Tomi Kaukinen (host) [00:00:00] This podcast is brought to you by Allies. Allies is all about bringing growth to the software services industry. It's a platform where hundreds of companies grow together by exchanging talents, projects and best practices. In this podcast, we will bring you the stories of the most successful companies and people in the business. We cover topics from sales, marketing, H.R. and culture to give you ideas for future growth. Hello and welcome to another episode of Allies Podcast. I am Tomi Kaukinen and I am your host as usual. Today we're going to meet a couple of people that have the tagline in their company "A Fairer Work Life for highly skilled workers" soon you will hear more about that. Guests with me today are Timo and Tuomas.

Timo Korander (CBDO at Luoto company) [00:00:47] Hello.

Tuomas Nousiainen (CEO at Luoto company) [00:00:47] Hello.

Tomi [00:00:47] Did I get it right? Great. So now that I pitched kind of some things regarding like fair work and stuff before we get into that. Who are you guys? Why are you here with me? What have you done?

Tuomas [00:01:04] Tuomas Nousiainen is my name. I'm CEO of Luoto Company, and I have 20 years experience in IT and especially in service companies. I've been also working with startups in board positions, and this experience is pretty important when it comes to Luoto story. What I do is mostly sales, internal communications, communications like this. That's what I do.

Tomi [00:01:33] All right.

Tuomas [00:01:34] Good to be here.

Tomi [00:01:34] And soon we'll know more about what Luoto does.

Tuomas [00:01:36] Yes.

Timo [00:01:38] Yeah.

Tomi [00:01:38] All right Timo.

Timo [00:01:39] Yeah. Yeah. My name is Timo Korander. I have also, like, 15 years of history in either IT sector and let's call it digital development sector. And back then, in the beginning of 2000, I actually started my work career with payments, online payments, like maybe the first online payment services in Finland and now in Luoto my role is also in sales, but also in addition to that, I building up our ecosystem together with our company.

Tomi [00:02:13] We touch upon on it soon.

Timo [00:02:15] Exactly.

Tomi [00:02:16] When you, when I look at your page and I see fairer growth and to be a little bit mean I say sounds like communism to me.

Tuomas [00:02:25] Thats what they say sometimes.

Tomi [00:02:27] So. So let's let's jump into Luoto which is also on your arm there. So now what does Luoto do?

Tuomas [00:02:35] So we are a service company and we work with our customers with different kind of solutions. It's e-commerce data platforms, systems that are building our customers competitive advantage. But what is like the core of Luoto is something that we started 2016 already when I was talking with my co-founder Lauri, like why do we do better in, in service companies? What can we change actually? And at the same time, we were reading, for example, Esko Kilpis articles like real academics, writing about human capital and writing about post-industrial era, where the human capital is becoming more and more important and valuable all the time. Yeah, that's what we all know.

Tomi [00:03:30] Yeah.

Tuomas [00:03:31] So we wanted to test and ask a concept of a company concept of a service company where 80% of the stocks are in the hands of professionals, they are in the hands of stars in our business. And we wanted to ask from professionals like, how do you feel? Is there something cooking here? And as I mentioned in my my presentation or introduction, I am like all so familiar with startups. And I think that startups are going like a little bit ahead of the service companies right now when it comes to ownership, for example. So we wanted to ask and what they value actually, especially the best of the best, I mean there's 100,000 IT professionals in Finland, so best 10% or best 15%. What they value in service companies is transparency, power to make decisions, power to vote for investments and then, of course, ownership. When we're like at the end of the year, seeing the results of the company and then dividing it to actual stars who been doing those results. So that's what they value and we also with Lauri, we wanted to interview customers like service company customers and ask what do they value? So they value team effort and they value commitment and you don't actually stop before you're finished. And they value the way somebody comes with the hobby projects, all the skills and knowledge they have and are willing to give their best for their customer service. So when it comes to Luoto, we were like defining a company saying that the most important process to be led is customer experience and that must be led in front. Not in the middle management or especially in the management or board of directors.

