Dom & Tom’s Founders share their stories from 2016 with the Built In NYC community.
Dear Colleagues,
Happy New Year! Wow, we made it through 2016! We’d like to start by telling you how much we truly appreciate you all. It’s certainly been a wild ride since we started this company in 2009 on a kitchen table in Queens, NY. We have to say that each and every one of you has contributed to making this the best year this company has ever had.
Thanks to your leadership, hard work in your craft, passionate pursuit of excellence, and friendship, we made amazing progress with our clients’ digital initiatives. Together we grew our skills professionally, and have grown significantly as a community.
As we “ship” 2016, and “product plan” for 2017, now is the time when we “retro” on the past year and the plans we have for an exciting future. We want to share what we’ve accomplished, how much we’ve grown, and how we’ve pursued our mission of making progress, by stewarding the next generation of digital products.
GROWTH
It was a tremendous year for Dom & Tom, both internally, and externally. We started 2016 with an impressive 52 team members and have finished 2016 with a whopping 86 team members. That’s right! We’ve grown a remarkable 65% over the course of the year.
For the third year in a row, we’ve landed on the prestigious Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing Companies list and we hope to keep that momentum going and shoot for the 4th year on the list. Our mobile, web, and creative team have won an International Silver Davey Award for their creation of the iOS and Android mobile app OU Innovate for the University of Oklahoma. Additionally, we’ve been recognized as a top mobile and web agency by online publications such as Built in Chicago, The Farm, Appindex and Clutch.
As you all know, we’ve made significant improvements to the flagship New York office as well as the Chicago office (New desks! Paint! Bean Bag chairs!) Our U.S. expansion has made its way to Los Angeles, CA along with some of our key staff with more to come as well as a satellite office in Austin, TX.
PRODUCT
This year, we shipped several digital products across a range of industries including media, publishing, education, pharmaceuticals, food, logistics, celebrity and more. In addition, we’ve strengthened our portfolio by delivering innovative technologies such as geo-location enabled applications and the creation of smart offices in New York and Chicago for Fortune 500 clients.
These organizational initiatives catapulted our company to work with brands such as Bloomberg, Channel One, CliffNotes, Hearst, University of Oklahoma, LECET, Tyson Foods Inc. and Turner and do cutting-edge work such as the Extreme Weather Simulator and OU Innovate. The best results of these initiatives are the increased quality of work with our customers, the implementation of operations management and improvement of overall service delivery. We’re proud of each round of design, each release we ship, and each Discovery session we complete with a clear understanding of the future of a Product.
ORGANIZATION
With the increase of clients, technologies, and projects, our company has expanded to support new opportunities, by organizing new services and enhancing our existing process and methodologies.
We grew our internal Marketing Department to 3 new team members this year and formalized digital marketing as a service to one of our oldest accounts: Tyson Foods Inc. Our Human Resources, Operations, and DevOps teams also expanded this year to help improve process, optimize tools and support our clients with increased digital security and ongoing support.
As our teams grew, so did our need for organizational leadership. At the beginning of this year, the executive team consisted only of Directors, most who joined us in 2010. This year, we created a new management position called “Associate Director” to promote professional development in leadership, lead the charge in growing the company, and service the team members better. There are now 4 Associate Directors supporting the respective teams, and pushing the level of excellence in our craft.
CULTURE
One of the most impressive things we see as founders is the continual support and unity of our team members. There have been several internal initiatives (shout out to our amazing Social Committee) that allow us to come together, have fun and give back. The Do Good, Be Good Award was created this year to highlight 2 team members kick-ass work as they “Do Good” and “Be Good”. To further thank them and continue the spirit of DG.BG, we added to the award by including a donation to a charity of their choice on their behalf. Good work with good people has an influence beyond ourselves.
We all know how hard everyone works all year long and taking the time to enjoy each other’s company outside the office is extremely important. The start of our bi-annual Dom & Tom Olympics this summer unified both our New York and Chicago offices with a day filled with BBQ and some insane games like wheelbarrow races, balloon toss and more. Let’s of course not forget about our annual Cinco de Mayhem party, our Dodgeball tournament over the summer, as well as our traditional Holiday Party, Thanksgiving Potluck, White Elephant, and Karaoke Nights out. We are proud that not only are we all colleagues, we are all friends and damn do we have fun together!
Let’s not forget our Ferris Bueller Day where you are encouraged to go out take a day off and do something wild, crazy or just something you have never done before. This year’s Ferris Bueller Day activities ranged from eagle watching to acting like an eagle and sky-diving from 12,000 feet. We also had not one but two people experience a weightless isolation flotation chamber and others who wanted to give back by teaching an advanced UX class and volunteering at the animal adoption expo.
2017
In 2017 the opportunities within the digital space are plenty and Dom & Tom will be certain rise to the occasion. We will continue to expand our projects and showcase our abilities with more in-depth User Studies, Data Visualizations, IoT, Geo-technologies, VR/AR, Voice Assistance and Second Screen experience products. We understand the application of Virtual Reality programs will continue to find its bearings within the entertainment and education industries. Applications need to be built and planned with the mindset that multi-screen usage is becoming the “norm” and not the exception to the user’s experience. Devices are segmenting into isomorphic, lambda-like (Dom’s words) utilizations, like Keyboard extensions, Chatbot’s, Wearables, and more.
Business solutions that automate manual workflows will continue to expand in technological laggards in the economy – particularly in education, insurance, and construction. The past several years have focused on application development for mobile devices and the next several years will incorporate existing infrastructure within communities and cities to leverage that next stage of digital development.
As we look forward to the next year we are certain to have a lot of growth. With that success, we will continue to build out our Digital Marketing team; with a plan for offering services to our clients by mid-2017. Marketing services is an obvious path of expansion and opportunity at Dom & Tom. When clients come to Dom & Tom for product development, they need a go-to-market strategy and a way to experiment and test to achieve perfect product-market fit. Marketing will layer well within our current organization alongside the Mobile, Web, Design, User Experience and Strategy services we already offer.
With our core Executive team in place, along with our awesome Dom & Tom team members and colleagues, we are poised to grow our competencies and build on our strengths in the new year. Year by year, we earn the trust and consideration of our customers, but we do so with the intense understanding that “we are only as good as the last product we launched.” That focus and diligence in shipping quality are what has served our good reputation, and it is something that we will endeavor to keep in sight while we rapidly grow the company. We recognize that it is better to grow steadier, with higher client satisfaction, than to star-burst in growth and risk having the quality of our products suffer.
We know that the tremendous success and accomplishments are thanks to you, our amazing team members, our excellent clients, and our seasoned management team. This year’s jump in growth was the biggest in the company’s history, and we look forward to continuing that momentum into 2017 with our GSD attitude.
Happy New Year and thank you for all that you do!
As Always, Do Good. Be Good.
Dom Tancredi, Co-Founder Tom Tancredi, Co-Founder
