April 1, 2024, is Passion Fruit Partner’s 4th birthday!
Coming back from our annual in-person retreat in BC this year, we have much to be grateful for and reflect on as we wrap up our 4th year in business. It is time again to pause for a moment and take the time to share our milestones achieved, lessons learned, and closing thoughts. We do this both as a reminder of how far we’ve come and to hold us accountable for the commitments we’ve made to our team.
This year was a wild one! We celebrated some fantastic wins and took some big hits as well. To highlight a few bittersweet moments, we said farewell to two team members (Courtney and Jim) to wanderlust and semi-retirement last summer. At Christmas, Clair’s daughter was born, and she started her maternity leave. We saw two other team members leave to pursue other career passions (Stacey and Michael), and lastly, Rachel will be starting parental leave as she welcomes a new little one into her family. We want to take a moment to appreciate and recognize these team members' contributions in their time at Passion Fruit. We are thankful for everything they have done for our team and clients, and we wish them all the best on their new adventures!
As we’ve mentioned in prior posts (Year 1, Year 2, and Year 3), when Passion Fruit was founded in 2020, we wanted to do things differently by prioritizing people over profits, staying true to our core values (Passion, Authenticity, Integrity, and Quality), and making sure that we never lost sight of the impact our work has on the amazing nonprofit organizations we support.
Milestones
On April 1, 2023, we shared the following goals for Passion Fruit:
- Grow our revenue by 40%
- Grow our team to 20 awesome people by April 2024
- Give back by donating $30,000 to nonprofits
- Do another team retreat in person in 2024
- Create Delivery Team Lead roles
- Keep Client Satisfaction Rating above 4.9/5
- All vacation time used for all team members
- Host more local meetups
- Create client case studies
- Growth, not at the expense of others
- Personal development and opportunities to learn new skills
- Maintain work/life balance for our team
- Stay true to our values
In our fourth year of business we:
- Grew our team to 19 awesome people who demonstrate and live our core values every day
- Grew our revenue by 41% YoY
- Promoted two team leads on our delivery team!
- Worked with 54 unique nonprofit organizations
- Maintained a client satisfaction rating of 4.92/5
- Partnered with 28 new nonprofit organizations as clients
- We used all of our vacation time!
- Exceeded our goal of $30,000 and donated $35,000 to nonprofit organizations in 2023
- Improved our benefits offering to our team by implementing a transparent vacation increase plan, paid sabbaticals, parental leave top-up, and a $500 Health Spending Account for all employees. We also updated the learning budget to include collaboration for team members to meet in person to celebrate wins.
- Continued learning and increased our average to 5.7 Salesforce Certifications per team member
- Hosted our 4th in-person team retreat in March and have been able to host local meetups in Vancouver, Toronto, and Calgary, and industry conferences/events
- Continued to live by our values and remain authentic to who we are as a company and as individuals
- Presented our 1-3-10 year vision plan to our team
Lessons Learned
- Adapt to changes - This is the first year we lost 5 team members for various reasons and life changes. This was very hard. We also had 2 people, including Clair, go on maternity leave. We had to plan early for backup and start hiring earlier than anticipated. There were many times this year when changes happened overnight, and we had to find solutions without compromising the quality of our work or sacrificing other team members' work/life balance. With the introduction of the new Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud, the team had to adapt by learning new products and increasing knowledge sharing from within to support each other. Thank you, everyone, for your commitment to continuous learning and supporting each other through sharing best practices!
- Elevate and Delegate - With all of the changes and the growth of our team, this also meant it was time to elevate others and introduce Team Leads into our organizational structure. This was especially important to make sure that everyone on the team was supported and would have a more balanced workload. Being able to lean on each other in times of need is critical to keeping everyone happy at work. Thank you to Junette, our Director of Delivery, for promoting and supporting our new Team Leads, Cindy and Andy! We are extremely grateful for the work you do and appreciate all of the time spent making sure that everyone at Passion Fruit feels supported.
- Our team is incredible, and being in person is important - Coming out of the pandemic, we find a need for stability and a need to create the time and space to prioritize self-care. This is why at this year’s retreat, the theme was “Happy and Healthy”. We increased the frequency of in-person meetups this year and expanded our learning budget to include collaborations/celebrations so team members can organize their own meetups when they want. Every person on the team has their own unique talents to contribute and we are ever so grateful they decided to join us on this journey of helping nonprofits with technology. Ending our fourth year together in Loon Lake at our annual retreat was a great reminder of how lucky we are to have such an incredible team and how important it is to make the time to connect in person.
Closing Thoughts on Year Four
Similar to previous years, we end on a note of gratitude for how far we’ve come and excitement for what’s ahead. It feels surreal looking back at the past 4 years and seeing how far our team has come.
We are constantly in awe of our client's impact on the world and are grateful to be able to contribute toward supporting their missions. Being able to support the work they do to support those in need is what gives our team purpose. Thank you to all our clients for making the world a better place and being such terrific partners to work with.
Thank you to everyone at Passion Fruit who played a role in our success this past year: Junette, Reagan, Jenn, Lihan, Scott, Jim, Arjan, Cindy, Kevin, Courtney, Billy, Stacey, Krista, Suvane, Henry, Anderson, Michael, Rachel, Debbie, Andy, and Krislie.
As we head into our fifth year in business, we couldn’t be more proud of our team and thankful for your trust in us.
Cheers to Four Years!
Sincerely,
Ben & Clair
