How do PERK's 2013 achievements turn into a better future?

Dear team members, customers, partners and suppliers

I'm glad to summarize the previous year for you, and wish you all the best in the upcoming 2014. Let me then go through all the small achievements that we have accomplished this year.

Starting with the fact that although we have entered 2013 as the leader of educational niches for Polish Investment Advisor and Stock Exchange Broker licenses, we didn’t seem to have an easy time. I’d like to remind that only thanks to our successful public campaigns and influence on the legislator, we have finally won the battle for dominating these two licenses and therefore can uninterruptedly offer our initial products. An acknowledgement here must be made to Michał Berezowski from Cube PR who has effectively helped us pass through that time of trouble. If you look for a brilliant PR specialist in the next year, I’d honestly recommend you get in touch with this guy.

On May 9th, we have finally introduced our PERK 2.0 web service - a solid technical foundation for future evolution of the educational platform. I heard a lot of positive opinions about this job, but believe me we strive to develop this platform much more (Anyway big thanks to: Lena Rzatkiewicz, Amadeusz Wróbel and our best IT friends from Accesto: Michał Kurzeja and Piotr Gołofit without them we wouldn’t have gone so far).

Not much later, we moved to our new office which is just 200 meters from Warsaw’s Central Metro Station. That’s funny, but after a move from a small box in Zebra Tower, we have started here with only 17 sq. meters and 4 seats. After six months, we are recruiting more talent and have grown to 44 sq. meters that are going to serve as a great workplace for our 11 full-time team members. And well, I wish myself that by the end of 2014 there will be at least 20 of us!

Another key moment in the previous year happened in June and July. We have acquired our first angel investor - Krzysztof Szczawinski and started close cooperation with ExamTutor - our first institutional partner - that is about to provide another 5 educational programs, which are going to be distributed through our platform.

I’m also very happy to inform you that we have recruited our first foreign team member - Robin Singh - an IT guy from India. With the help of another four software engineers and designers he is going to help us develop a world’s leading educational platform. Robin is a graduate in Computer Science from Panjab University and has gained his experience working with US’ and New Zealand’s start-ups. I believe that with this pioneer step we are setting a good trend for both Polish and European start-ups or small companies to open themselves for talents from across the world.

Finally, at the beginning of December we have signed a contract for further development of our edu platform. The money will be injected into our platform from the EU Program - Innovative Economy. Moreover, at the end of December we have beaten our last year’s revenue level, so that’s why I can see our future only in bright colours.

Therefore, I’d like to shortly sum up the passing year: PERK was backed with financing of over 250 thousand euros, and moderately increased its revenues, launched only one new edu-program, but the team is already working on 6 new ones, we are finishing to grow our staff up to 11 team members, and we have grown the group of content creators, and part-time teachers to 22. I am sure all these memorable moments and hard work will definitely pay in the future.

You may also note that - despite being located in Warsaw, Poland - in 2013 we introduced English as the main corporate language. I strongly believe that this decision will accelerate our successful international appearance. There is still a lot of tough work ahead of us.

I wish you all that the next year brings you further positive achievements both in your private and business lives. I hope you will make dozen times more good than wrong decisions, you will find oceans rather than lakes of energy, and that you will simply have way more fun than in the last year. Have a nice New Year’s night as well!

Mark Bain

CEO of PERK