This blog post is the continuation of a tradition that began soon after CloudKettle was founded. As part of the culture of transparency that was key to the CloudKettle culture we showed our homework, so to speak. Each year we shared the numbers for the world to see, detailing our growth, who we served, our wins and misses, and some quirky facts along the way. It was the natural thing to do given how quant-focused our team is and also added some accountability along the way.
Inadvertently, these posts also now serve as a timeline on our journey from founding to acquisition in a way I likely could have never committed to documenting otherwise. When I initially began CloudKettle, I did so with a 10 year plan to be acquired – this marks the 10th of these posts and I am happy to see we hit our number. If you’re interested in reading the whole journey you can follow along here:
- CloudKettle Year 9 by the Numbers
- CloudKettle Year 8 by the Numbers
- CloudKettle Year 7 by the Numbers
- CloudKettle Year 6 by the Numbers
- CloudKettle Year 5 by the Numbers
- CloudKettle Year 4 by the Numbers
- CloudKettle Year 3 by the Numbers
- CloudKettle Year 2 by the Numbers
- CloudKettle Year 1 by the Numbers
Our acquisition by BCE marks a significant shift and an exciting new chapter for the company. Even with that change, transparency remains a key pillar of our organization. So without further ado, here is how our year shaped up.
Our Team
One of the major themes this year was growth. Growing the team (we increased headcount by 26% this year, while maintaining a 93% retention rate), expanding our ESG policies, and growing across time zones (we now have employees across every timezone from AT to PT). This is key in servicing our North American clients better, but is also a quality of life improvement for our team; as we grow from the Atlantic to Pacific, we have more flexibility on who can service which client in which timezone – meaning less time on early or late meetings.
We love our growing team – but make no mistake – it’s competitive to be a Kettler. For the new positions posted in 2024, we had over 6800 applicants. That commitment to hiring the best in the ecosystem means it takes us longer to expand our team, but we’ve never regretted it.
That commitment to hiring the perfect candidate each time also means that most of our team is remote; talent isn’t always located in our backyard. As such, we use Slack heavily to stay connected – it is the heartbeat of the company. Want to nominate a fellow team member for a spot bonus and recognition? Slack. Need to know more about the project you’re onboarding? Slack. Need to see team pet photos? Also Slack. In 2024 we shared over 333,000 Slack messages with our team, our Partners at Salesforce and of course our clients. This year, our busiest day on Slack was April 8th, with over 2000 messages sent that day alone (apparently eclipses impact our volume).
We still want to be known as a company that “does well, and does good” – and our commitment to the Pledge 1% program is a big part of that. We donate 1% or our team’s time and 1% of our profits to charities and non-profits in our communities. This year that included organizations like Feed Nova Scotia, Adsum House, Out of the Cold, QueerTech, We Are Young, The Arthritis Society, Second Harvest, Ronald McDonald House, and more. We also continued to beef up our ESG policies, maintaining our certification with Ecovadis and purchasing over 200 tonnes of Carbon offsets to help towards our goal of being carbon neutral.
Clients
One thing that never changes, is our love and appreciation for our long-time clients, who continue to see us as a valued partner, and new clients who are just starting out on their journey with us. This year we had a massive 53% of our clients fall into the “new client” category – most of these coming by way of referral from happy existing clients. Referrals continue to be our primary source of new business, a luxury we do not take for granted.
Content that Crushed
We kept the momentum up with content production in 2024. Eliot Harper’s Data Cloud blog and video series were hugely successful, with his “Salesforce Data Cloud Model Explained”
blog racking up over 15,000 views. On the YouTube side people were similarly enthralled by Eliot’s Salesforce Data Cloud Buyer’s Guide Series, yet Dan Stratton’s “How to Calculate Conversion Rates in Salesforce Reports” (which he created in early 2022) remained our top performing video with almost 5000 views. (You guys really love your Salesforce reports, huh?)
On the social side, we focused on LinkedIn and YouTube, taking a step back from X. We also opened Instagram and BlueSky accounts just to see what’s going on over there – but no major activity from us over there… yet.
By leaning in on LinkedIn and YouTube, we were able to grow our social audience by over 20%, get a 17% increase in engagement and 44% increase in post link clicks YoY. When sharing content, we try to do a mix of the helpful Salesforce content people know and trust, and updates about our team (which are always popular). So it’s no surprise one of our most popular posts was an image carousel of our Halifax team engaged in an epic video game battle.
Misses
There is no question that our focus on diligence and completing the acquisition in June led to a dip in revenue (and therefore also Gross Margin and EBITDA in Q3). We came a long way in making that up and Q4 was a record breaker for us, but it was a rare miss in terms of our growth.
Each year we experiment with new channels, new types of content and new ways of helping grow the expertise of the community. Many work, some don’t. This year, we tried advertising in some new places and discovered we didn’t have much of an audience there, and we also tried a Leadership video series that didn’t quite get off the ground. But this provided us with lots of good lessons to draw on for 2025.
Conclusion
Overall 2024 was a huge success. We had a plan 10 years ago to be acquired. From there, an entire team of people executed on growing an incredible business that was healthy, sustainable and demonstrated the type of ongoing growth that potential acquisitors were interested in.
A decade strong, and now a proud member of the Bell Canada family, we saw remarkable growth across our organization. Like all businesses, we have our share of struggles and challenges, but our ability to come together as a team continues to be one of our strongest assets. We look forward to what 2025 will bring.