One of our strengths at Innovia is our internal investments. We tell our customers that we are looking for long-term relationships with fair-minded people. To support long-term relationships, a company needs to plan to be around for a long time. At Innovia, we have a 5-year and 20-year plan. It tracks our planned growth, areas of expansion, and where best to invest in the company. I thought this would be a good time to talk about a few of Innovia’s investment strategies.

In 2022 we created Innovia University. If you are in business, you know the difficulties in finding qualified staff or any staff for that matter. This has been a problem in the technology world for many years and in the NAV/Business Central world, it has been an acute problem for a long time. We decided last year that it was time to “grow our own” staff. This year we have created an internal school that is taking people directly out of college, hiring them full-time, and spending the next 4 months training these folks to become Application Consultants. We know that to build good staff we must invest in people from the ground up. Our hope is to grow our internal school to provide training for all levels of application consultants and developers over the years.

Technology changes at a pace that is very hard to keep up with, even for a company specializing in technology. Innovia decided that we needed to dedicate a senior staff member to that role for the purpose of evaluating what Microsoft is doing going forward, working with the ISVs as they improve their offerings, and looking for new areas that can help our customers. To that end, we have promoted Chad Williams into the role of Chief Technology Officer. While many companies would look at this role as just overhead, we see it as necessary for the growth and sustainability of Innovia. Long-term relationships with our customers mean that we are always able to provide them with the best advice for the next technology that will help them grow their business.

Another area of investment is acquisitions. Innovia’s acquisition strategy is one of  targeted and strategic acquisitions. We look for other partners of similar size that provide us with additional highly qualified staff and a solid customer base. When an acquisition is completed, all the staff of the acquired company join the Innovia family and are integrated into our project teams. Good acquisitions can be a large investment but also can provide growth opportunities to help Innovia better serve all the customers.  

Great businesses always invest in themselves with the goal being to provide better service and products to their customers. At Innovia we strive for that same goal. We invest heavily to help grow our staff, our company, and our customers.