Tomi [00:05:54] Because I also read some some stuff about you and I understand, you know, and I talked to a lot of software service companies or tech companies as they are called now. So that for me, as well as as a person who has used these kind of companies, they're all generic. And you mentioned that in your site, too. There, for the outsider, everything is just the same. And I think Antti Kiukas mentioned that the only difference is basically the colour of the logo and, you know, things like that. So this is kind of an an attack on that, I would say.

Tuomas [00:06:32] Yeah. And we had a pretty important face in service companies. Everybody was talking about like company culture. And that's an important face. In that face, we we went towards people saying that they are important. We started to think like maybe humanity in general, like how do we get people on board and how do we get them feel good. We claimed right now in Luoto that, we are entering the era of structure. So structure is something that you don't change. Ownership is something that you don't change. Ownership is something that gives you power to decide. So we are seeing a shift from culture to structure.

Tomi [00:07:24] The structure will lead to a better culture.

Tuomas [00:07:27] Yeah, you can say that. That's what we believe. But that said, structure is something that is there forever, once it's put in place. But culture can change, management can change but structure is something that is concrete. And it will last.

Tomi [00:07:47] Hmm.

Timo [00:07:48] Yeah. Yeah. If I may add something, we really believe that the structure also leads to a better customer experience, as Tuomas mentioned. And why is that happening? Like, as mentioned, people who have the power to make the decisions, who owns the company. They are committed to make their work as good as possible for that for the end customer. Yeah.

Tomi [00:08:13] I mean, as you know, you know, from the startup scene as well, you usually have incentive programs for employees, you have options or you get some small shares and stuff. In this case, the incentive is just kind of scaled up a bit, so you get a little bit more of ownership.

Tuomas [00:08:28] That's right. Yeah, that's right. And you can also look from this perspective like what service companies need? We don't need any old capital. We don't need money. We need skills. We need people. We need people that are willing to give their best. So like Esko Kilpi mentioned already said, like, what if in this era we can use human capital as an investment like old capital is used in the industrial era, maybe that is so important that it can be invested to company. And by that investment you can get a share of that company. Maybe we have this kind of era ahead of us.

Tomi [00:09:14] I'm marinating this in my brain, though. But it's like this in if you look at a football team, the balance sheet is players.

Timo [00:09:27] Yeah, exactly.

Tomi [00:09:28] It's like so it's the same here. Basically, you make investments you well, it's not entirely the same. But it's it kind of reminds me of that method, but you don't, you don't pay for the employees. Right. How is that process working for you? So how do you attract the talent?

Tuomas [00:09:49] And many of the companies right now in our industry, they want to measure individuals. There might be in incentive schemes that are tied to your one individual, your own effort. But we believe that effort should be common because innovation is made in teams and customer experience. For example, in service companies, it's made as a team, a team of people. So we want to measure teams or we want to measure the whole company, and that's why we have an equal shares for everybody that are contributing. Of course, it's important that we have pretty similar type of human capital coming in. And when you're asking like, who's getting in, we want to of course give a freedom to our people to choose their colleagues. So you have a possibility to say no for somebody. But most of the people that have been joining us are somewhat familiar with our people already, and they have a proven track record in the industry. And what we're looking for is not only tech skills, we want to see social skills which are really important in service companies. We want to see maybe values that are shared. You've been saying like fairness, that's one of our values. Another one is always think your customers best. So these kind of things are very important to us when we recruit people.

Tomi [00:11:34] So for marketing or branding purposes outside, is there a value proposition you would like your customers to see? Is that because this model, these people are going to be much more kind of committed to these projects? That's the reasoning here, right?

Tuomas [00:11:55] That's one of the competitive advantages that we have right now and we have seen. So we have pretty good track record I would say we've been in the markets five years now. It's going to be Luoto an ecosystem. We're going to make 34 million revenue this year. There's going to be 140 professionals. We've been listed by Financial Times, one of the fastest growing companies in Europe, actually 18th on the list of 1000 companies. We've been selected as the best growing company here in Finland. So there's a track record and we have data showing that some of our thoughts they are really, uh, something that is making a difference.

