sa-fi pronouced [sar-fee], adjective. “a swahili word meaning cool, classy, fresh, fancy..” You get the picture.

Since SAFI Technologies Ltd started in early 2004, I as a founding Director have never ceased to be amazed at how exciting life in SAFI is and has been. We now find ourselves in 2008, four years on from our humble beginnings, and in that time SAFI has grown to a staff of 10 and has managed to have sustained revenue growth of at minimum 200% every year. Further to that, we can now boast a rather impressive client list, I wonder how many 4yr old start ups can claim to have foreign governments, defence forces, major nationwide retailers, local government and multi-national corporates (I’ll stop now…) on their client portfolio? Well we can. At this point I’m going to assume your time is as precious as mine, so I won’t even get into how exciting and how successful our US expansion is going…

I’m sure you’ve all heard the statistics about business startups, especially that one about how 90% of businesses fail within the first 2 years. As I’m sure you can imagine, I’ve had a fair number of people ask me how SAFI has managed to be in the 10% who make it through that fatal period, in fact, I think I probably get asked that question on a weekly basis. The funny thing is, depending on my state of mind I probably give a different answer every time!! However, there is one version of my answer that I appear to give more often than any other.

Now I really am no guru, I’ve got no letters after my name and I don’t have an MBA. So, the only wisdom I can offer (if you can call it that) is purely based on experience and perhaps what my father would like to call inherited business intuition.

So anyway, how did we manage to be in that elusive 10%? Well I can tell you now its through no one particular thing, but if there is one thing that is a crucial requisite it is this… having the right people, the right culture and a darn good attitude, or perhaps I should say… having safi people, a safi company culture and a darn safi attitude. (Ok, so that’s possibly not just one thing strictly speaking).

So there, I’ve baited you and I’ve set the scene for an exciting (?) blog, but guess what, I’ve just realised that this blog is long enough as it is. Personally I tend to lose concentration reading blogs that are any longer than a screen length, regardless of your screen resolution, I think its just the act of having to scroll that informs my limited attention span that I’ve read enough and there couldn’t possibly be anything more thats worthwhile reading.

So, soon to come will be blogs on having safi people, a safi culture and a safi attitude.