I’ll have to give it some thought and write up a post (or a book?) sometime, but off the top of my head I’d say that some of our biggest challenges have not been surprises:

* Staying billable — particularly early on (we’ve been bootstrapped from the start). We overcame this through good ole fashioned hard work. We were tenacious about going after any billable work we could find, especially back in 2000-2002, and went over-and-above doing the work when it came in. Doing this earned us fanatical clients — many that we still have now.

* Recruiting — finding great people at the right time for them and the company is always tricky. Our approach has been, to the best of our ability, bring on great people whenever we can rather than letting the exact work we have at the moment dictate our hiring decisions (which often forces you to just hire whoever is available at that moment).

* Retention — keeping great people challenged and growing as the company (and their roles within the company) has evolved isn’t always easy. We’ve tried to address this by (a) taking career development very seriously, and doing what we can to help individuals succeed, and (b) empowering people to control their career track in a way that is both good for them and good for Viget. I will say that the cases where people’s careers have blossomed inline with the growth of the company have been some of the most rewarding parts of growing the business.

* Growing - just the operational aspects of going from 5 to 15 to now 30 in two offices have been tough, since every aspect of the business seems to change (facilities, benefits, etc.). A key here is that we always knew we wanted to be bigger than what we started with, so we did our best to build a foundation that would support us — we’re really growing into this framework now, but that hasn’t made it easy. There’s no doubt it’s an ongoing evolution and we work on this issue every day.

Overall, I’d say that stubborn dedication and hard work has been a big part of our success so far. Building a company culture that’s all about the team and a “management style” (a term I detest) that is open, honest, and transparent has been big. And, as a consulting company, never losing sight of the fact that our clients are the reason we’re here and doing everything we can to make them successful.

Success is relative, though, and we still have a lot of work to do. Since the challenges never stop coming (they just change along the way), staying committed to figuring out anything that comes along and enjoying the accomplishments as we go is what matters most. We focus on “progress not perfection” and as long as that continues to be satisfying for everyone, we’ll be at it for a long time.