Tomi [00:12:44] Because this reminds me of, of a book by John Harvey. He talks a lot about addiction and purpose and meaning and in one of his books, I think it's the second one called Lost Connections, he talks about people who feel very, very disillusioned in their jobs. They don't feel that their contribution matters. They're just part of a big machinery and now there is a trend in the States that people go together and gather these cooperatives where they own equal share. So everybody makes decisions together. But it's not, as you said, it's not the structure thing. It's more of a meaningful thing. But I think the meaningfulness actually comes with this model.

Tuomas [00:13:29] I'm sure we agree.

Timo [00:13:31] Yeah.

Tuomas [00:13:32] I'm sure we agree. Meaning is important. Like we see that our mission is is larger than we are and we don't actually want to be in the center of everything. But if our example will like give somebody in maybe in some other industry an idea to make a new structure for service company in cleaning or maybe in the elderly care, we been doing something good. So we see our mission as as a larger than than Luoto. And let's look at from from another perspective there's, like I said, 140 professionals now working in Luoto and in our ecosystem. Guess what they are talking in their dinner tables at home for their kids. What kind of owners and what kind of interpreters we are having in the next generation when we are making more owners in this country?

Tomi [00:14:38] Finland has a very I because I'm from Sweden and I noticed when I moved to Finland that there is a really big difference in the Finnish mindset in ownership actually compared to Sweden and that's pretty funny because in Sweden, for example, we have seen something called Boost Osd Stret, which is kind of the right to an apartment, but it's almost like ownership, but it still isn't ownership. It's like a weird kind of hybrid. You can't rent it out to to a market price. You have to go with the areas like average price and all different regulations. In Finland I noticed that there is an extremely strong like I want to own my apartment, that everybody wants their first apartment. You never hear this in Sweden. It's like, it's so weird when you come to Finland, is this something that's this ownership thinking? Have you reflected upon that? Do do Finns have stronger ownership?

Timo [00:15:33] I would say that like yes or no. Like your example about apartments from that perspective definitely yes. Because maybe it comes from the childhood that owning an apartment is a good investment, you know. But from work life point point of view, I would say that it's still kind of a coming and what we, we made an investigation to, with our with our partner and asked like about the Finns, about in their work life, like what do they think about ownership and actually more I'm not sure what is more than half said that that they are not interested in ownership in their work. Like they would like more more to just come to work and get the salary and and then go home. But, but definitely at least we believe that it is changing. Maybe the tech startups and IT sector is like a forerunner within this thinking that that owning ownership is is important.

Tuomas [00:16:41] And you know, in even this sector, we want to say to everybody like that there's maybe a misunderstanding, sometimes, not always, but sometimes that ownership means that you get a ball.

Tomi [00:16:57] Yes, yes.

Tuomas [00:16:58] And you don't really get rid of it anyhow or it's really hard for you to be an owner from our perspective and in our model it's the same than having the salary you had, just getting the ownership on top of it. And if you want to leave the company, then of course you will leave your ownership. But that's okay, it doesn't matter. But this is something that we want to maybe discuss even in these kind of a podcast. Like it's not that complicated.

Tomi [00:17:33] That's a very good thing to raise, actually, because. The first thing I always think also like if I become an owner somewhere, it's like it's like I'm stuck with an umbilical cord and it's like, I can't get away. And I have all these obligations and all that stuff. So it maybe maybe companies that go into this model should actually work a little bit on the communications of this. What it means.

Timo [00:17:58] Yeah, exactly. And and like, it's not for everybody. We have to be honest, like it's not for everybody. Like, not all the people are interested in that. And it's, we think that it's, it's jumping into a world of transparency, like you're your owner, you should see the financials of the company you should participate in like, how should we communicate about this? How should we handle problems and all that, you're an owner. You have this right to know and jumping into that world of transparency.

Tomi [00:18:34] And I feel also being in the startup world for over ten years, I feel that this model or this structure, I think by default attracts the right people.

Tuomas [00:18:45] Yeah.

Tomi [00:18:47] And not the wrong people.

Tuomas [00:18:49] Yeah maybe.

Tomi [00:18:50] Because if you have this drive to to do more than 9 to 5, I think this would be probably a very optimal model for you.

