Fairer Growth

A fairer working life for highly skilled workers

We identified a key junction in competitiveness between customer experience and the motivation of employees.

According to market research, experts in the field do not distinguish between IT sector companies as employers. Yet, clients distinguish between various companies based on client experience. What is it that creates the client experience? What is it that encourages employees to give their best?

We started carefully developing a business model that focuses on enhancing customer experience by increasing the motivation of highly skilled workers through increasing fairness in their working life and delivering a fairer company structure.

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The solution: Owners provide a better customer experience

A positive customer experience is largely created by the employees’ voluntary will to do their best and take ownership of the service provided. Employees need both the individual freedom and the responsibility to deliver this – that is, they need ownership as well as a community that supports each other in delivering our best.

One’s willingness to do one’s best is fundamental to success and this willingness has to do with a sense of fairness. We took this wisdom quite literally and turned the ownership structure of our company upside down: Our partners would own the vast majority of the shares in the company, because they are the experts that our success relies on.

Because our plan for a fairer company structure is a new concept, before the launch we made sure that our plan to extend the ownership of the company to the employee base through a partnership model was legally sound. The first Luoto partners joined us in the fall of 2017.   

Owners root for the best interest of customers

We continued to propose this model to some of the best minds in the field and we gained more partners and won more contracts and won an approved supplier position under the prestigious framework agreement of KELA (The Social Insurance Institution of Finland) with four other companies, which for a small and young company was a great achievement. 

This year, for the first time, we agreed together on the rules of ownership and our vision for the company. The Luoto partners, the majority owners and decision-makers of the company, are experienced professionals who lead the way by prioritising positive customer experience as our top objective. In addition, we made the cohesion of service provision, transparency and similarity of roles key principles in our community of experts.

High customer satisfaction behind the rapid growth

A high customer satisfaction rate enabled the rapid but sustainable growth of our community founded in principles of fairness. We were pleased to get the opportunity to serve a range of new customers from start-ups to listed companies and the public sector delivering interesting and important projects together. During the year we further improved our partnership model as we continued to add new partners and ended up more than doubling our revenue during the year.

The Best Growth Company of the Year

Our good work helped us through the global uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and carried us through the fall. We received great public recognition for our success when Kauppalehti (the Finnish equal of Financial Times) judged us The Best Growth Company in Finland. The fact that we were doing things well was also confirmed by the excellent customer feedback we received through our comprehensive customer satisfaction survey.

Ecosystem – a new direction for fairer growth

Our experience has shown in many ways that the ownership model serves customers and professionals better. The Financial Times’ “Capitalism: time for a reset” asks us to rethink our corporate models. We believe that the future of successful specialist companies lies in small, jointly owned units that genuinely have no hierarchy. The Great Resignation has shown us that people are searching for fairer working conditions.

We are sharing our partnership model for those who want to follow in our footsteps and opening up our projects to an ecosystem model, in which we can cooperate with other companies based on this fairness model in providing the best customer service and top of the class solutions. The model is sufficiently mature to be applied by others with the same entrepreneurial spirit.

Our unique model can be shared and it thrives

New fair companies have been established: Northcode, Kipinä Software, Vuolu Group, Asteroid and latest Trail Openers have joined ecosystem. We are thrilled to notice that new company structure serves also in new companies well and our early year growth rates can be multiplied. Best of all, our ecosystem shares value and focus to customer experience.