The new adventure begins today - meet North Advisors!

Today, we’re officially launching our new business – North Advisors. This is something we’ve been working on for a few months now, and I’m thrilled to announce that as of today, we’re open for business. You can check out our new website at northadvisors.com.

North Advisors focuses on Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Power Platform consulting, projects, troubleshooting, and trusted advisory-services. Especially the complex and challenging aspects. We’re based in Helsinki, Finland, but much like everyone else, we work virtually with any company in the world right now.

We’ll work with companies of any size – but also with other Microsoft Partner companies. Perhaps we bid together on certain projects or source some of our expertise for others when in need. Our primary work will be consulting deliveries on Microsoft Azure architectures, Power Platform-based business solutions and hybrid solutions between Edge/On-Premises and Azure. Thus, we won’t focus on Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, AWS, or any other interesting things out there.

Our pathos is to help others succeed in their business with our expertise, experience and insights.

When I write ‘we,’ I mean the six of us – together with me, the company was founded by five other partners: Tomi Niemelä, Ilkka Suvanto, Mikko Salo, Eskindir Abdela, and Kim Pihlström. I’ve known each one of them for years – Ilkka perhaps the longest, all the way from 1999.

As I left the previous business I co-founded, I knew I’d want to get back to building a company from scratch. It took a few years of thinking and reflecting and a visit at Microsoft in-between. For a small company, roles do not matter much, but someone needs to be legally in charge. Besides the usual work I do with customers, I’ll also look after the business together with Tomi.

Perhaps therein also lies our logos – we aim not to be the biggest, but a nimble and trusted company with a fierce focus.

The company is built on the principle of working remotely with asynchronous communications, an agile approach to internal decision-making and culture, and a super deep caring for each employee. Thus, it needs to become profitable in time, but it’s not going to be driven in a quarterly or fiscal year mentality, ever. Profits are good, but building a great place to work that serves customers to succeed is equally important. The company is financed through our own pockets, as I believe bootstrapping a company is the best way to keep a finger on the pulse of finances and survival in the long term. This way, I believe, you learn to appreciate each euro you see in cash inflow and outflow.

We will work wherever we best can, and we encourage our future employees to adopt the same mindset. That said, we’re not quite ready to start recruiting, but if you’re interested, I encourage you to reach out.

I’m anxious to take on this new endeavor. I’ve had time to think and reflect on many aspects over the past months, and finally, we’re ready to kick in the first gear now. We have a lot planned, as we aim to shake the status quo slightly – expect additional announcements in the coming months on some things we’re currently working on.

Also, fear not – I will not push my business agenda through my personal blog in the future. Expect proper content on Azure, productivity, and life in general in the future, also.

Finally – how did we come up with the name? We had a long dinner with the founding partners, and I playfully said, ‘let’s go with North Advisors as a codename, as it reflects our attitude very well,’ and it just stuck. Everyone liked it the most. But in full transparency, we had plenty of other candidates – sharing some of those here: North Beta, North Crux, NorthOps, Northere, ReTrust, CoEdge Advisors, OffSight (yeah, I know..), NoCap Advisors, YepYep, CapSight, NorthXP, and many others. Internally we use ‘NA.’

I know some of you have questions, so feel free to reach out to me directly and I’m happy to answer.