Tuomas [00:18:59] Yeah, that's one perspective like how much effort do you want to put in? That's one perspective. But we would even like look this model from the perspective that once you are interested in to use power or be part of the decision making or sometimes like one third, I would say in Luoto that they are just passively looking some of the decisions or data that we are giving to them. But the feeling of this is from my own company, that feeling is something special for somebody. So maybe we are not saying that we're looking for people to work on more, but we're saying like we're looking for people to contribute to our company's future, to come along. And then we're pretty sure that once we have like different competencies, different skills doing their best towards certain vision or mission or strategic targets were stronger than having just the board of directors, five persons making decisions or trying to figure out what to do in future. In our industry, everything is changing so fast. We have now artificial intelligence and machine learning and there's like several things to look at. So we need everybody to contribute and being alert in order to be competitive in future.

Timo [00:20:46] If we take a step a bit backwards and start from like the history would indict the IT sector from eighties to present like what started back in the eighties. Like big companies were founded like CGA and Accenture and so forth. And then in the nineties like offshoring became a trend, you know, like Asia became really popular and Finnish corporates use that as well of course. And then as mentioned before, like in the beginning of 2000, in the millennium, like culture driven companies were rising, like where the human was taken in the middle and also like combining a bit of work life and then outside of work life world would enter into culture like nice offices and all that. And then like what we have seen and what we believe and what you mentioned as well, like people or at least some amount of people want to work like into smaller companies. They say that companies will get ruined if it gets too big. If you don't know each other, like if it's 500 people, you wouldn't know each other. And and that's why smaller companies how now risen within the IT market. We have seen that in 2020, but we believe that in the future those smaller companies need to work together. So that's an ecosystem like they work really tightly together, share same values, same structure, and it's all about networks. So getting smaller entities working, as Tuomas mentioned, in one substance really well, let's imagine that Luoto is working in Fullstack development, architecture and so forth but we could have a company working with design or working with data as mentioned and working and making those working together within the ecosystem and providing services to our customers together. It makes it more, more efficient.

Tomi [00:22:57] So when you say working together and what does that mean in this case? Because now I'm starting to think like, okay, does that mean that they form a company and and they get shares together or?

Timo [00:23:10] No, no, no. They are individual companies autonomy and of course, for the founders, the upside for the founders and who are setting up the company is super important. So they are a company with full autonomy. Okay. Yeah, but what I mean working together, like if we take from the customer point of view like a customer, they want to buy services end to end maybe from one entity or just a couple of entities. Not from 20 or 50 entities.

Tomi [00:23:40] Yeah. Yeah.

Timo [00:23:41] So, so they want to buy services from one and that's what has been asked from us that okay, okay Luoto is good at Fullstack development but do you have this and that services.

Tomi [00:23:52] Yeah.

Timo [00:23:53] And previously we have said that no we don't have because saying no within the salesforce is also like you mean.

Tomi [00:23:59] Somebody giving you money and you're like, no, no thank you.

Timo [00:24:02] No, but I mean, as we mentioned, we believe that the customer experience needs to be the best of the best. And if you don't believe that, then you should say no. But but within the ecosystem, we can for sure say that that yes, the customer experience that you have get from Luoto will be the same within our ecosystem because the companies that we are now working together, tightly collaborating, they are sharing the same values, the same model as explained before.

Tomi [00:24:32] Is there, is it just our verbal understanding as partnerships or is there any like any tighter or how does that work?

Timo [00:24:44] It's kind of a both are, of course, like we have started.

Tomi [00:24:47] Trying to get into details.

Timo [00:24:48] No, no, it's important question. I mean, it's kind of both like you have to have the autonomy to make your own decisions, who to work with together, who to hire or to collaborate with and all that. But at the same time, within the ecosystem, like in order to make it work, you have to have some rules and like like shared practices and all that. And that's what we have been working within our ecosystem.

Tomi [00:25:14] So like you are building a some kind of framework.

Timo [00:25:17] Yes exactly, framework is the correct word. Yeah.

Tomi [00:25:21] Okay, maybe I'm starting to understand, but maybe it's good because then probably everybody else will understand.

Timo [00:25:29] If I add one one more angle, like if you think about product industry like manufacturing a car. It is kind of a ecosystem that we're setting up with the car. There are several companies providing different parts of the car.

Tomi [00:25:46] Yeah.

