News and thoughts from the people at EllisLab.

Q1 CEO Report, EllisLab 2011

Posted by Leslie Camacho on April 08, 2011

The Good

In 2010, EllisLab had 33% year over year growth: marking our best year ever in terms of finances and overall business performance. This started with the release of the ExpressionEngine 2 Public Beta in December of 2009 and continued steadily throughout the year. We experienced December’s normal drop in sales, but even there, sales in 12/10 were considerably above 12/09. In pure business terms, 2010 ended strong and we’ve seen that same growth continue in 2011. We’re on pace to equal and possibly exceed last year’s growth.

The Bad

Unfortunately 2010, especially the second half, saw a drop in quality in support, software (as measured by bugs), and a general unease in the CodeIgniter and ExpressionEngine Communities about the direction of EllisLab itself (and by implication, our software). This was perhaps best summed up in “Kenny Gate” and some of the tone at EECI2010.

In short, 2010 was the best of times and it was the worst of times. As one of my business mentors told me “Les, these are the problems you want to have, but you bet your ass they are still problems.”

The Way Forward

In October 2010, my Grandfather passed away and I remember setting aside a day to go through community feedback in the context of life and death. I loved my Grandfather dearly. He was an English teacher and principal most of his life, but his real love was farming. He grew up on a farm and returned to one as soon as he could.

When the farming life became too hard for his aging body he built houses (rugged describes Oscar quite well). When he got too old for that, he bought homes to renovate them. And when he got too old to do that, he taught his grandchildren to do it. He spent his every waking moment helping people succeed, starting with his family and working outward. He was a farmer through and through.

What would Oscar have done in my situation? What would he have done in the midst of business success but a community he cared about in unrest? I can hear his answer loud and clear: “Leslie, do good work. Help others to do the same.” Then he would have gotten up out of his recliner and made me bail hay with him for the rest of the afternoon.

When I am done, that’s how I want my children to remember me: “He spent his life enabling others to do good work.”

That was, at the risk of being cliché, my Jerry Maguire moment. I took my trusty MBP and emerged a week later with a plan for EllisLab in 2011. Fortunately, unlike the movie, Rick Ellis (EllisLab founder) and Derek Jones (President/CTO) are fantastic people who took what I presented and helped shape it into what we want EllisLab to be.

The plan is actually rather simple in its strategy. Here it is:

Enable Rick to do good work. He hates being the business guy. He prefers being creative. So step one was to let Rick off the CEO hook. Literally, within months of doing this, he burst back onto the web scene with a brand new site (RickEllis.com) and a new application, FileDriver. The dude is flourishing and his contributions to EllisLab are once again what we need them to be: a creative force that inspires us to do be great.
Enable Derek Jones to do good work. Our valiant CTO has been under so much stress for so long, it’s not even funny. We have completely thrown out the concept of a traditional CTO and President in favor of a “Chief Maker.” Jones’s primary role at EllisLab now is to build us the internal tools we need to do good work. He’s building out support tools, redoing our store (tears of joy), getting our team whatever they need so they can concentrate on the work. He’s also put his considerable analytic powers into all our company data. He is flourishing again.
Enable our team to do go work. The old EllisLab kept a stranglehold on everything. From the top down, when it came to it, the CTO was the sole arbiter of anything code-related. While this was completely necessary a few years ago, it was completely wrong in 2010, and it would have certainly dried up our team’s passion. We’ve revamped how our team works and now they are completely in control of the processes. We’ve honored their talent and commitment with authority and the tools to let them do their best.

We’ve invested heavily in our team, including company-wide training for all staff. We’ve also taken the financial growth from last year and used it to expand our team. We have a dev team of 6 now. At this same time last year our team was 3. Soon we’ll be at 7 and with a little luck we’ll be at 8 sometime in Q2, Q3. When you include new staff and part-time staff turned into full time staff we added five new people to the team between January of 2010 and today.

Now, here is the important thing. The above is not what we intend to do. It’s what we’ve already done. We’ve completely restructured EllisLab from the ground up and almost doubled our size from last year so that we can continue doing good work and enable our Community to do the same.

And that’s step four:

Enable the Community to do good work. This means listening, clarifying, and then shaping our software and services to meet your needs in creative, innovative ways that are tailored to your success and delight. In short, when you start out your day and dive into something we make, we want a smile on your face, knowing that you are using the best possible tools to do your work, to provide for your families, and be good at life.

Let’s talk a little about what this means for each aspect of EllisLab in 2011

For CodeIgniter it means a continuation of the CI Reactor program. So far adding the Reactor team has been a great success and given the CI Community a direct path to contribution, the biggest “feature request” CI had in 2010.

For ExpressionEngine it means that we are going to get on top of the quality problem, aka bugs. We’ve split our dev team in two and changed the way we do releases. Yesterday’s release was the last of the “old style” (for the new style, see Derek’s Branchy Management in Mercurial post). Now we’ll always have one team working on the “core” of our products. They will focus on stability, security, performance, and “technical debt” (bugs, code quality, polish). The second team is our Feature team, dedicated to building new things into EE, CI, and MM.

For ExpressionEngine, specifically, we want to reduce the number of add-ons people perceive as “necessary” and we want the CP to be a delight to use. The strategy for both of these is the same. We will have small, meaningful improvements on a consistent basis.

We’re already working toward those goals as you can see by the rebuild of EE’s File Manager and the job opening for a “Practitioner of Visual Delight.”

And finally for MojoMotor, our little CMS that can, it means… well, that’s a secret. I have to have a few secrets. But for sure if you love MM, please let us know what you’d like to see next. We’re in the midst of planning its future.

We will be revamping Support from the ground up in Q2. It’s too early to really go into specifics just yet, but let me just say up front that we are fully committed to providing the best support possible out of the box (included with purchase, in other words) and expanding the offerings significantly from there into business and enterprise level support.

Now, I promised Kenny over at the Nerdary that I’d talk about why I’m the CEO and the background to that transition. And since it’s an important transition at EllisLab and will heavily inform how we move forward as a Community, I’ll risk making this post just a bit longer.

You can read about why Rick stepped down on his new site. The short version is that he has no passion for being a CEO. He fired himself and then offered me the job.

Before accepting the position, I had two demands of Rick. I told him I needed real authority to do what needs to be done. And I told him I need the leeway to make changes to EllisLab that we can’t turn back from. In short, I needed the ok to take the risks that will honor the Community, honor what we’e collectively built, and ensure that we’re around for another ten years at the very least. The risk of doing those things now is very low. But if we don’t do them now, the risk will increase (most likely rapidly). He agreed.

That’s how I came to be the CEO. I feel like I was made for this. I wake up every day wanting to make our community and company the best it can possibly be. I put this company on my shoulders every morning and see how far we can go today. I take as many people as possible with me. There is so much joy in that, I can’t even explain it. Between me, all of EllisLab, and You the Community, we literally impact millions every day. I love it. Let’s do more.

This is EllisLab 2011. It’s been a wild 90 days. Let’s make the next 90 even better. I’ll be making these high level reports to you once a quarter, but expect to see me on this new EllisLab blog on a regular basis. And of course, you can find me on Twitter and you’re always welcome to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).