For fast-growing Richmond IT company Covintus, programming skill has no geographical limits.
Covintus provides enterprises with IT professionals and projects at a fraction of the cost of a full-time employee. To do so, it has a network of top-class engineering talent at the ready across the globe.
With less than 10 full-time employees in Richmond, the companies’ clients span North America and include a handful overseas. It works with mostly small and mid-size businesses, including UPS Freight and the Virginia Farm Bureau, but is picking up more work with startups, including Lighthouse Labs.
“We have our ‘human cloud,’ which is a group of pre-vetted, top-shelf talent. We’ve put together a group of a couple-hundred top-shelf developers that we can pull in on a project-by-project basis,” co-founder Chris Trebour said. “One of the reasons we run very lean and we’re extremely scalable is that we can ramp up and ramp down for projects very quickly.”
And Covintus has scaled well – Trebour said it has approximately doubled revenue every year since 2014 and is on track to do so again this year. And its low overhead cost has led it to be self-funded since its inception.
Trebour launched the company in 2009 along with Nick Bawa and Brian Flood. Flood previously did national and international talent recruiting for companies like Google and Amazon, hiring what Trebour called “the best of the best from around the world.”
“Brian found out that very top developers were happy where they are. They don’t want to work in the U.S. for Google, they want to stay where they are.”
With that in mind and a pension for pulling talent from winners of coding competitions, the team assembled an on-demand team of remote freelancers that stretch from Australia to South America to Europe.
Trebour said one of the key benefits is low overhead:
“These people are extremely sharp, so they get things done quickly because they know what they’re doing, so we benefit on speed and cost,” he said. “For a small to mid-size company, it makes sense to use us as their IT department because they can’t afford experts in all these different technologies.”
The company is also building an internal community to facilitate talking to its programmers and having them communicate with each other. As freelancers master new technologies, Trebour said, they'll use the program to quickly update skillsets and maximize the company's use of its talent pool.