Timo [00:25:48] But the ecosystems are such have been like really popular way to do things within product industry. But within the service industry it's, we haven't seen that yet and we really, really believe that the service industry may be first in the IT sector but later on, other industries as well. We'll turn to use ecosystems as well.

Tomi [00:26:13] Okay. So coming back to the question of is there, you mentioned that you have a like entity that is that the on the top and then you have subsidiaries with 20 people and you have to do that to arrange the shares and stuff. Is there a maximum size for a for a structure like you have.

Timo [00:26:36] I mean, like one of the biggest decisions that Luoto made was was kind of to stop the growth. And the reason behind that was that, as I mentioned before, at least some of the people have said that if the company grows bigger than, let's say, 100 or 200 people, people don't know each other anymore. And it will kind of ruin that whole stuff.

Tomi [00:27:05] Yeah.

Timo [00:27:06] And Luoto stopped the growth and that's why we set up the ecosystem to make the growth to continue but in a different structure. But from the if you ask from the like that from the stock's point of view or structure point of view, no, I don't see that there's a limit but, but we really believe that the smaller entity is better than larger.

Tuomas [00:27:36] And that's what our customers also love is like for example, we too like representing sales. As long as we know our people, we also know what to sell. What can we promise? But if we would be, like, 1000 employees, I don't know what I'm selling at least not always.

Tomi [00:27:57] Yeah.

Tuomas [00:27:58] So that's what our customers loved is like when we are keeping our promise, we're giving it with our own face and we're really believing it. So that's one of the angles to entity.

Tomi [00:28:12] I love the thinking. I love the thinking because I'm a very strong believer in like extremely niched niche business. And we talked with Antti Kiukas about the kind of demand for constant growth leads to this kind of conformity within the business where everyone all of a sudden just wants to grow more and more and more, and then they open up more niches below that are owned subsidiaries. And everybody just looks the same because there is external growth demand. But I love the fact that you're like, stop the growth. And I'm not sure stop the growth is going to stop the growth in terms of revenue, actually, it's going to probably be the opposite. And I know Apple has a different business model and stuff, but if you look at like Apple, they don't have like a major market share in terms of them, but they are the most valuable.

Tuomas [00:29:05] That's right.

Tomi [00:29:06] So and that's why I love when you just focus on keeping it real. It's going to give you a lot of credibility as well.

Tuomas [00:29:14] That's that's very true. And talking about growth, you can always grow. I mean, human capital wise or as a person, you shouldn't limit that to financial terms when it comes to growth, I'm pretty sure that we are growing, at least competence wise, even though we are not recruiting right now more people.

Tomi [00:29:40] And I mean, even if I think that once your confidence grows, it's going to it's going to ride out into the the prophet.

Tuomas [00:29:49] Right! Yes.

Tomi [00:29:51] To be honest. So it's a wonderful, fresh way of thinking, because even if I'm like a capitalist and, you know, worked in finance and stuff, I still feel that heart always is going to win like a heart and smart is going to win. Only profit in the end. And we're moving, I think a little bit and I wouldn't say backwards, but we're moving back to a more human centric approach, having escaped out a bit into, you know, just insanity for a while because there is now this quiet quitting. There is purpose problems. People are quitting their jobs. They're not going to do the 100 hour weeks anymore. And when I came from Stockholm School of Economics, everybody wanted to work in London for Goldman Sachs and Jp morgan and these companies. It's not the same anymore. It's more like, maybe I'm just going to stay in Finland and work here. I know. So it's definitely in the times.

Tuomas [00:30:47] Yeah. Yeah. And I want to say that we're not against capitalism. No way. We just feel that it can be more equal. And as you say, there can be more humanity in it. So those jobs that are done by people, we need to create new structures for that. And then there's going to be a lot of machines, production and stuff that we need along with the work that people are doing their jobs. Service industry that's the most growing industry in most of the countries and there we have a chance to look at the structures.

Tomi [00:31:26] And now once we figure out all the existential issues and philosophical kind of frameworks here, let's go back to the big question that Simon Sinek always talk about. Like the why, like why? Why did this happen? Why did Luoto happen? What was the thought? Tell me about the story of how did you end up in this situation?

