We didn’t want to end this year, without looking back at all the memorable achievements of this year, we couldn’t have made possible without our clients.
Since NOBA was founded in 2018, our company had practically doubled every year in size and revenue. We’ve been fortunate enough to work with an increasingly wide range of industry leaders and newcomers who span the entire globe — and we do it all with our awesome team based here in Barcelona.
Yet despite this year’s impressive milestones, our growth has slowed down with respect to previous years.
From our experience, every time we double the number of team members, the organization takes a new shape. This means we need to invest in new ways of cooperating, communicating and working. The current doubling is proving to be the hardest.
This made 2022 a year to pause and reflect. And we are ready for a booming 2023.
We’ve used this crossroads to reflect inwardly, redefine what good means to us and improve our internal ways of working, as well as building a kick-ass team.
The following principles have been critical to our development in 2022, and we’re excited to carry them into 2023 and see where they continue to take NOBA.
2022 by the numbers
- 10% revenue growth 2021-2022
- 13 new team members
- 62 projects
- 14 countries
Build strategically with scaled operations
Every business leader looks forward to the moment when their company finally takes off with a steady pipeline of new projects, new people and new prospects. While exciting, this newfound growth also demands new, more efficient processes to scale effectively. It’s only natural to evolve from old ways of running projects.
That kind of evolution requires careful preparation — and that’s precisely what we’ve been up to for the past few months.
We have launched what we call “Ways of Working” to standardize internal processes and ensure even smoother collaboration across our teams. Our new step-by-step manuals guide employees — both new hires and veteran staff — in everything NOBA, from finance to social media to presentations and more.
New tools like ClickUp were crucial to this transformation. With this all-in-one app, we centralized all of our project planning to track task statuses and manage our team’s time more efficiently.
Cultivate talent to make a dream team
NOBA is home to 28 team members who come from different industry backgrounds and countries around the world. We believe that this breadth is what makes our company shine brightest and that we need to invest in sharing their knowledge company-wide.
That’s why starting this year, we tapped into our own talent pool to provide weekly internal trainings. Every Thursday morning, a NOBA member teaches a 1-hour upskilling session in key areas of our business, such as client management, finance, design thinking, Google Analytics, data protection and much more.
While external trainings indeed are beneficial, especially for gaining fresh perspectives, our focus on self-driven learning has proven to be an incredible opportunity for new leaders to shine, new synergies to emerge and knowledge to grow. By promoting these trainings, each person at NOBA becomes more collaborative and all-hands-on-deck, which ultimately provides tremendous new value to our clients, without whom none of this would be possible.
But the spotlight on our staff doesn’t end there. This year we’ve also been fleshing out our performance review process with extra attention to details that help each NOBA team pave their own career path.
New to come in 2023
Even though we can’t predict the future, it’s clear that NOBA will continue our internal company evolution in the year to come. We’re already working on becoming 27001 ISO-certified in 2023 to make sure we’re adhering to the highest global standards in security and efficiency, and that we continue to operate at the forefront of innovation.
Additionally, this year we’re celebrating our 5-year anniversary!
