It’s one of the greatest challenges for any growing company: how do you take on more work and continue to deliver excellent service without running your team into the ground? This was exactly the question I was struggling with earlier this year as I watched our project list expand, and saw the stress levels on the team begin to grow.
Thankfully, we found a solution! We decided to partner with Pantheon for our Drupal and Wordpress infrastructure needs so we could focus on what we do best, helping our clients do great things!
The decision to work with Pantheon was easy in many ways. They have a great reputation. They’re big enough to handle everything we need but not so big that we risk being lost in the mix. Their strengths perfectly match our needs and we are familiar enough with their leadership team to know they would be great partners.
That said, we still had to think some things through before making the switch. TEN7 has always been proud to offer our own infrastructure solution through our open source platform, Flight Deck. We also have an incredibly talented Platform Architect, Tess Flynn, who has been able to work magic for our clients, keeping their websites fast and secure. We had been able to deliver on our promise to clients in house, so was it really necessary to partner with Pantheon?
The more we considered this question, the more we realized the time was right to make the switch. There were a few factors that moved us to this decision:
- Scaling People is Hard: The only way we could continue to grow as a company without outsourcing was to hire a whole team of talented Platform Architects. We tried. We learned that it’s not easy to do and that it would pull resources away from other client services.
- Our Clients Deserve the Best: Rock solid infrastructure is critical to helping clients accomplish their goals. While we had always been able to deliver, we knew that scaling our efforts would jeopardize our ability to continue providing that same level of service. This move provides them with more reliability and flexibility going forward.
- We Care About Our Team’s Mental Health: Our team members aren’t ones to complain. They will do whatever it takes to get the job done. While that’s a great quality in many ways, it’s not always ideal for mental health. As we kept adding new clients and projects, the stress around keeping those sites up and running was accumulating. Website monitoring is a 24/7 endeavor. Our DevOps team members had to know everything about every website to make sure nothing fell through the cracks. That’s simply not sustainable long term for a team like ours.
Taking all of this into account, we made a decision to switch to Pantheon. It took us about six months to migrate everything onto the platform, but it has been a rather seamless transition. Our clients didn’t have to worry about a thing and the Pantheon team has been great to work with!
While there was some internal concern at first about the change, I can already tell it was the right thing to do. This move frees our team to focus on our clients’ needs. It allows Tess to use her talents for higher level strategy and architecture work, an area where she is uniquely talented. It also gives us peace of mind as we continue our growth efforts, knowing we can handle the new work that comes our way.
Offloading infrastructure to Pantheon has been like clearing the weeds from our workflow. We have renewed focus, vision and energy as we tackle problems that are even more squarely in our wheelhouse. We’re ready to continue our growth, and we are able to leverage our core talents to Make Things That Matter.
