Check out Life @ 45 Degrees

Managing Partner, Diederik Wyffels, dedicated his 45″ seconds of 45 Degrees to elaborate his plans for 2023. He defines ‘vintage 45 Degrees’, looks forward to the challenges of the coming year and explains how he’s going to face them by means of ‘growth’ as a central focus. Read the interview to discover what the club will be up to this year!

What is the club up to in 2023?

In 2023 we’ll be building on the successful year we had last year by accelerating growth, recruiting new colleagues and using those additions to the team to grow towards strategic partnerships with our clients. Currently we have a number of huge enterprise clients and we want to add customers to that number in order to deploy full teams at the client in order to support them in their Cloud journey.

So, growth is the keyword for this year?

Yes, and it will manifest itself in three domains. First of all, we want to make the team grow by hiring new people. This will enable us to increase the number of strategic clients we support. Secondly, we want to improve the way our 45 Degrees club works. More specifically by sharing knowledge between different projects. We want to create a club in which people don’t work as individuals, but share experiences with each other. And finally, we are going to invest in a training program for every 45 Degrees employee, called ‘Boost Your Impact’. This program will take about one year and will help our team grow as individuals with regard to communication, presentation, leadership and interpersonal skills. These are the three domains we’ll be investing in throughout 2023.

What else, besides a growth mindset, defines 45 Degrees?

I think it’s typically us to have a foot in the door at a client through one person and from there on starting building a relationship and eventually a partnership by expanding the tasks, the team and the responsibilities. That would be vintage 45 Degrees. Start small, and scale up from there. 

What challenges do you face in 2023?

Well, I think the current economic situation, to start off with. There’s a lot of uncertainty in the market right now. Companies don’t really know what is going to happen or what to expect. Are clients going to keep on investing? Or are they turning it down a notch instead? It will become more clear in the next few months what the impact of things such as indexation etc. will turn out to be. So, we’ll have to see which way the wind blows. Fortunately, we’re able to play the waiting game for a little while. 

Secondly, staffing is another challenge we’ll be focusing on. At the moment we have our recruitment approach under control. It’s a very complex way of working that involves reaching out to possible candidates on the one hand, but a structural communication strategy in support on the other and finally keep on investing in education and training. So, despite having recruitment in order, we want to add another 10 colleagues to the club. Which is a serious ambition, with regard to the troubling economic circumstances at the moment.

Finally, why 45 Degrees?

45 Degrees is a super fun team, or as we call it, a club of people, with a lot of expertise and experience in several domains. The mix of technical colleagues and business minded ones, enables us to offer end-to-end solutions for customers. We can lean on different people in our club to perform different tasks with regard to the Cloud and digital journeys of our clients. Or in other words, we have a core team of 15 to 20 people with various expertise in the Cloud. Besides that team, we can depend on the entire Cronos network for additional experience and skills to those of our own team. So clients can rely on us for everything they need, since we can rely on other Cronos companies to help us. And I think it’s exact the combination of our club with the help of Cronos that makes us such an appealing partner.