How we scaled from being an IT outsourcing business to ecommerce specialist

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Scaling a business is not as simple as recruiting more people to increase the team’s size. More often than not, a company needs to fundamentally transform itself to keep up with the evolving market needs.

Back in 2009, Vietnam was known for being a fast-growing destination for IT outsourcing. As with many other businesses established at the time, SmartOSC, the company I co-founded, started offering web development services with a four-member team. Like many startups, our main priority was surviving the first year. We soon realized there was a niche in the market for proper ecommerce development services. So naturally, the business evolved and adopted an agency model, providing a full range of digital ecommerce services across the globe and growing into a team of more than 350 specialists as of today.

Looking back at the initial process of scaling my company, there were a few important considerations that are worth looking into.

1. Specialization vs. generalization

One of the most important strategic decisions you need to make for your business is to focus on providing a few great solutions or acquire more resources and diversify your service offering. For us, specialization was the way to go.

Specializing in providing ecommerce solutions meant that we were able to communicate the brand and services well to meet our clients’ specific needs. It also enabled us to differentiate ourselves from our competitors and gave us a perceived value in the eyes of potential clients.

When making this decision, however, you should be aware that in a dynamic market, it can be difficult to predict and plan for the future. It is important that you stay agile so you can adjust your value proposition.

2. Building the right capabilities

As the retail market was quickly evolving, we were challenged to invest in the right technology that best solved our clients’ growing pains. Our criteria to build capabilities was validated based on the business impact it would bring to our clients and what the latest industry trends were showing.

For example, the Gartner Magic Quadrant report released in April 2017 shows that Magento is now positioned as a leader in disruptive commerce technologies. But in its early days, we had to make a decision whether we should invest in it. But as of today, aside from Magento, we have also adopted other market-leading platforms such as Sitecore, Adobe Experience Manager, and Hybris.

SmartOSC hosted Meet Magento Vietnam 2016.

3. Scaling up the quality

We believe businesses who are scaling up in size have the opportunity to scale up in quality as well.

We formed a Delivery Excellence team to fully support this opportunity. After delivery, every project is well-documented, with practices that work and mistakes that should be avoided next time. This knowledge is used to build up our “solution library” to make future projects more efficient and is passed on to employees as a learning resource. As we scale up and deliver more projects, this system allows us to act quickly on clients’ demands, provide reliable and tested solutions, and shorten time to market.

Our in-house training facilities helped to scale qualified resources in a shorter period of time compared to recruiting an already scarce pool of talent in the market. And in four years, our company grew from having only 40 employees to 350.

4. Building a relentless sales team

5. Creating a culture that embraces change