Another great year has come and gone at Bluetrain! Like any business, it didn’t come without its challenges; above all else, we believe in celebrating our wins. This year, we truly LIVED our values (Balance, Growth, Teamwork, Quality, Integrity) and wanted to share what that looked like for us and the things we celebrate as we bring 2024 to a close.
BALANCE
By the Numbers:
- 12+ countries visited
- 209.5 vacation days taken
Balance can be a tricky one! Such is the nature of agency life, there are days, weeks and even months where the balance can feel off quilter. This is why we as a team are focused on ensuring that during those times, we encourage our team members to do whatever it takes for them to feel balanced, even if that’s outside of work sometimes.
This year, that seemed to overwhelmingly be travel! We had quite a few team members go on some amazing trips. Terri went to New Zealand, Bryan went to Singapore for an Entrepreneur Organization Conference, and Melanie spent six months working remotely from the UK, bouncing all over Europe throughout her time there. Monica spent three weeks in Europe with her daughters, the trip of a lifetime, making it to Disneyland Paris! Merilyn also popped over to Europe for a few weeks soaking in the sights of Spain and Amsterdam.
We also had various team members work remotely for various reasons, some including to support family members through health challenges. The flexibility to work remotely is one that we will continue to support and foster as a company, because we trust our team, see the value in working together to support each other outside of work as well and find balance in the flexibility. “It’s great to work for a company that lets us take care of life issues as needed.” – Carol
GROWTH
By the Numbers:
- 5 new team members hired
- 2 babies welcomed
Our values clearly state “We are constantly aiming to grow both as individuals and as a company.” – we certainly achieved both this year!
Our team has grown once again, and we’re thrilled to welcome aboard several talented individuals to Bluetrain! Joining us are Monica as Director of Client Services, Louissa as Account Manager, Mauro as Digital Marketing Specialist, and Monique as Digital Marketing Coordinator.
Two of our team members attended SocialWest in Calgary this year. They found it incredibly energizing to connect with fellow industry professionals and gain insights from the lineup of incredible speakers and panellists.
This past year, two of our team members, Ally & Megan, expanded their families and welcomed little ones into the world. We are overjoyed for them and their families and have had the opportunity to meet the little Blue-trainers at some social events. We look forward to welcoming them back in 2025!
TEAMWORK
By the Numbers:
- 152 “Thank You’s” in our Town Hall Agenda
- 3 partner lunch and learns
2024 was another year of phenomenal collaboration for the Bluetrain team! While we collaborate daily internally and on client accounts, we won’t bore you with those mundane details. Let’s get to the good stuff!
In our monthly town halls, there was an overwhelming amount of “Thank You’s” for stepping in to support while someone was tending to a personal or other company-related matter. Our team has a way of showing up for each other when it matters most that is truly invaluable. We trust each other, know that we can rely on each other and above all else, feel confident enough to let others step in knowing that our clients are in good hands. This is something that we feel truly sets our team apart from others.
We hosted Lunch & Learn’s with some of our key vendor partners this year and it was a huge success! It’s always great to have working relationships with other vendors, but we took it a step further and had them present their business and service offerings to our entire team so that we’re better informed and able to tap into those resources for our clients when we see fit. Our team found this to be highly beneficial and informative.
It was the second year in a row that we had our annual in-person Team Day! This year, our morning sessions included group strategy breakouts, a presentation on our new internal Career Pathing templates and fun team-building activities. We then spent the afternoon racing go-karts, throwing axes and bowling.
It wasn’t all fun and games that week. Our leadership team then dove into the deep end for 2 days of annual strategy planning. Taking an analytical and practical approach to ensuring we’re on the right track for the 2025 season!
QUALITY
By the Numbers:
- 10+ Community/Land Development and Home Builder clients
- “I’m impressed with how up-to-date you guys are with the newest changes from Google” – New Hire
Quality is the value that we live and breathe by. Throughout this past year, during exit calls with clients (it happens), they had nothing but praise for the quality of work produced by our team. This is echoed by our being nominated (for the second year in a row) for the Sherwood Park Chamber of Commerce – Business of the Year Award! We still are unsure who submitted us, if you’re reading this, thank you!
Other ways that our team exemplified Quality this year was by building strong relationships with our clients and contacts and taking time to understand the client’s needs and patience to ensure a great client experience. We also initiated more robust internal peer reviews on our Paid Ads team, tested and trialled helpful tools to be able to expand our services and better serve our clients, and are always striving to up our game by providing innovative ways to ensure a positive client experience.
“On behalf of the marketing team here at Canada Learning Code, I want to say THANK YOU for the incredible work your team has done over the past two years in setting us up with a strong foundation. Your team’s expertise and dedication have truly made a difference, and we deeply appreciate the effort you put into our partnership (and we’ve learned so much!). While we’re sad to see the partnership come to an end, we’re so grateful for the positive impact you’ve had on our organization and for helping us evolve and grow.” – Canada Learning Code
INTEGRITY
By the Numbers:
- A couple of mistakes
- Countless lessons learned
We define integrity as the act of conducting ourselves honestly and ethically with everyone we do business with. This was accomplished in 2024 by ensuring that when working with clients, we are continually adapting and improving our processes to be as efficient and effective as possible, we support their teams by strategizing and generating fresh ideas to increase results, and due to how we represent ourselves with our clients, we have had several clients as our opinion on marketing decisions their making internally. While we’re humble about this, we also believe it to be flattering and a true testament to the expertise and knowledge that each person on our team possesses.
In 2024 we also took on some projects that spoke to our integrity. To expand on last year’s transition from Universal Analytics to GA4, we alerted clients well in advance of the need to perform a backup of all Universal Analytics in Google to not lose historical data forever with the transition to GA4. We then supported numerous clients in performing these backups so that their data is accessible.
Internally, we also made a HUGE switch and transitioned out of Dropbox for client and internal file sharing and migrated everything into Google Drive. While this was an enormous undertaking, it allowed us to streamline our file sharing and storage for both our clients and our internal team, making sharing and collaboration more seamless.
What an incredible year it’s been! A heartfelt thank-you to our clients and partners for your unwavering support and loyalty throughout 2024. And to our team, we couldn’t have achieved any of this without you! Here’s to even greater achievements and shared successes in the year ahead. We can’t wait to celebrate more wins together in 2025!