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Please introduce your company and give a brief about your role within the organization.
Aspired is an all-inclusive staff augmentation company that creates opportunities for businesses to hire top talent without worrying about national boundaries or breaking the bank. We help our clients hire and build remote autonomous dedicated teams by carefully selecting the elite from the vast pool of talent. Headquartered in West Palm, Florida, and regional offices in the UAE & Pakistan, Aspired has helped many Fortune 500 companies, SMBs, and funded start-ups, realize lasting value throughout the development lifecycle.
I am the Associate Vice President of Aspired and I oversee marketing, client engagement, & delivery operations while supporting the company's strategic goals for growth and development.
What is the story behind starting this company?
Aspired was founded on the premise of delivering top-end talent for businesses of all sizes enabling them to achieve their goals all year round without having to worry about breaking the bank or hassles found in traditional IT project & resource management e.g., Change Requests. With over 3 decades of experience in the digital transformation & gaming development space, we have helped many individuals, start-ups, and SMBs all around the globe thanks to our unique approach & robust engineering talent pool.
What are your company’s business model–in house team or third-party vendors/ outsourcing?
Our model is based on a managed dedicated team structure that offers a result-oriented success-driven digital transformation lifecycle that bolsters a hassle-free experience with an exceptional cost-to-value ratio for our clients. We ascertain the needs of our clients and suggest a dedicated autonomous delivery team that is managed in-house by our stakeholders/project leads. Aspired is a proud family of 250+ (& counting) in-house development staff.
How does your company differentiate itself from the competition?
Unlike traditional staff augmentation firms, Aspired offers its clients with benefits of staff augmentation without any of the drawbacks. Our clients enjoy the following:
- Non-billable Resources - During our discovery workshops, we usually include subject matter experts, solution architects, and additional seasoned experts depending on the complexity and need of the project, at no additional charge to ensure the planning phase of the project is streamlined.
- Resources-level Support - Each of our resources has a minimum of 5 years of experience however if any of our resources stumble on a problem that they're not able to resolve promptly, he/she can leverage the expertise of our leadership if need be while only paying for the selected resource.
- Design Review Committee - Our Design Review Committee or DRC is a vital piece of the puzzle where our team of experts (designers, business analysts, quality assurance, and marketing experts) is responsible for evaluating all creative and system design elements of our project to ensure they meet the highest standard of UX/UX, functional needs of the project while comparing the same to leading market trends, required compliances and more.
- Ethical Hacking - Much like our DRC, our ethical hackers test the security, infrastructure, and frontend for vulnerabilities to ensure a secure, sustainable solution.
- Lower On-going Development Costs - Leverage reduced overhead costs as we offer senior resources with over 5 years of experience, at a tremendously competitive monthly rate.
- Transparent Delivery Lifecycle Management - Our organization fosters transparency in our development lifecycle and as such, our clients can access their project's JIRA instance whereby all tasks (w/ active statuses) are laid out so that the client has 100% visibility on the work being done. However, if a high-level view is preferred, we offer weekly progress meetings along with a detailed breakdown of hours spent with associated tasks for a bird’s eye view of the project's progress. In both cases, our clients have access to our designated teams through Slack for Instant Messaging throughout the engagement.
- Aggressive Performance Review Schedule - Our culture is transparent and as such, our resources are subjected to monthly and quarterly performance reviews that assess their contribution toward the success and collective objectives of their project(s) within that time period. If the resource's performance is found to be below our accepted standard, immediate disciplinary action is taken - failure to comply with the suggested steps for improvement within one week may result in the resource being removed from the project (after intimation to the client) and in extreme cases - termination.
- Ownership of Quality Delivery - If, for the unlikely reason you do not like the performance of the developer(s) working on your project/product, we replace the designated developer(s) with a near-ZERO impact on any committed deliverables. Our timelines do not falter nor are there any gaps during the transitions between personnel - we cover the personnel issues on our end so you don't have to.
What industries do you generally cater to? Are your customers repetitive? If yes, what ratio of clients has been repetitive to you?
Due to the nature of our offering, as long as there’s a need for IT roles – Aspired operates on an industry-agnostic approach.
Please share some of the services that you offer for which clients approach you the most for?
Outstaffing, based on a dedicated team structure is the only service we offer and is – by default – the most sought-after service for us. That said, the most common uses that we encounter are new project/product development & ongoing support.
What is your customer satisfaction rate according to you? What steps do you take to cater to your customer’s needs and requirements?
To date, we have a 97% customer satisfaction ratio across our clientele. Much of this satisfaction is derived from the nature of our model, which warrants a constructive long-term relationship between the development/support team and our clientele. Our consistency is a product of our model enabling our delivery teams to stay on board after the development and support most of the new products we develop and in numerous cases take on existing projects that we support.
What kind of support system do you offer to your clients for catering to their queries and issues?
We offer a variety of support systems including Data-Driven DSS, Knowledge-driven DSS & Communication-driven, and group DSS. Our support systems are empowered by the core team which contributes to the success of the project.
What kind of payment structure do you follow to bill your clients? Is it Pay per Feature, Fixed Cost, Pay per Milestone (could be in phases, months, versions etc.)
We offer monthly payments to our clients based on the number of resources they’d like to hire. Our payments are based on a flat rate per resource per month.
Do you take in projects which meet your basic budget requirement? If yes, what is the minimum requirement? If no, on what minimum budget you have worked for?
Our engagement minimum is based on the number of resources required and engagement length. The minimum is 6 months and between $40,000 to $60,000.
What is the price range (min and max) of the projects that you catered to in 2021?
The minimum price range for our engagements were between $40,000 - $60,000 and maximum ranged from $550,000 - $750,000.
Where do you see your company in the next 10 years?
We intend to scale our operations over the coming years by forging key alliances and expanding our engineering teams, locations, and services models. We’re constantly exploring avenues to innovate & optimize our service delivery process and empower our clientele with top fulfillment talent that help them reach their desired goals without having to worry about recruitment and hiring complexities or financial limitations.