Tuomas [00:31:46] Well, you said like 2016, we were thinking of like, what can we do better? And one of the thoughts was like, who has power right now in service companies? Can we change that power structure? That is one why. Maybe we will change it, maybe we turn this pyramid upside down. And I used to like or one of my favorite habits in our monthly meeting is to start like, dear board members, I'm looking for next season, are you with me? Do I get your waltz? And that's pyramid upside down, CEO asking from the people that are the heart of the service company, they are the stars of our industry. So that's one reason. Another reason is that if you want to, like, work for best of the best, you need to give them more. We have this tendency to say like let's get rid of middle management.

Tomi [00:33:01] Everybody likes that.

Tuomas [00:33:03] Yeah, yeah. It's like you can take the power and you can you can like, you will be responsible of this and that. But we started asking like, what do I get if I do this? So you need to have something on top of this responsibility that I'm taking as a professional, for example, in service companies. And it's ownership. So those are a couple of reasons that we were like thinking with Lauri on one of my or my co-founder.

Tomi [00:33:34] I need me to ask. You mentioned that the power structure and turn it upside down is like it makes me immediately think like, did you have any bad experience somewhere?

Tuomas [00:33:47] Maybe not bad experience but I'd be an entrepeneur before. And that was really fun because you had power, you had a chance to make decisions. And then I've been working in a listed company as a deputy managing director, and in the listed company you have some power. But it's limited because there's a different ownership structure and there's may be somebody on top of you. So not a bad experience, but different experiences. And that's why we thought that maybe still, we're young, I guess.

Tomi [00:34:28] Yeah.

Tuomas [00:34:28] Yeah, definitely. We have 20 years still ahead in our professional lives. I hope. I hope so. So maybe we do something that that we really believe in. And that's maybe a story of Luoto.

Tomi [00:34:48] So there was a little bit of ambition to kind of show the others, but. But the little bit of heart as well.

Tuomas [00:34:55] Of course. Yes.

Tomi [00:34:56] How much of a heart is left? I mean, I started thinking when you said I reflected on it, you said like 80% decent. Where's the 20%?

Tuomas [00:35:06] That's a good question. Like, yeah. Then then the question goes, like, where do we need to, like, support organization? What do we do? Demand me. So you need somebody to be in this podcast. You need somebody to meet our customers. I mean, new sales. Somebody needs to arrange administration, and somebody needs to take care that we are legit. Somebody needs to market and do these kind of supporting functions. And I'm pretty convinced that our professionals, they are happy that we are with them.

Tomi [00:35:46] Okay. Got it. Got it. Okay. So, okay, that makes sense because. That means that the people who are in the software development side, they actually only do that. They don't have to do other stuff at all.

Tuomas [00:35:59] Yeah. Even though you are concentrating on the job that you know or you're concentrating on the job, that you are best of the best in the in the industry. We still in luoto, we see that you have many other skills. There's a really good people in photography, uh, in communications, in setting up events and stuff. And we want to see people like 360 so that everybody can contribute also along the side with your like main profession. So that is also important when it comes to our model, we see that people are a vast variety of skills. And with owning your company, you're willing to give your best those skills as well. That's important to us.

Tomi [00:36:58] I mean, now it all sounds like, you know, happy rainbows. And, you know, the sun is shining. Like, okay, I have to ask, like, what are some challenges and risks with this business?

Tuomas [00:37:09] One of the risks is that that we have too much dependency on certain persons or personalities. So especially in support organizations, that's a one question. It's like how do we get this company for us and why? If something happens to me or Timo or somebody else, and then of course, we're getting old. It's like that's one of the risks it's like in 20 years, I guess we are not that best of the best anymore. I don't know. But that's that's like in this model, you need to find a way to renew yourself. One as various ecosystem, of course, that we are building right now that you have heard of another reason or a way is to look at future stars. We have a couple of like research papers and have writing related to that. Maybe we will figure out something there.

Timo [00:38:22] Of course, like we are really like into this. This is our thing. And it, of course, means that means that sometimes we disagree quite a lot about things. And that's like it's not a challenge, but we see that that's actually a good it's a good thing that we disagree quite a lot. But but it's all at the same time. It can be tough.

