The Trek10 Way

Be friendly with clients, the team, and partners. Be yourself, don’t take yourself too seriously, and roll with the punches. For our clients, we want to be a calm, friendly island in the sea of chaos that modern IT often is. Working with us should be a pleasant experience and a sharp distinction from the typical IT consultant. Clients love working with us. And we all want to work in an environment that makes us happy.

Perception is critical with our clients and with internal team interactions… striking the balance is important. Everyone on the team is top-notch and should be very confident of their skills and expertise. Speak up and feel comfortable challenging norms. But it’s a big world, and there’s always something you don’t know. So retain humility and work to strike the balance.

Get things done, fast. We’re a scale up company, racing full speed to build something meaningful. And delivering value to our clients faster than our competitors is a huge differentiator. So focus on quick, practical solutions to problems, and be ruthlessly efficient in executing. Don’t build up too much technical debt, but err on the side of “the 80% solution” to get things done, working, and delivering real-world value to us or our clients.

Our expertise is our huge differentiator. We are super-focused, and in our niche we know more than anyone else... in the world. Pride yourself on getting insanely deep. Don’t know something? No problem, jump on the challenge to become a guru overnight. Pore over AWS docs, and interact early and often with experts at AWS and our partners to learn the things that aren’t documented. Always be learning.

The current state of the art in cloud, software dev, and IT is never good enough: always be on the lookout and ready to adopt the next big thing. Curiosity is at the core of what we do. Don’t worry about whether it will reduce our job… if we’re delivering value to the client, we’re doing the right thing. That said, always be cautious about whether the bleeding edge is appropriate for a client… don’t be blind to the downsides of new technologies.

Lots of consultants make their money by endlessly studying problems. Don’t get me wrong, planning and the big picture is important… but get it quickly, and move right away to start building. Demo, POC, mock up, then iterate… it’s so easy to build in AWS, so don’t wait. Agility is the number one reason companies move to the cloud. The fact that we can start building quickly shows how compelling that agility is and it sets us apart from a sea of talking head consultants and managed service providers.

We all want to work in a place where you feel respected and appreciated. Go out of your way to make new employees feel welcome, and take time out of your day to impart your knowledge on others or help them out. Keep your eye out for people having challenges or concerns… lend a hand, help them out, or help raise the issue to others.

We have a strong sense of responsibility to the professional community we exist in. To make the community great, we have to give back. We contribute talks, online content, and open source code, and collaborate with others on their ideas. An open community makes everyone stronger and we all like being part of something bigger than ourselves or even our company.