Is it just us, or do the years seem to be going more quickly? Or perhaps we’re just packing them more tightly?

Whatever the reason, we’re all ready to kick back and enjoy some downtime after an action-packed year. But first, we’d like to share a review of our year – people, learnings, and thoughts for next year.

One Little Seedlings

On the people front, we welcomed two new team members to OLS – Tom and Aimee.

Tom is a senior designer who not only has significant creative skills but also years of solid IT marketing and branding know-how. Aimee is a talented marketing executive with an exceptionally useful background in social media, graphic design, and UX/UI.

Our team's annual offsite meeting in November was held in Sydney, and while we thank goodness for Teams, it was great to catch up in person. Given that we sponsor a beehive - complete with our very own Queen Labeefah - as one of our CSR efforts, it was especially fun and appropriate to turn our hands to a native beehive hotel building (who knew?), followed by our inevitable margaritas!

As for business growth?

We’ve had another year of steady, controlled growth, with wonderful clients who’ve continued to step up and shine brightly despite tough times for the MSP sector.

We’ve worked with them to generate a record number of entries for industry awards, resulting in 14 finalist nominations and some stunning awards in Australia and New Zealand, including Indigenous Cyber Security Business of the Year, ARN - Channel News Regional Innovation Partner, and Management Excellence in the Partner category. We’re always super proud to see our clients’ names in lights and to celebrate right alongside them.

We’ve also done what we tell our clients to do (admittedly, we’d be a pretty poor agency if we didn’t!). We’ve blogged regularly and authentically, maintained engagement with the industry on LinkedIn, nominated ourselves for awards (and made the finals), and spoken as subject-matter experts at industry events. And as ever, we’ve been unafraid to take a stand when it’s needed (our no bullsh*t/no dickhead rule still applies to everything we do).

Krystal ball time (see what we did there?)

As already mentioned, we’ve been blogging about the changes we see in IT marketing. Internally, we’re keen sharers of information on everything IT – from marketing to technology, to cybercrime, to GEO and email subject line testing.

In case you missed it, we wrote about:

• Whether AI is rotting your brain (seriously!) Love or hate it, AI is here to stay. It’s not about blind acceptance of everything, though. You can’t wash your hands of the responsibilities of sound judgment, critical thinking skills, and applying a human touch.  
• To slash or not to slash. We all know that things are tight out there, but belt-tightening doesn’t have to come with random marketing budget cuts and losing the hard-won ground you’ve worked so hard to gain. So, we shared our thoughts on how you can stretch your budget further, discussed the importance of leveraging MDF with your strategic partners, and shared our top tips for doing so.
• We also chipped in with our thoughts on the new wave of business owners. Who they’ll be, what they will know, and how this will impact your sales, marketing and customer service. One of the call-outs here was the need to continuously evolve your product stack to meet your clients' changing needs, including embracing AI and automation.

For more thoughts, check out our Greenhouse, where we incubate new ideas and discuss strategies worth tending or pruning.

As for next year? We’re already planning out what’s next for our customers, and we’re looking internally at our own efficiencies to help serve you all better. But until then, we (like everyone in our community) are looking forward to the break. We’ll see you all in January when we’re all back on board, feeling fresh and invigorated and ready to get growing all over again.

For now, it’s 2025 over and out.