Yes, obviously not the calendar year. For historic reasons (I think our CFO wanted a holiday) Purrmetrix official year end falls in the summer holidays. So we’ve had an opportunity to pause and take stock of what we’ve done in the past 12 months. Turns out it’s quite a bit;
- we’ve doubled our revenue (and broken even)
- expanded our team of colleagues and contractors by 4
- secured 2 new research grants for building better building performance tools
- proudly graduated our first accelerator programme with Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership
- put more than 200 homes – from Jersey to Teeside – onto a platform that already hosts hundreds of schools and office buildings
- installed monitoring in the bulk of Coventry City Council’s facilities
- started working with our first dozen housing providers
- now logging more than 1 billion data points per year, so invested heavily in our server and database infrastructure
- data which are being put through our new integrations analysing heat loss (thanks to Build Test Solutions) condensation risk, comfort levels and air changes / ventilation rates
For a tiny, bootstrapped, team we are quite proud of ourselves. And we’re hugely excited about the year coming and the chance to deliver on many of the dozens of interesting projects in the pipeline. But, in the interests of balance* we should also look at the less fun things (aka ‘learning experiences’) from the year.
- The emotional toll of running a small business you care about. Oh man the bad days….
- The struggle of running a hardware business in a supply chain crunch (goodbye margin, it was nice knowing you)
- That under no circumstances should you rely on a business plan based on policy announcements. If it arrives, it’s jam, but your business case has to make sense on its own.
Whatever the ups and downs of our business, we’re facing a winter where energy efficient housing has never been more important to people’s health and welfare. Now, more than ever, we believe it’s important to measure building performance; to make sure that the right measures are going to the right homes and the people that need it most.
If you agree, or have ideas to help us build, please get in touch. There’s always a human on the end of the form.
Happy 2022!
*There’s a particular brand of LinkedIn bragging posts which make me want to curl up because of their hysterical insistence that everything is awesome. Life’s not that simple…