CEO Peter Scott has seen a lot of “firsts” in his time at Bluetent — from its earliest days in his best friend’s loft through its transformation into a full-service digital agency for the travel and hospitality industry. We asked Scott to share some of those pivotal moments, and how they’ve made the company what it is today.
FIRST OFFICE: Bluetent’s first office was in my best friend's loft in Southside Basalt, Colorado. It was going well until his girlfriend (now wife) moved in. She didn’t want me eating all the food while my friend was at work.
Compare that first office to the one Bluetent is in now and our current office is pretty amazing! It's close to 10,000 square feet with big ceilings and a unique vibe. Plus, we’re 25 minutes from both Aspen and Glenwood Springs, making the location of our office the center of the Roaring Fork Valley, which I believe is the coolest valley around.
FIRST HIRE: At the time Bluetent was ready to kick off recruiting, I was volunteering with students at the Basalt Colorado High School to rebuild old computers. The computers were given to less fortunate students to lower the “digital divide.” In that volunteer position, I met Danny Delany. He was intelligent and the most competent out of the group, and so he became the first Bluetent employee.
Danny joined Bluetent to build email marketing programs and eventually websites for local customers. Not only was he was inventive, he was the most mature high school student I had ever met. After Bluetent, Danny became a senior engineer at SoundCloud in New York City.
FIRST PIVOT: The first big pivot as a company occurred when we realized we needed to build business based on recurring revenue. It was important to focus on building a customer base that paid a monthly subscription for our services, instead of looking to close the next deal. This early model helped Bluetent through tough economic times, and our recurring revenue has grown from zero to over half of our revenue today.
FIRST BIG CHALLENGE: Three years ago, we made a choice to exclusively build web platforms for vacation rental or resort managers. That meant turning down deals we had said yes to in the past. It was a challenge for our sales and marketing teams to understand how to say no.
FIRST MISTAKE: Our first big mistake was when we decided to hard bid our biggest web project — ever. We were clueless about the amount of risk. We have since learned that certain partnership methodologies and systems can help projects like that move forward, so client and agency are not always at odds.
Since introducing new processes and systems, we have implemented a hybrid of Agile project management into what we call "feature-driven development." So far, this has helped our team win larger projects and avoid situations where the customer and our teams are fighting over a hard bid or set statement of work.
