Hey @Bjorninen SamiK and @Peskaparse
Great questions, thanks for them!
“How long does it take on average/approximately for a new employee to start doing billable work?”
The question strongly refers to experts, so I’ll answer from that perspective. We have tried to ensure that people don’t start on a project on the very first day, but instead have an initial orientation period of a couple of weeks. Often, this has been a balancing act with client wishes, but we have wanted to stick to it.
“How would you explain Witted’s business idea to a vagrant sitting in front of a local convenience store (Sale)?
Just saying ‘helps clients build successful software development teams and aims to create collaboration across the IT vendor landscape’ doesn’t really explain what problem is intended to be solved. To put it simply, you help build successful software development teams? What are they used for, for example, or what problems do they solve? I.e., what added value does it bring to the client?”
This is always one of my favorite questions. We IT companies are currently terribly bad at communicating what we do in plain language. Especially when we can’t use IT terms. I’ve only told my 5-year-old daughter that daddy works at a bread factory, and that’s what she tells her friends. (Our office happens to be located in a bread factory.)
To the vagrant at Sale, I would probably say that when you open your phone or TV, you come across services that we have been involved in creating. If you use online banking, buy food online, book trips, or doctor’s appointments, we are helping you there again. A large number of IT professionals do these projects, and increasingly, you will come across us then.
The vagrant at Sale might not grasp the dynamics of our field, but in reality, our clients are already very adept at IT service development, and the client leads these projects both in Finland and internationally. That is also correct; that place belongs to them, not to software consultants. There, we IT companies, together and in cooperation with the client, always build development teams for new needs - projects come and go, but the work just continues. In the IT sector, projects are only outsourced by entities that cannot lead them themselves or if the work is not critical. The environments are often multi-vendor environments.
In the company prospectus, we seem to break this down by industry, so we do:
- e.g., music services, streaming services for consumers, and operating systems for mobile phones (Digital leaders -clients)
- online stores and e-commerce services for businesses, online banks, operator services (retail, telecom, finance)
- digital services for industry, health technology, and public sector services.
Regarding the company prospectus, we have really messed up the reference game. We have never purposefully collected public references, because they have never been needed. Demand in the industry is so high that customer acquisition has never been a problem. At the same time, whenever you talk to someone coming to work, of course you can tell them what project they are needed for now. This has led to the fact that for us, this IPO has been the first time we need references when describing the company to a new target group. We screwed up the reference thing, sorry - We will try to collect them on the company’s site in the future. However, Newthings.co and mavericks.fi sites do have references collected and published by the subsidiaries.
Regarding added value: there is huge global competition between digital products (e.g., Wolt vs. Foodora). People use the services that work best. If a client can build killer features, another might copy them quickly. The competition intensifies and the pace accelerates. All this comes back to who has the best and most innovative team doing these. When operating in such an environment, we IT providers must be able to be constantly one step ahead of the market and ensure that the client’s development teams are better than those of competitors. In such a world, Witted has succeeded well.
Related to this, a question: how high is the turnover of consultants, and how long does one consultant work for you on average? In consulting firms, I understand there is quite a lot of turnover because clients want to hire consultants into their own company at some point.
Historically, we have had quite low turnover. This may not be opened up in our materials, but the information can probably be seen from public sources. However, the doubling rate means that the medium tenure looks short, but that is because half of our people have joined in the last year. This has been the case throughout history - half are always new. Talented Insights also monitors this industry dynamic.
This year, there have been only a few individual leavers. We are likely in the under 5% category. The company is quite young (5+ years), many of the subsidiaries are even younger, so they are well protected by the fact that many have only just started working or have only been working for a few years. We have also been protected by the fact that the employer brands and subsidiaries are specialized and strive to be the best workplaces in the world for a specific target group. Likewise, we have been protected by the fact that we have openly gone through this IPO journey for about a year now, and our staff owns the company. Almost everyone has ownership, and hopefully the newest joiners will become owners in the employee offering made in connection with the IPO. The idea would be to keep this turnover low in the future as well 
P.S. Sorry for the long answer. The questions seemed to require a bit of elaboration!
We haven’t had any discussion about them, so the assumption is that the anchors’ share is that 4.6.