The company is at sixteen-and-three-quarter years today, by the April 2009 founding date and today's calendar. The 2025 sixteen-year-marker was unmarked except in the December Christmas note; the recurring pattern of unmarked-anniversary continues. The 2026 will likely produce the seventeenth-anniversary in the same form.
The arc. Sixteen-and-three-quarter years is a longer institutional arc than the period of my own continuous employment at any previous organisation by a substantial margin. Gala Coral was four years (2006-2010). DEC was the longest pre-Hedgehog single-organisation period at seven years (1996-2003). The continuing-engagement pattern with Hedgehog has, by simple duration, produced the deepest professional-development arc of my career.
The team. Forty-three at the moment. The senior leadership team is now substantively independent of my day-to-day operational involvement on most operational dimensions. The lead engineer has been ten years in February. The customer-success function lead has been five-and-a-half years in. The various senior partners across vCISO, pen-testing, and SOC functions have been with the company between four-and-twelve years. The continuity is the operational asset.
The customers. The Browne Jacobson, Towry, and Northcott engagements are now in their fifteenth, sixteenth, and sixteenth years respectively — every full year of the company's history for Towry, every-but-the-first for Browne Jacobson, every-but-the-first for Northcott. The manufacturer is in its eleventh year. The financial-services firm is in its tenth year. The retailer is in its tenth year. The customer-relationships-as-personal-experience continue to be the most rewarding professional dimension of the work; the multi-year arc of seeing customer-organisation security postures develop from the early-engagement state to the mature-programme state has been the substantive content of much of the professional work.
The personal note. The continuing personal-direction shift toward strategic-and-external-facing work is, on the early-2026 view, sustainable and engaging. The fifth book is in late draft. The continuing customer-engagement-and-conference-contribution cadence is operationally settled. The day-to-day operational management is, increasingly, not my day-to-day. The pattern is appropriate to the company's maturity and to the personal-direction question that has been continuous for several years.
Onward.