Those of you that know the history
of UP3 will know that Matt & I formed the company at the beginning
of 2016 after working together at TeamUltra for 5 years.
It
wasn’t easy to step out on our own and we really did start from scratch
with our own money, our experience, and an unwavering belief in the
platform we had worked with for so long. On day 1 we had no customers
and no staff but we knew that there was a massive opportunity to build a
business in the UK around ServiceNow provided we could establish
ourselves quickly and differentiate ourselves sufficiently.
We
began in earnest in March 2016. We registered as a ServiceNow Sales and
Services partner and set about trying to find a customer. We set
ourselves the target of rising up out of Registered partner status and
into Bronze within our first year.
After the initial euphoria of
getting started we experienced some dark days as the enormity of what we
had taken on occasionally crashed in on us – we reached out to our
respective networks to let them know what we were doing and had lunch
and coffee with as many people as we could. One of those lunches; led to
our first piece of work.
ServiceNow
were short of Engagement Managers and needed someone to run a
QuickStart implementation for a new customer. QuickStart implementations
take the base out of the box ServiceNow product for IT Service
Management and over a period of 10-12 weeks run the customer through the
process of defining their requirements for Incident, Problem, Change,
CMDB and Request then standing up the instance, configuring the
requirements, loading the data and getting them live and operational. It
wasn’t something that they would normally ask a partner to do but given
our relationships and experience we were considered a safe pair of
hands and ServiceNow offered any support that we might need to get the
job done. In all our discussions with ServiceNow prior to this point
they had always been incredibly supportive of us setting up a new
dedicated partner business but this was the real lifeline that we needed
and we grabbed it. It was to be the catalyst for everything that
followed.
Because of that implementation we established a great
working relationship with a customer that was looking to use ServiceNow
to support request processes across business IT. We helped them to
develop a roadmap for ServiceNow which we then delivered together. We
were now in a position to hire technical staff
and think about growing. Two more QuickStarts followed and each time,
with ServiceNow’s full support, we retained the customer and helped them
to define and deliver against their roadmap. One of those customers in
particular represented a perfect fit for UP3 – they had the vision and
the determination to position ServiceNow at the heart of their business
operations with a multi-year roadmap extending way beyond IT. They
understood what it would take to do this but also the huge benefits they
would realise from modernising their applications and processes. They
were exactly the reason we had gone into business and started UP3 in the
first place.
By the beginning of 2017, coming into our fourth
quarter, we had far surpassed our first year forecast as well as the
number of deployments and CSAT scores that we needed to achieve the
coveted Bronzed partner status. All we needed to do was go back to
school and sit our exams. A few of our team had been working with
ServiceNow since before the days of Certified System Administrator and
Implementation Specialist but we needed the certifications to qualify.
We dug out our certificates, we did our homework and we sat the exams,
we achieved the requisite product competencies and in April 2017 we were
awarded with our Bronze Services Partner status.
Despite being competitive people – Bronze felt pretty damn good and we are now well on our way to Silver!
