Five minutes with our co-founder, Calvin

Over the next few months, we’re going to be introducing you to core members of the Webantic team, giving you a glimpse behind the scenes and helping you understand how the cogs in our machine turn.

To kick things off, we sat down with our co-founder, Calvin Evans, to learn about his experiences in business so far, how his role has evolved, and what makes him tick when he’s not running the show on Quay Street.

Tell me about the Webantic journey so far.

Luke and I have come a long way since the early days of Webantic. When we started back in October 2011, we were operating from our spare room in Fallowfield, building websites and basically learning as we went along. Our only objective back then was to keep improving, and this drove us forward. Gradually we refined our skills, our client base grew, and we began solidifying Webantic into the business it is today.

In 2013 we moved into our first office, which was a major milestone for us. Our team quickly took off from then; over the past few years, we’ve grown to an agency of 10+ staff. Last autumn, we celebrated our fifth anniversary, and we’re currently hiring our 15th employee.

How has your role evolved since you set up the company?

As Webantic has expanded, we’ve done a fairly good job at pushing things down the tree. When bootstrapping a business there’s never enough cash. Initially, rather than hire from the top, we were forced to recruit more junior people and train them up. Since then, however, this approach has become one of our values as a company. We try to invest in growing people. It takes longer, but results in staff who stick around and take ownership of their roles.

Surrounding ourselves with competent staff members has allowed Luke and I to delegate more and more of our tasks; I stopped development work over a year ago, and recently appointed team members to more senior responsibilities like Q+A and project administration too.

Nowadays, my focus is primarily on project management and providing strategic input during the planning stages to pave the road for smooth implementation. As we bring on new hires, I’m going to be spending more time consulting on product strategy from a holistic standpoint as that is one of our core value-adds.

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve had to overcome?

Implementing a more agile project structure over the past year has been tricky. The agile concept originates from product companies in Silicon Valley; it’s much more difficult to apply to a client relationship, as you have different dynamics to consider.

Many agencies have encountered the same problem and given up, or reverted back to waterfall methodology while retaining the same labels so they can call themselves “agile”. However, we’ve persisted as we believe that agile represents a considerable opportunity to deliver genuine value. That said, we have found certain aspects very challenging to implement without causing friction between us and customers.

To overcome the issue, we’ve created our own hybrid framework known as "Tempo" internally. Constructed from the ground up, it borrows from various other frameworks including Kanban, Scrum and even Prince2.

It’s still a work in progress, but we’re really happy with this model so far. It allows clients to embrace some of the core concepts of Agile and lean product development, without forcing them to operate too much outside of the dynamics of a conventional client/supplier relationship.

What has been your biggest achievement so far?

In all honesty, the fact that we’re still here is a big achievement for me. There are so many odds stacked against you in business, which is why only one in five startups make it past the first five years. I felt immense gratitude and relief when we hit that milestone last October.

We’ve still got a long way to go, but every day feels like an achievement when you’re running a small business.

Where do you see software development heading in 2018?

That’s an interesting one. There’s a lot of noise around technology like AR/VR, wearables, IOT and machine learning, but I feel as though we’re yet to really see any truly disruptive applications.

Behind the scenes, big companies might be doing clever things like, for example, applying machine learning to big data. But a lot of the public applications of these emerging technologies are either somewhat gimmicky, or complete flops (Google Glass?).

Hopefully this will change soon; I expect we’ll start to see rapid growth in real-world applications of AR, VR and machine learning. It will be exciting to see how these developments pan out.

How is Webantic preparing to respond to this?

One of the company’s biggest advantages is that we fill the shoes of an interim CTO or product development consultant, but go that bit further. When you hire an individual, they come in with a brilliant vision, however they usually leave implementation to the company itself. As a result, the final product sometimes struggles to reach the grandeur of that initial idea.

Webantic, on the other hand, combines an in-depth understanding of product development with the in-house expertise to deliver it. This gives us the capability to build cutting-edge products that meet or surpass the expectations of our clients and, most importantly, deliver value to their users.

When you’re not running the business, how do you unwind?

Because I don’t program as a job anymore, I try to find the time to code outside of work; I enjoy it and it keeps my skills fresh. Beyond that, I spend a lot of time outdoors. It’s really difficult to switch off when you’re running a business, but so important that you do. Going for a walk, or sitting in a hammock on the balcony at home, really helps to make sure my head is in the right place.