Looking back at another year of growth and development at Black Nova Designs

As we get closer to Christmas and the end of the year, it’s the perfect time to look back at how the last 12 months have gone. Here at Black Nova Designs the time seems to fly so quickly, but we always take a pause after each month is over to take a deep dive into our sales figures. That way we can see what’s working well and what isn’t in our messaging and push some services if we think people aren’t aware of them. Plus, we’re usually planning well ahead for our events and networking, so there’s plenty of time spent with our head in a diary!

For this month’s blog we’re sharing a roundup of our year, including our events, (and non-event, in one case) as well as some of our key stats from the past 12 months. They’re a handy reminder of the range of different services that we offer and, with a quick look back at previous year’s sales, show how we’re growing and strengthening the business. We’re looking forward to celebrating 10 years of Black Nova Designs in 2025, and it’s good to see the results of all our hard work in numbers. There’s plenty of work still to do, and, like so many businesses, our costs are higher than ever, but it’s worth celebrating successes. So, without further ado, let’s look back at the past 12 months in numbers, events and wins!

2024 by the numbers

It gives us such a buzz to reflect on how many businesses and people have chosen us to provide their IT, web design and hosting this year. Here’s the breakdown of the different services our customers have chosen:

275 people called for general IT support
160 people chose us for their professional 365 email account
Our web design team has created 38 new websites
We’ve added 13 VPS (Virtual Private Server) customers in the past 12 months
The team has handled 164 ad hoc website jobs
We’re managing an additional 83 domains
Our onpage SEO services are helping five more businesses get better visibility online
36 website work and upgrade customers found us this year
We’re hosting 45 more websites than this time in 2023

Overall, we’ve welcomed 672 customers to Black Nova Designs since the start of November last year. That’s up from 557 the previous year (Nov 22 to 23) and 475 the year before that! What a great demonstration of our continued growth and the fruits of the team’s hard work. This year hasn’t been easy, and we have some big aims for the future, particularly around growing our web hosting customer base, but it’s good to see we are growing.

2024 events review

Our trade stand has seen plenty of action this year as we attended Badminton Horse Trials and the Royal Bath & West Show in May, two of our favourite equestrian and rural events. While we work with businesses in virtually every sector of business, we’ve forged an excellent reputation in the horsey and countryside world, so it’s always worth going to these events to network with fellow business owners and competitors who could be in need of a website or IT support.

Then, we had a flurry of disappointments – we were due to exhibit at Gatcombe Horse Trials in August, but this was cancelled after the organisers simply couldn’t make the numbers work. The 2023 event had literally been washed out by torrential rain and it turned out that they were running on too great a loss. We were sad but poured our energy into getting ready for our first-ever appearance at The Game Fair in late July.

This celebration of the great British countryside presented a great chance to meet more business owners and push our brand awareness in the world of gundogs, gunmaking, clay shooting and fishing. Unfortunately, a mix-up meant that there was no space for us! Other exhibitors offered to squeeze together, but it was deemed impossible… So, we headed home with a free weekend instead of a great sales opportunity! We’ll be back next year though.

In September, we were back at Blenheim Palace International Horse Trials which was another excellent networking opportunity and chance to catch up with customers present and past. That event marked the end of our outdoor events season, so we packed away the BND gazebo and focused on networking and planning 2025…

We’ve also renewed our sponsorship of the Horse & Hound Event Horse of the Year award for 2024 and voting for that opened in October. Now, we have to wait until the end of this month for the ceremony at Dallas Burston Polo Club on the 27th of November to find out the winner. We’ll share all the pictures from this black-tie evening on our social media so make sure you keep an eye on the night!

As always, thank you for choosing Black Nova Designs. We would love to support and help even more people next year and we have plenty of availability for new project, so whether you’re a sole trader, gamer or run a business of any size, get in touch if you need our help – and spread the word if you love what we do! We’ll be sending out an email in December to wrap up the year and look forward to continuing to support you and your business in 2025!