A Series of Forbes Insights Profiles of Thought Leaders Changing the Business Landscape
"Capitalism demands the best of every man – his rationality – and rewards him accordingly. It leaves every man free to choose the work he likes, to specialize in it, to trade his product for the products of others, and to go as far on the road of achievement as his ability and ambition will carry him."--Ayn Rand, For The New Intellectual
What is a Lithuanian-born, Ayn Rand-quoting, Computer Science and software engineer doing to re-think the software design and development consulting business? Aurimas Adomavicius and his four partners (all Lithuanian-born) created Devbridge Group to not only bring their clients a higher level of craftsmanship in building software solutions, but to also provide an unusual business model that focuses on providing full transparency in its billing and customer service.
“We've been in business for six and a half years now. We consider ourselves to be an engineering partner to our clients and focus very heavily on enabling businesses through technology,” says Adomavicius. Clients come to us because we guarantee delivery of a digital project to market in a defined time and budget and we have a proven method and workflow to do so.”
Devbridge positions itself as an international software design and development company that builds comprehensive, custom solutions for enterprise mobile and web, with elegant design aesthetics to deliver exceptional results for category leaders in manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, and retail. The company produces more than 100,000 engineering hours annually, building custom cloud-based and mobile solutions for mid-market and enterprise clients such as The Art Institute of Chicago. While growing fast, the business was bootstrapped from the beginning and has yet to seek outside financing.
“We started as consultants. All of the partners in the business worked in different areas of the technology industry. We worked for different organizations, and started consulting at nights and on weekends. At some point in time, we said we have enough work that we could open our office and quit our jobs; just start doing this on our own and have our own business,” says Adomavicius. There were five of us when we started the company in 2008. Since then we've doubled in size each year and now have 125 employees in three offices.”
Perhaps unique to the category and among consulting services in general, Devbridge believes in complete transparency in the way they work with customers and how they bill for their work. “We actually have applications and tools that we built for ourselves that show our clients how we operate on a day-to-day basis and how we guarantee the delivery of the product.
The application is called, PowerUp – it allows clients to see the staffers assigned to their project as well as the time people are putting in on a day-to-day basis, right down to 15 minute increments. With this level of transparency, the company believes they can generate the same value to their client as a large consultancy that may be pricing themselves based on value. Devbridge is going to be a much more attractive partner for the company long-term, because customers will know that they are just as interested in solving their problems, all at a fraction of the cost.
The innovative service also helps its clients become better designers and developers themselves by creating a different development model that they can teach others to use.
“The evolution of the industry has been what is often referred to as ‘waterfalled;’ where everyone is building software in a linear fashion. While this approach works short-term, we see the waterfall failing right around 1,500 man-hours. This, then, indicates there’s a certain complexity level beyond which linear design of product does not work as well anymore because the assumptions no longer apply by the time you get through three-quarters of the project,” says Adomavicius.
Devbridge has also created a process they've branded as the “Blueprint.” It combines lean product design of story-mapping sessions, user workflow sessions and rapid prototyping onsite that trains clients on how to run these sessions as well.
Adomavicius’ journey to business builder and American capitalist started in Lithuania. After finishing high school, he returned to the United States to secure a college degree in computer science with a minor in mathematics at Roosevelt University in Chicago. It’s a classic immigrant tale. “Life wasn't all that great in Lithuania when I was growing up. My parents struggled despite being highly educated. My mother was an art teacher and my father a physicist. There was a lot of poverty and not many opportunities. It was my mother’s mission to get me out of Lithuania and expose me to opportunities in the United States. Now I’m a U.S. citizen and very proud of it,” said Adomavicius.
Like many in his circumstance, he was going to school full time while also working full time. After graduating, he got his first job at a small company where he was one of three people in their IT department. This allowed him to be exposed to a wide range of technology challenges and solutions for businesses.
“I started consulting because people asked me to help them. At first, I did it for friends, then people I knew … then I was getting experience working for small businesses and consulting on the side at the same time. Once I was at that company for five years, I had met my partners," says Adamovicius.
Like one of Ayn Rand’s characters, Adomavicius and his partners founded their own business based on the shared belief in fighting back against mediocrity. “That’s our mentality in terms of how we price ourselves and how we position our process. It’s ingrained in the culture of the company that we’re very accountable. We’re very transparent, and we’re very meticulous about data analytics. As a result, every single year that we've been in business, we've been profitable, and for the last two years, we've had a profit margin of over 20 percent,” says Adomavicius.
It’s gratifying to see that the American entrepreneurial capitalist ideal is alive and well, constantly renewed through the efforts of immigrants like Adomavicius who work hard to build a new life in the US. “I believe there’s so much opportunity in this country, if you just want to work and apply yourself … as long as you have that intolerance to mediocrity,” says Adomavicius.
What’s ahead for Devbridge?
“We have large, challenging, but achievable goals. We want to be a 1,000-person organization by 2020. And the reason we want to do that is because with size, we can solve bigger and bigger problems,” concluded Adomavicius.
