History of Agileana

2007 - Formation

Santa Monica, California - Blake Newman was working in sales for a Los Angeles based web design firm (Daniel Burns Design) catering to Hollywood elite. The company's founder was born in Brazil and out-sourced the design and development work to his contacts back home. While 80% of the new clients had a budget of less than $5,000, Burns would not accept contracts less than $5,000. Blake saw a gap in the needs of clients versus the minimum acceptable criteria of his employer.

In the meantime, Andrea Melo was living in Colombia waiting for the birth of Blake and Andrea's second son, Nico. During one of Blake's visits to Colombia, he asked Andrea if she knew any head-hunters in Colombia with contacts in the technology business. Andrea passed that message along to her sister, Pili, who was working with a car dealership. The very next day, Pili was visited at her office by Luis Cuellar, who was representing a tech firm and had provided Pili with training on the information system. Pili was impressed with Luis' customer service skills and referred him to Blake.

Later that week, Luis came over to Blake and Andrea's apartment in Cali. Over a couple bottles of wine, Blake described to Luis his vision for a new web design firm with sales occurring in the United States and production happening in Colombia. Over the course of the next week, Luis introduced Blake to several potential employees including Felipe Ceballos, Manuel Otálvaro, Pablo Monroy, and Ricardo Infante. Within two weeks, Luis and Blake formed a partnership under the brand name Artists Cafe. With the concurrence and cooperation of Daniel Burns, Blake referred new clients with ultra-low budgets to his newly formed startup while retaining the higher-potential prospects for Daniel Burns Design.

Over the course of the next few months, Blake realized that most of the incoming clients were starting new businesses of their own and needed help ranging from strategy to branding to web design and development and business modeling. These startups needed incubation and accleration on a bootstrap budget. Blake quickly rebranded the company from Artists Cafe to inQbation.

2008 - Beginning of the Great Recession

inQbation launched its own website (www.inQbation.com) as well as its first two client websites for Reel English Coach and NFL professional football player, Adalius Thomas who helped the New England Patriots win the super bowl that same month. inQbation designed and delivered more than a dozen new websites that year and their annual revenue was $75,000. Felipe Ceballos also joined us in early 2008. Felipe has been become a pillar of the company.

Starting up a business is difficult. Indeed, close to 80% of small businesses fail in their first year. Of those 20% that survive their first year, 80% are likely to fail in their first five years. So, only about 5% of all small businesses live to see its 5-year anniversary. The single largest point of failure is a lack of cash flow. Another challenge with new businesses, particularly among people and partners who have never worked together before is the life cycle of Team formation: Form, Storm, Norm, Perform. The company observed a lot of chaos, conflicting ideas, immature project management, and poor estimates. inQbation was struggling.

By early 2008, Blake also started to notice a distinct slow-down of new business inquiries. He observed a series of unfortunate economic indicators including bank failures, insurance company failures, a credit crisis, and instability in the stock market. Blake predicted an economic slowdown, which would directly affect his ability to grow the business. At the same time, Blake also observed a brilliant social media campaign by U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama. Blake predicted that Senator Obama was likely to win the U.S. presidential election and if elected, would invest heavily in federal government websites. So, Blake made the strategic direction to seek a job within the U.S. government, understand how government contracting works, and get as close to the White House as possible.

In July 2008, Blake accepted a job as a GS-14 Public Affairs Specialist and director of www.ICE.gov. He left inQbation in the hands of Luis and Pablo. Meanwhile, Blake oversaw a team of 5 contractors responsible for the operations and maintenance (O&M) of that website.

2009 - Blake got Fired

Blake also discovered that the Department of Homeland Security spent $1.25M per year for that team of 5 contractors to provide O&M. Blake found this shocking given his experience bootstrapping companies on shoestring budget. He knew that open source software such as WordPress, Drupal, PHP, and Wikimedia would allow the government to save millions of dollars in web operations. Blake constantly and passionately raised his concerns about wasteful spending. In July 2009, three days before his first anniversary and the end of his one-year probation period, Blake was fired from ICE.GOV. On the way out, Blake thought, "if you can't beat them, then join them." He vowed to resurrect inQbation and seek government contracting opportunities.

By the end of 2009, inQbation had doubled is revenue from $75,000 to $150,000.

2010 - inQbation got Traction

Through Blake's obsession with search engine optimization (SEO), inQbation's website produced a lot of traffic and new business inquiries. In February, 2010, Blake received a call from Scott Fletcher of REI Systems. REI had a major contract with GSA and OMB for the White House. While REI was a highly technical firm, it lacked skills in web design and usability. Blake offered to perform a design exercise to demonstrate inQbation's skills and abilities in web design. So, over the course of a week, Blake and Luis gathered the team and produced a series of exceptional designs for performance.gov. Impressed by inQbation's design skills, REI systems entered into a subcontract with inQbation for the design of several high profile websites including Data.gov, usaspending.gov, and the itdashboard.gov.

Knowing that design and project management works best with a close working relationship with stakeholders, Blake met with the White House CIO Vivek Kundra at the Executive Office of the President (EEOB). It took Blake less than 2 years to reach his goal of getting as close to the White House as possible.

