Aptos Kick Off FY25: A Focus on ‘Make It Happen’ Moments

Earlier this month, approximately 65 Aptos colleagues were in Atlanta, Georgia, for our annual Kick Off event, a gathering of sales and other customer-facing colleagues. This event marked the transition from one fiscal year to the next, as Aptos’ FY25 started on October 1.

Going into Kick Off this year, we had four primary goals:

• Celebrate the prior year’s successes. Our sales and sales-supporting colleagues work hard all year long. It’s important to spotlight the amazing achievements of colleagues who contribute to Aptos’ and our customers’ successes.
• Share updates regarding strategic direction and plans. This includes major technology initiatives and product roadmaps to ensure our field teams can communicate effectively with clients.
• Facilitate cohesiveness, collaboration and productivity. The better we work as a team across functions, the better we can serve our customers.
• Dive deep into retailer feedback. We detail how specific retailer feedback from the prior year has impacted our priorities and investments for the year ahead.

While it would be impossible to recap four days of Kick Off presentations, networking and testimonials in a single blog, below I share some of the biggest takeaways, innovation previews and memorable moments from the event.

Product Engineering: Tushar Sachdev joined Aptos as CTO in May 2024. I know I’m not alone in being impressed by how quickly Tushar has gotten up to speed on the Aptos business. Equally impressive has been his introduction of new initiatives aimed at faster and more frequent product releases. For example, during Kick Off, Tushar detailed important investments in our platform engineering team as well as how release flags could be utilized to accelerate release velocity in a way that is highly beneficial and sustainable for our customers.

Professional Services: Several leaders in our professional services organization gave an update on A², our agile-inspired services delivery framework. A² is having a major impact, allowing us to get software live for clients faster than ever before.  

For example, prior to A², it was not uncommon for a POS project to take 6-10 months to implement. Under the A² framework, we are now able to go from selection to live with Aptos ONE in as little as 14 weeks. The customer-reported benefits of A² are improved speed to value and the ability to achieve ROI in a very predictable way, within the agreed upon time frame and with the desired features and functions.

Marketing: As CMO at Aptos, I’d be remiss if I didn’t share highlights from marketing. During Kick Off, we offered a look at our event schedule for 2025, including Aptos-hosted events as well as participation in industry gatherings such as NRF (meet with us!), Shoptalk Spring and the Retail Technology Show.

I also spoke candidly about some of our marketing challenges and opportunities, including the importance of ensuring retailers are aware that Aptos ONE POS is a built-from-scratch, modern POS, not a rearchitected version of our long-standing Aptos Store POS solution.

Sales: What does it take to be a winning software organization today, including having the ability to keep selling more software?

• Make customers happy.
• Ensure successful projects.
• Stay ahead of the competition.
• Win opportunities.

This is oversimplified, to be sure, but this summarizes the message we delivered to our sales teams during Kick Off. While a lot of software companies over-index their time and resources to secure new logos, at Aptos our viewpoint is slightly different. We believe that if we put the bulk of our attention and investments into ensuring our customers are happy, our projects are successful and we keep innovating our solutions, we will win opportunities.

Speaking of winning, during Kick Off, we highlighted the dozens of deals won throughout the year, including WSS’ selection of Aptos ONE, Liberty’s deployment of Aptos POS and CRM and Brown Thomas’ adoption of Aptos Sales Audit and CRM.

Concluding the Kick Off

Aptos GM Jeremy Grunzweig was the emcee for the Kick Off event, and while I am biased, I think his ability to humbly and authentically connect with and inspire people is quite rare. 

Jeremy shared this quote from Tommy Lasorda, a figure in US baseball, at the start of Kick Off and then again at the conclusion: 

“There are three kinds of people in this world: people who make it happen, people who watch what happens, and people who wonder what happened.”

Jeremy urged everyone to find and embrace their “make it happen” moments throughout FY25. Because when we consistently show up for ourselves, our colleagues and our customers, good things are bound to happen.