Celebrating 25 Years of Authority Partners!

By Maja & Erol Karabeg, Founders @ Authority Partners

Maja and Erol Karabeg are the founders and company officers of Authority Partners. They met in Mostar, their hometown, working in IT, and then immigrated to the United States 28 years ago. They started building Authority Partners 25 years ago, from a small team to an over 500-strong, global consulting and custom software development company. With offices on three continents and consultants working on-site and remotely worldwide, Maja shares her thoughts about the past year and their hopes and aspirations for Authority Partners’ continued success and excellence at the start of 2023.

Erol and I have always believed in people and the strength that comes from helping others succeed and be their best. Authority Partners is a way for us to offer world-class IT solutions to our clients and put those beliefs into action.

Enabling and encouraging our consultants to strive towards excellence, sharpen their skills and fully realize their talents and potential, while contributing to the communities where they live and work, is a source of great pride for both of us!

One of the keys of our success has been our willingness to seek out the best engineers and experts to drive the innovative software solutions we develop. This began as a response to the scarcity of qualified engineers in the US and it soon became the catalyst for our rekindled presence in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It also renewed our desire to bring talented professionals from all over the world into the company.

Twenty-five years on, we continue to reap the benefits of that decision – our global workforce is now integral to our company’s structure, ethos and culture. By offering opportunities for professional growth and development and building teams based on a culture that encourages creativity and personal initiative, we build excellent, innovative solutions for our clients.

As Erol often points out, we were driven by a desire to create a world-class work environment and an open culture where everybody would be respected. Our foresight in putting remote consultants into that mix has been critical to our success.

Now, as we begin 2023, returning to our roots has another significance. In the past, our decentralized international structure gave many clients the impression that we were simply an “offshore” outsourcing company – discretely providing services to develop technological solutions and solve IT-related problems.

We do that, and we do that exceptionally well, but we’re committed to taking Authority Partners to even higher levels.

As part of our 2022 to 2025 strategic plan, our vision for an updated AP 3.0 is to increase revenue from consulting services and create a clear path for continuing growth opportunities for Authority Partners consultants – strengthening the company operationally and financially.

The focus on consulting brings all of us in the Authority Partners family full circle, back to the kind of work we did when we started the company, offering clients a combination of technology strategy, product management and product engineering solutions.

After 25 years of finetuning the inner workings of an information technology company based around remote work and decentralized teams – and now coming out of two years of COVID mask-wearing, isolation and working from home – the management and remote work structure that we’ve been using for close to a decade is an approach to work that many companies have only recently started to get comfortable with.

Given our experience working this way and our focus on delivering world-class solutions, we are ideally positioned to take advantage of the opportunities that can come from more complex and higher value consulting work and deliver the excellent results we are known for.

Continued growth and cultivating a consulting mindset and consulting skillset should be top of mind in the coming year for all of us at Authority Partners. In 2023, we will be making a concerted effort to increase the consulting offerings. We will focus on providing world-class, end-to-end solutions and managed service offerings that start with a deep understanding of the client’s business and the desired business outcomes.

We are very proud of our AP Lab Cloud Masters Training Program and the excellent work of our Technology Education and Innovation Center in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which has been running since 2014.

The training opportunities and the increasing number of business trips our consultants now make to help clients globally testify to our hard work and success.

Erol and I believe that our company’s core values of excellence, growth and development, stability and social responsibility serve as a model for how we treat each other and operate in our community and the larger world.

Authority Partners was never just a business for us, it became our lifestyle and a way to connect and collaborate with great people around the world. We have to work peacefully and together to make good things happen.

With that close to our hearts and our minds, Erol and I wish you and your families a safe, healthy, happy and prosperous 2023.

Peace and love!