Tomi [00:38:50] Yeah, I totally understand that. So what I'm thinking here, I'm thinking about the Ben and Jerry's kind of thing here. But what I'm seeing is the big, big, big players are like, Oh, these guys are doing well. Like, what if we kind of get them out of the way by just buying them and just pretending that we didn't buy them and we not communicated that and then, Luoto, they will be this sexy brand like Ben and Jerry's, and then you have Unilever like so I mean, that surely must be a risk in a way.

Tuomas [00:39:22] It can be. But what we love in this model is that we decide together and somebody asked, or many people they'd been asking like, What if your way is not winning in this? Voting, sessions or, you know, strategy, what happens. Our experience in five years now is that you still kind of feel valued because you have been allowed to say your opinion and raising up questions to our, for example, strategy or investments. You feel valued even though your way or your opinion is not winning. So we see that's a benefit. Maybe next year, your ideas or your way, we'll we'll get into our strategy, our yearly plan. So we haven't seen any problems in that. It's more compared to the old way of doing things. It's more for people like a sign of somebody telling that your opinion matters?

Tomi [00:40:38] Yeah. Okay. So feeling a part of something? probably. Yeah. Okay. So how does the future look now? Ecosystem. That's the thing.

Timo [00:40:47] Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, of course Luoto is the thing and the ecosystem like it both are the things at the moment. Like what as mentioned in our board,as Tuomas mentioned voted that the ecosystem will be our choice and that's what we believe in. And as I mentioned, we really believe that the service industry will we'll be more ecosystem more we'll be focusing more on the ecosystems in the future. And of course, now now we have four companies in addition to Luoto making totally 34 million of revenue this year. And of course, we are thinking like what next? And setting up maybe a company within some other substance area could be a thing to work with next.

Tomi [00:41:42] Another country? No.

Timo [00:41:44] Yeah. Maybe. Yeah, that's a really good question. Definitely. I would say. Okay, let's put it in the other way. The substance can be, as I mentioned, it can be within the industry, let's say design or support or whatever, but it can be in different area as well. It can be different area in Finland, it can be different area around Europe or even somewhere else. But of course it has to be somehow making the difference.

Tuomas [00:42:12] Yeah, and we do have customers in Silicon Valley, so there's several customers already. So it's not impossible to like go geographically ahead talking about the ecosystem. It's growing twice faster than Luoto right now. So we're doing something right.

Tomi [00:42:33] And in this is only is this in Finland.

Tuomas [00:42:35] This is only in Finland.

Tomi [00:42:36] And all all people actually also in Luoto in Finland.

Tuomas [00:42:39] Yes, yeah. Yeah.

Tomi [00:42:41] Okay. So it's a very local. Yeah. Kind of stuff. How do you feel that locality helps you? Everybody speaks Finnish, everybody's from Finland or?

Tuomas [00:42:47] No we have people talking only English. It's I don't see languages is the thing. Why we have started here is that we have network and we know this market. That's how we started. But that's as Timo mentioned we can go to Silicon Valley, but if we would go there, we would need a local face.

Tomi [00:43:10] Do you have any advice for young developers or software service companies when it comes to Luoto? Anything you want to share about Luoto? Here's your chance.

Tuomas [00:43:21] I would advise to look at the structure, and then I would advise to look at the different models in the markets. And then I would go to networks. What we like in Allies is that there's like a huge network and that's how we should work. We should be like combining our skills and making the best possible customer experience and service for our customers. It's not to see load and company to company competition anymore. We have a big network where different kind of competencies are joining their forces in a best scenario. So I would look at their structure if you're starting networks that you can utilize and then of course, value always human capital.

Tomi [00:44:09] And Allies is doing it well, we heard their story also and how they gathered the network first and then they start expanding and it's going quite well. Yeah, network thinking. So I think Allies is also a very good example of the power of networks.

Tuomas [00:44:22] That's true.

Tomi [00:44:24] So I think with that said, I don't even know how much time we spent but thank you for this times. Thanks to Timo and Tuomas from Luoto and we'll see you in that next part. I think I'm Tomi Kaukinen and see you.