Q4 was recently named as one of Canada’s Emerging Growth Companies by PROFIT Magazine, as part of the 10th annual PROFIT HOT 50 ranking and awards program.
Canada’s Emerging Growth Companies are a tiny elite. Most of the tens of thousands of businesses launched each year in this country fail within a few years. Even among the survivors, only a precious few expand at anything close to the blistering pace of the PROFIT HOT 50, whose revenue growth averaged 1,007% over the past two years.
In spite of sectoral downturns, qualified worker shortages, prospects’ reluctance to buy from a young firm, and currency fluctuations, every HOT 50 firm at least doubled its revenue from 2006 through 2008, and 13 grew by at least 1,000%. The extraordinary performance of the PROFIT HOT 50 goes beyond the top line. Fully 70% were already in the black in 2008.
Read more…
We’ve been so busy the last couple of weeks we haven’t been able to announce a new addition to Q4.
Sheryl Joyce, joined us on April 14, as Director of Marketing Communications and is responsible for all marketing and communications initiatives such as blogging, webinars, events and best practices. Sheryl has twelve years experience in the capital markets industry, nine of those specializing in investor relations. Sheryl brings years of experience in investor relations and corporate communications and maintains well-established relationships with sell-side analysts, institutional investors, investment bankers and transfer agents.
Sheryl has hit the ground running with a number of blog posts (see below) and managed our popular webinar on IR website best practices. Sheryl is also behind our new corporate twitter profile @q4websystems and is active in LinkedIn and our Q4 fan page on Facebook. Be sure to say hi next time you see her online!
Here are some of Sheryl’s recent posts:
Ok, it’s been almost a year but nonetheless, this is officially the 2nd year into implementing the Rockefeller Habits at Q4. We kicked off our annual and Q1 2009 priorities yesterday with the whole company and now that we’ve gone through the process a few times we seem to be much more efficient at it.
I think what I enjoy most about the process for implementing the Rockefeller Habits is that it’s actually very similar to using Agile processes for developing software:
- Focus on the highest value items first
- Make progress on those items
- Have a retrospective
- Find new (and usually more difficult) problems
- Repeat 1 – 4 often
Read more…
Last year was a great year for all of us here at Q4. We officially launched Q4 PRESS and also launched a major version of Q4 WEB that included RSS feeds, Google Maps, photo galleries and a host of other improvements.
Anyone who has worked for company experiencing explosive growth can appreciate the difficulties that come with it and the the importance of maintaining focus with respect to corporate objectives. Chris Jones posted back in July with respect to our adoption of the Rockefeller Habits as well as our re-adoption of Scrum as a way to maintain alignment across the company.
Since Q2 2008, we have been living our values. The single most important value we realize at Q4 is a dedication to constant improvement. Read more…
Q4 Web Systems is looking for senior .Net developers with Agile/TDD or XP experience to develop software for our suite of web based disclosure products. The primary responsibility will be to maintain the core product code for our Q4 WEB and Q4 PRESS products. This includes application architecture design and development accounting for new releases, rollouts, upgrades and ensuring scalability.
Q4 Web Systems is an Agile organization ( using Scrum) and to be considered, the candidates must be able to demonstrate the qualities associated with working in an Agile environment. You must be able to think on your feet, adapt to change and be involved with defining and implementing solutions to business issues and value.
You may view the full description here or contact us to apply.
As Jason mentioned in his previous post, we are getting ready to kick off a busy summer quarter. With this, we have a new set of priorities and goals that we want to achieve. This is going to be our second quarter implementing the Rockefeller habits, we learned a lot the first time around and will be aiming to improve the way we track and score our progress.
One of the biggest changes we are making this time around is in the area of product development, implementations and support. Historically we have divided our development efforts into 2 distinct teams, a Product team that focused on building new features for our products and an implementation team that worked on implementing our products for clients and supporting those installations. As part of our recent re-adoption of Scrum project management, the entire group of developers were given the task of deciding on what kind of team structure we should work under. To make a long story short, the team decided on one group after much discussion, but the really great thing I’d like to point out is that we were given the option to chose for ourselves, this shows an amazing level of trust that is often times hard to find in the corporate world.
Photo credit: roy_mac_an_iarla
Another big change is that new team will be sitting together in one room, we feel this will not only help us as a group work together, but also to foster creative thinking and continually improve our products and processes. This also allows us to learn and feed off each other on a day to day basis. Learning is a never ending job for software developers and being surrounded by other smart people makes learning easy and fun!
We are all really excited about the coming months, and excited to be working on more great features for our clients.
Q4 Web Systems is looking for a kick-ass senior .NET developer. If you are a technology junkie and your idea of fun is spending a Saturday night reading about Team Foundation Server 2008 or playing with Silverlight 2.0 just because it’s cool, we want you!
You will become assimilated into our product development team where you will be responsible for the product advancement of our 2 application suites. You will participate in design and architecture reviews, code reviews and write code with automated testing in mind.
Q4 offers a great environment as well as competitive salary and benefits.
Job Requirements:
- 7+ years enterprise application development experience with 2+ years in architecting software platforms
- 4+ years experienced with .NET/C#, ASP .NET, distributed services
- Strong interest in Design Patterns, Refactoring, TDD
- Solid understanding of object oriented vs. component design
- .NET Application deployment methodologies with N-Tiered systems, redundant/failover Windows technologies
- Excellent Understanding of FSDL including best development practices, documentation, QA processes and deployment strategies
- Windows 2003, SQL server 2005 and IIS 6.0 as it relates to application development and scalability
- A willingness to promote and ensure a common understanding of user stories
- Prominent participation in the planning, design, and implementation phases of high level concepts as well as user stories
- Ability to work well within a team of developers
- BS in Computer Science
- Secure application development
- Application stress testing
How to apply: Send your resume to careers@q4websystems.com Only suitable candidates will be contacted for an interview.
I was reading an interesting blog post the other day about how to live in the present when you feel overwhelmed and how that can affect your personal and professional life.
The article talks about the 3 states a person generally lives in at any given time; past, future and present. I’m sure just about everyone uses their cell phone while driving, or has the news on TV while eating dinner and while checking email on their blackberry. All of this multi-tasking leads to a drop in focus, drop in productivity as well as an increase in stress.
What I admire about my friends here at Q4 is that we have always taken the approach of living “in the now”. There is always temptation to immediately react to any problem and I have personally been guilty of leaping before looking, but here are a few ways we handle “living in the now”
- On our white board in our work area we have a motto for all to see. Stop. Think. React.
- In our group chat when anyone feels we are going down a rabbit hole, someone posts “Stop. Think. React”
- We reiterate this message in meetings
I have personally found this approach very useful, even in my personal life, but the greatest benefit is the gain in productivity and enjoyment at work since we are all on-board with ‘looking before leaping’
Something so simple makes a big difference in both our productivity and how we interact with each other at work. Stop. Think. React.