Friday 3 August 2018 marks the third anniversary of Civic Web Media as a business. When we started, we became Newcastle’s first dedicated content marketing agency and our third birthday is a milestone we’re very happy to celebrate.

According to ABS statistics, for businesses established in 2013-14 with fewer than 20 employees, there was a 64% survival rate by 2016 (not a 60% failure rate as is often cited online). This drops to 55% for surviving a fourth year – a select group we intend on joining.

Deciding when our anniversary should be wasn’t as easy a choice as you might think. While a bricks and mortar store might have a more obvious first day in business, we had different anniversaries for:

• Registering our ABN,
• Registering our business name,
• Purchasing our domain and hosting,
• Becoming ‘LinkedIn official’,
• Having our first business meeting,
• Invoicing our first client,
• Our first client paying us (within two days!)

In the end, we’ve gone with registering our business name as our official anniversary, as that’s the day Civic Web Media was truly born. There have been major achievements in that time for us:

• Each year, we’ve had more income (and more tax to pay, including GST),
• Each year, we’ve grown our client numbers (both in Newcastle and overseas),
• We’ve gone from a home office to working in a shared office space of creatives at The Roost,
• We were invited to speak at an industry event,
• At the start of 2018, we invited one of our freelancers to work for us on a more official basis.

We also recently celebrated payment of our 200th invoice. While this isn’t always the best measure of success (for example, our biggest invoice contains 60x as many items and is worth 200x more than our smallest), it feels like an important landmark nonetheless.

When we started in business, we made the decision to make a donation after every 100 invoices – a local business helping the local community. The first time round we donated to the Hunter Wetlands; this time we’ve supported Newcastle Toy Run.

We’ve got a lot to look forward to – a celebration of a fourth anniversary and our 300th invoice among them – and every day in business is another reminder that we’re doing something right.

But before then, let us eat cake.