2015 has been an incredible year.

We’ve welcomed a new audience of readers, helped dozens of Customer Success Managers and accelerated the growth of our clients.

In this post, we’ll share our top 10 highlights from 2015.

We share a world-class Customer Success article every week. Click here to stay up to date.

1 & 2. Glide Consulting was born… and Alex joined the fun

After 15+ years as an employee, Nils made a bold move to launch Glide Consulting. He had an incredible start, bringing clarity, purpose and his unique experience to new clients. His simple, yet effective 4 P’s Customer Success framework helped leaders access a new perspective and finally see the forest, instead of being caught in the trees… or weeds!

In May, I met Nils and we clicked. We did some quick ‘back of the napkin math’. The equation? 1 + 1 = 3. As individuals, we would be successful. The combination of our strengths and experience would be unstoppable.

3. Purpose and core values: defined

Our half-day workshop at my San Francisco office was an absolute blast, as you can see below.

Our purpose is to invest in the growth of our clients.

Our values are:

• Always be helpful
• Essentialism
• Top off the tank

Our purpose and values guide the decisions we make, where we spend our time and how we prioritize our effort. To us, topping off the tank looks like this…

or this…

Energy drives everything we do, so we’re mindful of making time to exercise, eat well and being 100% present with our families.

4. We invested in the growth of our clients… and they grew!

Nils’ approach to consulting is authentic and energizing. He’s in his element leading workshops and asking questions instead of giving the answers. His approach works.

Here’s what a few of our clients had to say about working with Nils this year:

“We contracted with Nils and Glide to help us establish our Customer Success group at Customer.io. We wanted confidence that we’d be world class at customer success on day 1 when we hire for the role. We also wanted to make sure we know who to hire and what they’d be doing. After working with Nils, our customer success role and goals of that team are the most well defined of any role in the company! I’m a convert to Nils’ way of doing things believe this will be transformational for our business.” Colin Nederkoorn, Founder & CEO at Customer.io

“Nils has hugely helped us with all aspects of customer success, from how to think about CS all the way through to when to hire our 3rd CSM and how to conduct Quarterly Business Reviews. He is incredibly knowledgeable and opinionated on what good Customer Success looks and feels like, and he will help you get there.” Fred Stevens-Smith, Co-founder / CEO at Rainforest

“We’ve worked with Nils twice at Segment, and I’d recommend him to any company serious about Customer Success. While he has an encyclopedic knowledge of the various forms and tactics of CS deployments, what really sets him apart is his mastery of teaching, coaching, and capacity building. Anyone who is smart and committed can collect the knowledge that Nils has accumulated, but it’s Nils’ ability to transmit those lessons to the teams he advises that makes him a no-brainer for a team looking for rapid improvements.” Raphael Parker, VP, Business at Segment

5. We reached over 40,000 (!) people with our content

We created 20 pieces of useful, actionable and valuable content for Customer Success practitioners. We also welcomed Dr Emma Price as a contributing writer to our team. She’s been incredible to work with.

Here’s a list of all of our posts from this year:

People

• 3 ways to retain your Customer Success Managers (Bluenose)
• 4 powerful questions that saved a $100,000 account (Totango)
• How to find the perfect Customer Success Manager (Gainsight)
• Improve Customer Success hiring with this advice (Preact)
• 7 ways Customer Success Managers can overcome outreach anxiety (Client Success)
• What I learned from being dumped by a customer (LinkedIn Pulse)

Purpose

• The 4 P’s of Customer Success (Bluenose)
• 22 must-answer career questions for Customer Success Managers (Bluenose)
• How to improve customer satisfaction and avoid metric overwhelm (Forbes)

Process

• The art of the Quarterly Business Review (Preact)
• A Customer Success Manager is the quarterback of a Quarterly Business Review (Bluenose)
• 5 tips to jumpstart your Quarterly Business Review process (LinkedIn Pulse)
• The best $50 you’ll ever spend on Customer Success (LinkedIn Pulse)

Platform

• How to avoid a failed Customer Success platform implementation (LinkedIn Pulse)

Expert interviews

• Customer Success: The best kept secret of hyper-growth startups (Forbes)
• 3 startup experts reveal their Customer Success secrets (Forbes)
• How Campaign Monitor achieves 98% customer satisfaction with 2M customers (Forbes)
• Okta: How Customer Success powers their incredible growth (Forbes)
• How Intercom helps 8,000 companies communicate with their customers (Inc)
• Eoghan McCabe’s counterintuitive approach to building a unicorn software company (Inc)

Here’s what our readers had to say about our content:

• “I love the posts so far! Great insights on Customer Success!” Miray
• “You do know your stuff, that’s for sure. Thanks for sharing your articles with the CS community!” Marc
• “I count you in the top thought leaders for Customer Success Management.” Jean
• “I really enjoy this content and find it extremely valuable.” Anthony
• “I’ve been reading your articles and love them.” Kate

If you’d like to receive our weekly update, click here and we’ll send you our best article every week!

6. We helped 500+ Customer Success Managers

We spent months creating, tweaking and perfecting our Customer Success email course, CSM Elite. Helping Customer Success Managers is incredible fun… and rewarding for us too.

We had great feedback from our audience, with Conor’s tweet being the stand-out.

Advice from Glide on Customer Success is like listening to Warren Buffet on Investing https://t.co/InI5Gg2Ra7

— Conor Nash (@conornash) September 15, 2015

If you’d like to join the course, click here to get started.

7. Nils rocked the mic at Gainsight Pulse

I’ve been to a lot of conferences and watched a lot of presentations. When I witnessed Nils own the room at the Gainsight Pulse conference, I was in awe. Here’s a picture of him in action:

When you’re doing something you truly love, the audience can tell.

8. We contributed to the Customer Success community

Nils was a Champion contributor to the Bluenose Customer Success Community, answering questions and sharing his experience whenever his schedule would allow.

He was also active in the Customer Success Forum, which is a great way to get your questions answered and share learnings with your Customer Success peers.

We guest-posted for our friends at Totango, Client Success, Gainsight, Bluenose and Preact. Our work was featured in Forbes and Inc, which helped us to expand our reach and bring wider awareness to the Customer Success movement.

9. Every ‘working’ day was fun

Each morning around 8AM, we sign into Slack and get caught up. A new day brings a new challenge, whether it’s creating a new course, customizing a new proposal or thinking about how we can have a bigger impact.

No matter what we work on, it’s good old-fashioned fun. Here we are with the incredible leadership team at Oracle Marketing Cloud. This photo was taken at the end of an all-day intensive workshop… fun can be contagious 🙂

10. We set ambitious, yet achievable goals for 2016

We created a V2MOM to help guide us in 2016. This one-pager plan articulates our Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles and Milestones.

We co-created this on location in Nils’ new hometown of Bend, Oregon.

In 2016, our vision is to be the go-to experts in Customer Success. We’ll get there by doing more of what works… and we plan to have a ton of fun along the way!

Thank you for supporting us this year and we look forward to helping you succeed in 2016.

We share a world-class Customer Success article every week. Click here to stay up to date.