# APAX Strategy

## Current perceived strategy for growth
* Every hour worked must be billable unless absolutely necessary
* More billable hours means more revenue
* Unbillable hours means less revenue
* This is how APAX defines "efficiency"
* Increase APAX margins by hiring cheaper, less-experienced engineers
* Our only way to grow this approach is do ***more*** of it
* More projects
* More employee capacity

## Scaling current approach to $10M
* A pod is roughly **$1M** in yearly **revenue**
* 50 weeks * 32 hrs/wk * 4 employees * $150/hr
* You need **10** pods
* *This assumes each pod is operating at **100%** efficiency*

## Efficiency as a metric
* There seems to be ***no strategy*** for assigning less-skilled, less-efficient engineers to certain types of project phases / contracts:
* APAX is sometimes ***rewarded*** for using less-efficient junior devs
* Matinenance
* Flexible budget
* Flexible timeline
* APAX is sometimes ***penalized*** for using less-efficient junior devs
* Tech debt
* Less confidence in effort estimations which negatively impacts:
* Finite budget projects
* Strict deadlines
* The way APAX enforces efficiency:
* Discourages internal hours
* Incentivises APAX to use junior devs which:
* Decreases quality
* Decreases predicability
* This is not efficiency and we need to ***stop calling it that***
* Maybe call it "*billable quotient*"

## Re-defining efficiency
* Someone is more efficient if they output the same value in **less** time
* Being *more* efficient would **not** affect revenue with a *static* team size:
* We'd do more projects but make the same amount of money
* Incentives for efficiency:
* Competitive estimates which increases sales
* Maintaining clients
* Work toward the inflection point of billing for hours we didn't work
* Fixed price contracts
* This enables a **different** kind of scaling for APAX which doesn't require hiring

## Project inefficiencies and lack of process
* APAX throughput is ***capped*** by the # of senior devs
* Every project must have a senior dev
* At least **50%** of a project's timeline is blocked by senior devs
* Estimates
* Blocks sales and the development cycle
* No technical review is done of architecture or technology choices which:
* Decreases predictability
* Leads to tech debt which decreases employee satisfaction / retention
* Project setup has zero process or restrictions
* Often starting with zero code
* Re-inventing the wheel:
* Inefficient
* Leads to knowledge silos
* This negatively affects sales, growth and employee satisfaction / retention.

## New metrics needed
* Predictability
- How much of a project is reusable code?
* Estimate confidence
* How far off were we?
* Estimate efficiency
- Are we getting faster AND more predicatble estimates?