“Building An Effective Brand”

Rami Korhonen, CEO of Oivan, thinks that building an effective brand starts with defining and communicating the company vision, mission, and values to all team members. He is at the frontline of the company's operations, especially when it comes to key accounts, rolling out OKRs (Objectives & Key Results), and building an effective Executive Team whose members have full ownership of their fields.

Over the years, Rami has been a part of the Finnish support ecosystem for budding new entrepreneurs. He is always excited to hear the entrepreneurs' vision and, where applicable, offer insights based on his over twenty years of experience. "Time to time, we also give young startups good deals in getting their MLP (Minimum Lovable Product) built if there is a good fit."

Being a steadfast leader Rami has learned numerous leadership lessons throughout his career. According to him, "The leader's job is to define the goals, point the way, stand back, and be available whenever a team member needs support. Businesses consist of three elements: people, money, and time. People always come first, especially in the human-centric business such as Oivan. Money is also important as ensuring the company's financial health is one of the CEO's key responsibilities. While people and money are elements that a company can get more of, time spent is forever lost. Clear goals and priorities are critical for effective time management."

Rami has been at the helm of incorporating numerous technologies for his company. Being a technology company, almost everything Oivan does has some technological angle. "On the operative side, the latest technology solutions we have adopted are in OKR tracking and HR management. In terms of client-facing services, we have been very excited about our partnership with the open-source messaging and file-sharing platform Nextcloud," he explains. "We have delivered Nextcloud-based services to several private and public sector organizations in the Middle East and Finland."

While working in a highly competitive industry, Rami and his team have discovered three pillars for positive differentiation:

• Turning geographical decentralization to their advantage: The Enhanced Distributed Teams model, also known as EDT, is often the primary value proposition Oivan presents to potential large clients. EDT means that they provide their larger client teams, consisting of smaller sub-teams, called Arrowhead teams, that work onsite at the client, and larger sub-teams, whose members work from their international offices or remote work locations.

• Focusing on markets where Oivan product-market fit works the best: Oivan's biggest successes have come from its work in Saudi Arabia (KSA), the Middle East's biggest market. Large organizations in KSA have traditionally had relatively limited options for securing high-quality talent for their digital transformation and cybersecurity projects. Oivan provides Saudi clients with premium class onsite experts with their EDT model while we scale the production force with a much bigger international team. Their combination of high-quality work and the ability to scale to meet client needs has worked exceptionally well in the market.

• Maintaining Nordic design and quality standards in their work: Nordic countries have a long tradition of clean design and high-quality software engineering expertise. The team members come from many backgrounds, and they view this multiculturality as a significant benefit for them.

Oivan's most significant case from recent years is our work with the National Housing Company (NHC) in Saudi Arabia. "For them, we have built a comprehensive suite of e-services that help Saudi citizens with housing-related matters, ranging from renting to buying a home," explains Rami. "The Saudi government included the Sakani and EJAR services in their list of top 10 government e-services in 2021. According to our client, the Sakani service turned a manual process that used to take nine months into a 10-minute digital process."

Building the Oivan brand is an ongoing process for Rami and his team, and many exciting initiatives are under construction at the company. For instance, Oivan is planning to enhance its already outstanding cybersecurity services in the days to come, especially in cloud security. "We also just released our new white-label Bitcoin Saving App Hatch, which offers banks an easy way to provide simple embedded service, with which the bank's customers can easily buy bitcoin, store it, or send it to their bitcoin wallet. The world's organizations adopt Bitcoin at their own pace, and Oivan is ready to help any company that wants to launch a BTC savings app with minimum effort", Rami concludes. IE