**Bojil Bojilov**

Chief Technology Officer, Bulgarian Software House (BSH)

More than 20 years of company history and all that time staying true to Microsoft technologies?

Indeed, Bulgarian Software House (BSH) has always considered Microsoft’s technology platforms as a strong, complete, and evolving portfolio. Being a Microsoft partner and reshaping our business with the way Microsoft has been transforming, has always been a winning strategy for us. As a boutique software service provider BSH is betting on extreme quality and high specialization in domains where we have an unparalleled advantage.

What domains are you referring to?

Business Transformation and Customer Experience solutions for mid to large enterprises. We have not expanded much as a team headcount over the years. Our growth was always focused on skills, expertise, and understanding what brings tangible value to our clients. We have delivered many complex enterprise projects for customers in Healthcare, Banking, and Insurance, Technology, and Telco, Energy, Manufacturing. BSH is delivering much more value with small teams of highly qualified experts that achieve the targeted results faster. Such an approach has a positive impact on the projects´ duration and on the overall budget spent.

How is being a small company working for enterprise customers?

Challenging and fulfilling as we are compelled to stay sharp and relevant to the latest trends. Moreover, we need to get to the core of the business needs and the desired outcomes as going into production means a considerable impact on operations, processes, or sales revenue. Understanding the dependencies and peculiarities in large companies has helped us become a trusted, long-term partner for many organizations.

What is your formula for keeping the team motivated?

It has been a challenge for the IT companies in Eastern Europe to retain engineers for the past 10 years, especially in periods of peak demand for quality development and niche skills. BSH is the company of parents with many children. Many of our colleagues have 3 or more kids. That creates a different culture and different values from other companies. We are looking for a perfect work-life balance, where time with the family is cherished. Our team is expecting the company to understand their needs and preferences; thus, we are looking for long-term projects that also enable the professional development of each consultant. Our engineers are motivated to have a real impact on clients´ projects, while their family responsibilities are also respected. This is a unique advantage that BSH has on the HR market in Bulgaria.

What was your drive to search for cooperation with CoMantis?

Engaging with CoMantis by the end of 2020 was an important decision. We were looking for international expansion and the vision was to have external support to win some new European customers. This vision was great as such. We were missing, though, an important aspect – if you want things to change, you need to be ready to change as well. CoMantis reminded us of this important principle, and that is how our journey started – rebranding to the possible extent (we were also willing to keep all the value and strength of the heritage) and becoming more relevant to the latest digital presence paradigms.

How did the rebranding help?

Beyond rebranding, what we did was rebranding and repositioning. Starting from the content at our website, update, and upgrade of all our key marketing materials, reviving our LinkedIn presence, the definition of how we want to be perceived, what kind of projects we’d like to attract, what type of customers; going through the analysis of trends and where Microsoft is betting for the future, reshaping our positioning in several domains by modernizing the storytelling around existing case studies; to executing several focused campaigns across Europe, making joint intro calls, and working together on concrete opportunities and proposals.

Sounds like busy times?

The competition we have out there is huge. To differentiate in the ocean of Microsoft partners, you need to go at a fast pace. This is something CoMantis helped us a lot with – keeping a velocity that enables us to achieve a lot in a short period of time, without making any compromise with the quality.

We also learned a lot about the end-to-end sales process. The most difficult part is getting to have the undivided attention of a decision-maker who needs our expertise. It is a challenge getting noticed when there are so many companies trying to sell and target the same accounts, we are interested in.

And when you finally identify an opportunity that fits your experience and skills (a hard and time-consuming journey on its own) is where the concrete sales process starts – RFIs, RFPs, proposals, offers, profiles, interviews, negotiations, and ultimately – winning or losing to other players.

What are the plans you have for the future, even though nowadays it is challenging to make any predictions?

For a while now we have been receiving propositions for selling the business or getting a strategic investment. So, it has become a possibility that has not been contemplated in the past years. It is still quite an early stage, and the idea should mature first. In all cases, what is in our immediate plans is to keep the delivery quality, focus more on the low-code solutions of Microsoft (Microsoft Power Platform) that enable very fast value delivery to clients and continuous customer-base expansion across Europe.

Thank you for your kind words, Bojil!

The Power of Focus – a Journey of Excellence in Enterprise Business Transformation and Customer Experience Solutions