanted to keep this small and manageable most importantly: part-time. We communicated our goals, knew very well where our ethical boundaries were, and how much time we could commit to the business. As best we could, we divided our goals and got to work.

Growth

The first 3 years flew by, and we didn't really make any major changes. We kept things part-time. We grew organically, not putting any real money, time, and effort into marketing ourselves. We let our work speak for itself and found new business through word of mouth. As we gained new business, we got to the point where we had to decide what we wanted out of this. All options were on the table: turn away new business, hire people to help, or one of us could go full-time.

Transition

At this time, it was early 2024. We knew we had enough business to sustain one of us being full-time, but we needed to decide what that would look like. Side note, I cannot stress enough how important it is to be able to have hard conversations with your founders, as this was a difficult conversation. How do we divide workload? How do we split profits? Employee sponsored benefits? When is the right time to pull the trigger? All things we needed to flesh out.

Fast forward 6 months and I ended up going full-time in July 2024. There's been a lot of lessons learned along the way, and maybe I'll write about them in the future, but things are going well. Having the extra time to focus on the business has really unlocked some new levels for us and we're excited to see what's to come.

Side quest

With me being full-time, our side quest has been to create sustainable processes within the business to be able to scale. We've already taken what two people can accomplish pretty far, but we know we can do better. Communication habits, documentation, tools, and systems to do the job better - generally the things we help our clients with - is something we think about a lot. "Dogfooding" is popular term these days, but that's essentially what we're doing. We're finding and implementing systems in our business, testing the waters, and then coming up with solutions to help others.

End of 2024 and beyond

Another realization is that, even with organic growth, there's a lot more people we could be helping. We've already hit another soft cap in what we can accomplish and are looking at ways to better allocate our time. We might even be looking at hiring, so stay tuned for that.

We're always looking for ways to improve. Finding efficiencies in our workflows, leveraging technology to scale businesses. If you know us, you know.

Conclusion

I've seen more and more of these sort of business updates being posted online, so I thought I'd give it a try. As we grow, I think I'd like to continue to write more about the lessons learned, maybe in even greater detail than I've written here. While I don't want to necessarily go full-blown "newsletter," I do think smaller case studies are useful, if only for us to document our journey.