Reflection on Circles 2020

2020 was a most peculiar year. We began our work in earnest and the future looked very bright. New recruits began to work with us and the Circles spirit was at an all time high. Then came Covid-19.

We, like I assume the rest of the world, became very concerned about this pandemic at an early stage. We halted our recruitment and dug into a pothole ready to defend our position with our existing customers.

By summer it became obvious that the Corona virus was not affecting our business as much as it did impact some of the other less fortunate industries. We resumed our normal operations and began recruiting again. Unfortunately we did lose a few good people during the summer to some more stable industries, but we managed to compensate the losses with good recruits.

In autumn we had a major breakthrough when we signed a contract with an excellent customer that allowed us to build a whole team for software product development which has proven how good our consultants can be when they can work together.

In late autumn we announced the Circles Share Program, which would reward our loyal consultants for the work they have done so far, and the future consultants should they be deemed worthy. Unlike other companies (that I know of), our share program concentrates on how we are able to build our community instead of other hard performance measures.

At the end of the year we could look back at our work and be very proud of it. Key learnings were found in resourcing strategy (never put all eggs in one basket), that proved to be a sound choice and the impact that Corona -virus had was practically non-existent. And also in how to engage employees when we could not see each other in person for a really long time.

Our results for 2020 speak for themselves. We generated 2.2M € (+31,5%) in revenue and 250 K € (+329%) EBIT.

Year 2021 has begun with bright stars in the sky. As usual we swam against the current and did things differently than others. We expanded our office to create space for our teams working from the office and continued to evolve our organization, which has become more alive than before. We updated our brand to reflect our new, bolder and more exciting strategy. We are looking forward to making this year the best year Circles has seen so far.

Markus Säteri
CSFO, Chairperson
Circles Consulting Oy