20 Questions for 20 Years

1. What's it like working with your spouse?

Well, we won’t say it doesn’t have its moments! The main thing that works for us is breaking the job down and having clear responsibilities, so we’re not treading on each other’s toes. Work/life balance can be hard, but after 20 years, we’ve got much better at it.

2. If you were starting now, would you do it again, given AI?

Yes, we would. There’s a bigger market, and it’s easier than ever to work outside your area.

AI is complicating things though. We think AI is transformational in allowing smaller companies like us to compete with larger companies. AI isn’t going to take our jobs, but this is a revolution, and it will transform our jobs, and we will move with the times.

We think the combination of AI + expertise will be seen as critical, and our long history, with the same people, will increase the value of our expertise. Good judgement in changing times is not something we think winning businesses will trust to AI.

3. What was the biggest emergency we had to deal with?

When the main courier company for our customer went bust overnight. They had to find another one, and we then had to overnight implement an integration to a new company.

We managed it though. Keeping the orders on time averted many negative feedback ratings from eBay, and those would have impaired future sales by damaging the client’s reputation. So there was a long-term impact from our decisive action for the client, which we benefited from for years as they grew.

4. What's the strangest thing we've built?

Once we had to make a tannoy system.

One of our customers had a physical shop attached to the warehouse, despite most of the products being sold online. The tannoy system announced “customer waiting” into the warehouse when somebody bought from the shop. So it was a bit like Argos.

5. What's the best technical decision we made?

We chose a database as our preferred choice — PostgreSQL. It had a reputation 20 years ago for “doing things right”, and it’s been rock-solid the whole time.

Its streaming backup and hot-swap functions provided great reliability and datacentre independence.

6. Did Artumi lose work because we were so small?

Undoubtedly we have, yes.

There is a concern from some larger clients about a small one- or two-person team. One of the concerns is that all the knowledge is in one person, who could leave, or get ill, or something similar.

Those clients who have seen how larger agencies work realise that hard work does tend to get assigned to a single person anyway, and that agencies generally do a poor job of transferring knowledge from one team member to another when there’s no invoice attached to it.

7. How easy was it to find work for Artumi?

It has been surprisingly easy over the years.

We have hardly ever had to market for business. We have worked on our website from time to time, but usually someone who knows someone who knows someone has ended up starting work with us. Enough of those clients came back for repeated work that, for the vast majority of the last 20 years, the issue was getting the work done — not finding work.

8. What's Artumi's proudest moment?

When we delivered the CPD system to the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG), we had taken an old, slow system and provided a new backend which was much quicker.

Our proudest moment was when the head of the programme explained how she didn’t think our system was working because it was so fast compared to the previous system, and she’d spent days testing it to make sure all the data was there.

9. Why Sheffield, and how much did being in Sheffield help or hinder?

Sheffield feels like the largest village in the UK. Yes, it has all the infrastructure of a big city, but it’s such a friendly place with a great community.

It’s been a good fit for us, as we love green spaces and we have had an amazing time here.

Business-wise, we have looked outside the city for work, but given the nature of what we do — especially since Covid got everyone on video calls — location matters less than it once did. Manchester is known for drawing in a lot of the talent from Sheffield, so maybe that’s helped us keep work here.

10. Was there any technology you steered clear of?

WordPress.

It’s the most common application built on PHP, and we are PHP developers, but we never wanted to use WordPress because we didn’t want to be on the hook for the various security problems WordPress users experienced over the years.

We didn’t like the way it was designed, and we still don’t really. This meant we lost some opportunities as well, but you don’t get long relationships if you’re having to apologise for a client’s site being hacked.

11. Artumi stayed small, why? Was it by choice? What were the upsides? What were the downsides?

Artumi did stay small, and it wasn’t by choice at the start. We were young when we started and we tried a couple of times to get staff to help us with the work, but the clients never seemed that keen, and the attempts to grow failed. We felt we probably weren’t cut out for management skills, at least not at that time, and as our clients valued our technical skills more, and as they grew, we were able to grow the revenue without growing the staff. So we ended up continuing with that approach. The downside was we weren’t building a business that we could sell as a concern, but the upside was that we were able to be very free about our working hours and conditions.

12. How has web technology changed over the years?

The change has been continuous, somewhat circular, and at the same time, it hasn’t really changed all that much. We’re still in the business of writing programs that produce HTML, CSS, javascript and SQL, much as we were when we started. However the conceptual framework, manifested in coding frameworks has changed, as has the finer detail on how you can do what you do. It is easier to achieve more and more quickly. There are also a slew of APIs which have come (and in some cases gone again) which enabled new features. Like the geolocation API.

13. What does 20 years in business mean to you?

It kind of sprang up on us.

It does feel like a great achievement to still be going after 20 years. We have weathered a few storms, including the financial crash, a client and a partner going bankrupt, all the changing technologies, and it feels great to still be here.

14. What kinds of clients have you supported over the years?

We have been lucky to work for a wide variety of clients, with many small Sheffield businesses at one end, medium sized e-commerce companies, and then with membership organisations, like the TUC and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists.

15. How have client needs changed over 20 years?

The essential requirement of delivering value to customers, or meeting specific internal goals has not changed dramatically, but the means of achieving those goals has changed by becoming increasingly complex. Jobs that would have been done locally on our own systems are increasingly being distributed out to specialist providers of certain features. Conversations about how to implement and change functionality are transformed into conversations about competing suppliers and how to integrate their products into client’s services.

16. How do you help businesses feel less overwhelmed?

This is a question of organisation.

By approaching a problem set logically, it can then be well understood. Firstly we need to ensure everyone is using the same terminology in the same way. If a sentence can have 2 meanings, then you’re going to get confused conversations. Then it’s a case of organising tasks and regular meetings to show progress and keep things on track.

17. What have you learned from supporting businesses as they grow?

So very much. In our experience the businesses that grow have something in common, they have leaders who are highly driven to achieve that growth. Then you need so many big things and small things to be right. Big things, like direction, clear decision making, consistency of approach, a willingness to suddenly turn on a sixpence. Small things like picking up a phone to get an answer, rather than writing an email, or sending a video explainer rather than an email, or even just writing simply.

18. What mistakes do businesses make when systems are not working?

There are a number of common problems that businesses often don’t notice, and their mistake is not checking.

Automation failures go un-noticed. Time draining ad-hoc error prone work-arounds of partially functioning systems. An unwillingness to engage with complexity when it’s necessary.

19. What does “good systems” actually mean in practice?

A good system is reliable, predictable, efficient, responsive, and it achieves specified goals. The users of a good system understand how to navigate it, how to get answers they need, and can reason about the nature of the reality that system recording, or changing.

20. What do you want the next 20 years to look like?

For Artumi, we would like to think that 20 years from now we’ll be writing a blog post closing down the business and heading off into the sunset, hand in hand, looking back on having been an important part of the lives of many businesses, and by extension, the people in those businesses. We hope we’ll have learned a lot, and smiled a lot. And why not? It’s what the first 20 years were like.