September 1st, eh? That means it’s time for our annual birthday Cromuversary blog post =)

Continuing an annual tradition

We mark every Cromuversary by donating to local organizations doing vital work in our community. This year we’ve evenly divvied up $6,000 (the math is left as an exercise for the reader) between…

• Kitchener Public Library
• Waterloo Public Library
• Sanguen Health Centre
• SHORE Centre
• Spectrum
• Kitchener Waterloo & Stratford Perth Humane Society

Since Cromulent’s inception, we’ve donated more than $16,000 to these organizations. We don’t share that info in a braggadocious way, either — rather, we do so in the hope that it’ll inspire other corporations (and private citizens who are enriched by them) to help out.

Boring business stuff

For our fiscal year (September 1st, 2023 through August 31st, 2024), we…

• Did work for 7 clients, including 2 new ones (one of whom added a new country to our list) — for those keeping score, both are declines from year 5 (Y5), which had 12 and 3, respectively
• Sent a total of 35 invoices, again down from Y5 (50)
• Did at least some Cromuwork — anything from answering an email to a 12-hour writing marathon — on 307 out of 366 calendar days (83.9%, down from 318/365 –> 87.1% last year)
• Had 3 false starts with would-be-new clients (although all are very familiar with our work and might well become clients at some point)
• Had probably our most mutually disappointing (and quite confusing) engagement

“Oh no…” some of you may be thinking, “that sounds like maybe things didn’t go all that well!”

Fear not, for our overall revenue grew by around 20% year-over-year (the exact number depends on currency exchange rates (and ANGT4T)), continuing our unbroken streak of YoY growth (although last year was a pretty close call).

So what gives?

Basically, year 6 (Y6) saw us working on relatively fewer — but comparatively larger — projects for well-resourced clients who regard marketing as vitally important and, accordingly, truly invest in top-notch content.

In this context, perhaps it’s unsurprising that the vast majority of our Y6 business came from outside Canada, with an approximate breakdown of:

• 6.1% Canadian
• 5.1% International
• 88.8% U.S.

(Longtime readers will recall that Y5 marked the first time in our history when the majority of our business came from outside Canada — clearly, that shift has continued.)

Project highlights

We’re fortunate to work on many interesting projects, for many interesting companies, in many interesting markets.

As is typically the case, our smallest projects were blog posts, the largest were flagship thought leadership pieces at the heart of massive global marketing campaigns, and the in-betweens were largely things like datasheets, brochures, whitepapers, various different labels of longer-form content (e.g., eGuide, eBook, etc.), a handful or two of web/landing pages, some infographics, and so on.

Highlights from Y6 include…

• Our largest ever piece: a 100+ page beast of operational data-driven thought leadership, which the client has now promoted to a “flagship program”
• One of our survey-driven reports becoming the client’s “top performer for organic marketing inquiries” in 2023, generating more than 10,000 form fills — considering that the client puts out at least many dozens, and likely well over 100 pieces of content a year, this result is pretty cool
• Creating an entire regional campaign’s worth of content, including an eBook, six smaller eGuides, and an accompanying infographic — this one’s especially neat because it came from an initial inquiry about a single asset, and grew into a full collection after a single chat to discuss the project and possibilities
• In general, helping a few clients out of more than a few binds (which is always satisfying)

As in Y5, most of our activity in Y6 pertained to cybersecurity (and close adjacencies) and AI remained a common thread. Cyberattackers keep cyberattacking, and companies keep AI-ing, so we expect Y7 to continue these themes.

(As an aside, we sometimes get asked if and how Cromulent uses AI. The answer is: we don’t.)

Looking ahead

We step into year 7 with our strongest-ever pipeline of committed projects:

• one gigantic report (the ambitious follow-up to the “beast” mentioned below)
• one kinda standard-length (e.g., 20-30 pages) yearly report
• an eBook
• a half-dozen or so whitepapers and eGuides
• something like 15 blogs
• …and probably some other stuff here and there that I’m forgetting

Aside from recurring projects (typically yearly), most of our engagements have lead times in the range of 1-3 months — so having ~25 sticky notes up on the wall (we’re old school) to start the year is nice.

— — —

From humble roots as a semi-serious/semi-joking idea to whatever it is we are today, Cromulent’s come a long way.

Of course, we couldn’t do it alone, so we want to thank everyone who’s contributed to Cromulent’s success (thereby making our annual donations possible), including:

• Cromulent’s clients, who really make it a pleasure to do what we do and who continue to refer their colleagues, contacts, and (where applicable) new employers — we’ve met and worked with hundreds of folks over the years, and doing so has been a real treat
• Our intrepid on-call graphic designer, who does terrific work remarkably quickly while seamlessly adapting to our clients’ branding and design guidelines
• Friends and former colleagues, who provide helpful perspectives (and who are responsible for more than a few referrals)
• My family, who were tremendously supportive when I ‘opted out’ of the traditional corporate world in 2017 (without the slightest thought as to what I was going to do)
• My accountant, who expertly handles the important stuff
• And everyone else who’s said good things about us, supported us, and so on

We’re enormously grateful to have stumbled into this vocation — and we promise to keep giving our all to make every project a success!