During this time, Blake realized that the design work they were doing for REI systems was only the tip of the iceberg. REI Systems was generating hundreds of millions of dollars in federal IT work while inQbation was generating only hundreds of thousands of dollars in UX/UI design work. So, feeling emboldened by their work with REI Systems, GSA, OMB, and the White House, Blake started actively seeking direct contracts with the federal government.

Blake went to FedBizOpps (FBO), which is where many government agencies post their Requests for Proposals (RFP). The first time Blake went to FBO, which is the first time he ever wrote and submitted a proposal for the government, he won that contract with the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS). ACUS was being resurrected after a 12-year hiatus. It was very much like a West-coast startup that Blake worked with in the beginning of the company. ACUS needed to stand up a website in 6 weeks and did not have a large budget. Blake bid $80,000 for the job and guaranteed a 6-week delivery. Many larger companies protested our win claiming that it could not be done for less than $250,000 and 6 months. We got the job done on time and within budget. ACUS continues to be our client after a 10-year relationship.

2010 was a pivotal year for inQbation and its revenue quadrupled from $150,000 to $600,000.

2011-2013 - Growth Hacking

inQbation saw rapid and steady growth during these transition years. Juan (Flynn) Obando joined us in 2011, who has significantly contributed to the company culture and personality. A great addition to our team.

By 2012, annual revenue was exceeded $1,000,000 and employee count grew from a handful of people to over twenty-five professionals. We started doing more Drupal work than WordPress serving clients such as the Fulbright Scholar Program, Environmental Exchange Network, American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery, U.S. Department of the Army, NASA, Zuckerman Law, and several startups. We discovered during these years that fast growth comes with growing pains and it stressed our abilities to recruit, hire, and train as well as manage projects. As we hired quickly, we revisited the concept of Team formation. Given our growth in federal government contracting, we began hiring more from within the United States.

2014 - Growing Pains

In January 2014, one of our favorite people - Lucas Torres - joined the company. Also that month, inQbation won a contract with the U.S. Department of State through Georgetown University. It started out as a small migration from Cold Fusion to Drupal but more than doubled in size over the course of the first year. By the end of 2014, we found ourselves overwhelmed with new clients, new work, new employees, and significant growth pains. We were also following somewhat outdated models of project management and software development. Blake realized we needed a change. Blake started to introduce the concept of agile software development to the team and initiated our agile transformation. In December 2014, Blake made the strategic decision to shut down the company, gracefully end relationships with 80% of our clients and employees, and then focus on the 20% of our clients and employees that embraced our new agile approach.

In 2014, Blake also planned, financed, and executed the Startup Cali Weekend Hackathon where he produced and delivered www.calicasa.com a real estate marketplace for residents of Cali, Colombia.

2015 - Agile Transformation

In January 2015, inQbation re-emerged as Agileana - a lean, agile, software development firm. A new age had begun! We were 80% smaller and leaner but, by mid-year, our revenue was the same as that of 2014. Clients were happier, customer satisfaction higher, employee morale higher, employee compensation doubled, and we had achieved long-term stability with fewer, bigger clients. Headcount dropped from about 30 employees to 7 and our client base dropped from about 40 clients to about 4. This was very deliberate and, in hindsight, one of the best moves we had made since to relocating to Washington DC from Santa Monica, California.

We picked up Virginia Alvarez, who quickly became one of the most valuable employees and project managers the company has ever seen. We also changed ownership of the company. Luis and Blake resigned as partners and Andrea took ownership of the company. As we emerged from inQbation, Agileana became an woman owned small business (WOSB).

Another significant win for Agileana was our award on the 18F Agile Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA), which was a GSA and White House initiative to implement an agile transformation of its own within the federal government IT contracting space. Agileana was one of 17 vendors awarded to the Agile BPA and most of the other winners were large businesses with 10x-100x the number of employees and annual revenue. We competed effectively against much larger and more mature companies and this 18F Agile BPA put us on the map and radar within the DC beltway.

2016

2016 was another year of continued growth and maturity. Blake met Shefali Naik at a Scaled Agile (SA) conference and workshop and was so impressed by her interactions and engagement that he invited her to join the company. Shefali's onboarding was a game-changer for us. She really helped catapult the company forward in terms of technology, project management, maturity, and agile transformation.

2017

In early 2017, we picked up a sizable operations and maintenance contract with the Federal Communications Commission. This, along with our Georgetown University and State Department contracts gave us continued stability and increased financial forecasting. FCC was another step forward in our maturity and growth as a company.

2018-2019

We have continued to grow within, develop relationships with existing contracts, and attract and hire highly qualified employees.

2020

Our most notable accomplishment was the design, development, and implementation of The Agile Podcast and accompanying YouTube channel. Preparing for this initial podcast, which dedicated its first season to the Drupal 7 End of Life challenge, prepared us for helping organizations migrate out of Drupal 7. Other notable accomplishments were picking up key employees such as Gordon Makely, Carlos Fernandez, Addie Wolcott, Tiffany Newman, Hans Anderson, and Christian Le Fournis. We took our company processes a bit further in maturity with our participation in the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) certification process.

2021

A lot of our work in 2021 continues to be IT modernization, cloud migration, Drupal migration, operations and maintenance of government websites. We are delighted to have picked up Benji Damron as one of our newest key employees. We also welcome Henry Sabogal to the team.