It’s always fun when Spotify recaps your year of listening. Short of doing a full blown analysis of why certain artists got so much eartime, it does prompt you to look back on why certain songs or artists got into heavier rotation. A trip to Jamaica in my case meant that reggae topped my chart. Inspired by my Spotify recap, I thought it would be fun to recap my past year here at Rustici having just wrapped up my first year as Managing Director. I couldn’t help but make a list of my top ten highlights over the past 12 months, thanks to the amazing people who work here and the solid running start from my predecessor, TJ.
In (mostly) chronological order:
- We welcomed JCA Solutions into the Rustici family. From an acquisition standpoint, I don’t think we could have wished for more. George and Dottie fit right in lending their knowledge and standards expertise and quickly dominated the #office-games Slack channel. We’ve also been spending time getting to know the new customers that came to us from JCA and trying to make that transition as smooth as possible.
- We celebrated our first fully virtual (and hopefully last fully remote) Thanksmas and even included a visit from Father Thanksmas. It was memorable, but here’s hoping for less screens and more in person Thanksmases in the future.
- I built my first budget with the help of our fantastic finance team. This was a big challenge for my right brained tendencies, but also a great crash course into all facets of the business.
- We held our first virtual Hackathon and created some killer prototypes, from a customer portal to enhanced onboarding tools, all while jamming out to turntable.fm.
- Finally! We transitioned back to our office after a long hiatus due to both COVID and the great coffee flood. This is by far my favorite highlight from the past 12 months. Getting to meet many of our new hires from 2020 and having face to face (masked of course) chats is something that can’t be recreated. The Thursday burrito train is in full effect and makes it the best day of the week for sure. And I can’t say enough about our Office Manager, Liz who now has an office to manage.
- Rustici welcomed six new people to the team in 2021, and we can’t be happier to have Nolan, Elizabeth, Matt, Ruvim, Cameron and Peter with us.
- Rustici hosted our first (and hopefully not last) Hiring our Heroes intern, Levi Anderson. Levi shared his skills and experience with our DevSecOps team and contributed mightily to our search for the best boba tea in Nashville.
- A dedicated team of Rusticians delivered the exciting new cmi5 testing and development tools to ADL, known as Project CATAPULT. This is a big step forward to help increase adoption of the cmi5 spec and ultimately xAPI.
- Rustici welcomed 76 new customers over the past year with Content Controller leading the way helping many companies and publishers more efficiently distribute content both internally and externally.
- SCORM Cloud saw record utilization, and hit a huge milestone of delivering over 3M registrations in a month (a few times over). From what started as simply a testing tool, it’s been amazing to see how SCORM Cloud has become an integral part of many systems and content solutions worldwide.
There are many more moments from this past year that are in my Rustici playlist, but I’ll leave it at that for now. On a personal note, stepping into the MD role was exciting and admittedly a little scary. I’ve learned a lot over the past year and have spent more time in spreadsheets than I ever imagined. Starting this role in a virtual setting was a bit surreal, but actually being in the office and seeing everyone IRL is something else altogether and a lot more real.
