Intro
First, a quick overview for those who haven’t checked their LinkedIn notifications in a while, or are new to who we are: in July 2024, CloudKettle was acquired by Bell Canada to become the Salesforce arm of the Service Implementor (SI) powerhouse now known as Ateko.
Then and now, we had a tradition of transparency. It was important to me that we were open with our community about our progress, our wins, and our losses (and over a decade, we’ve had plenty of both). We’re a team of data nerds who believe in sharing knowledge, so these annual By the Numbers posts became a natural form of accountability that extended beyond our office doors.
Almost accidentally, these posts also became a timeline of our journey from a scrappy startup to a Bell acquisition. When I founded CloudKettle, I wrote a V2MOM (Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, Measures), more on what that means here, that included a 10-year path to being acquired. We hit it. Now, this ritual chronicles the “Post-CloudKettle” years as we scale within the Bell family and continue that same tradition of transparency.
- CloudKettle Year 10 by the Numbers
- CloudKettle Year 9 by the Numbers
- CloudKettle Year 8 by the Numbers
- CloudKettle Year 7 by the Numbers
- CloudKettle Year 6 by the Numbers
- CloudKettle Year 5 by the Numbers
- CloudKettle Year 4 by the Numbers
- CloudKettle Year 3 by the Numbers
- CloudKettle Year 2 by the Numbers
- CloudKettle Year 1 by the Numbers
The Players (Look at us grow)
Team matters most. We don’t sell widgets here, our service is providing clients access to amazing brains, and this amazing group of people is the reason I show up every day. Many acquisitions unfortunately involve stripping a company for parts; that was never Bell’s intent. Instead, we’ve hit the gas, expanding our headcount by 111% in 2025.
With that team growth, we have also expanded our footprint across time zones to better serve North America. We now have team members in AT, ET, CT, MT, and PT, giving us true coast-to-coast coverage, with the notable exception of NL (Newfoundland)… soon, folks. Soon.
This growth is a double-edged sword. Culture and quality are primary directives and as such, we keep this team an exclusive club, carefully reviewing thousands of applications in 2025, with 4.5% resulting in interviews. Even with that volume, we never hire as fast as we’d like, in large part because of our obsession with quality. In 2025, only ~0.5% of applicants were the perfect fit and onboarded to our team.
But here’s what actually matters: people stayed. One small piece of evidence of this is the dinner we host each year to honor team members who have reached their 5-year anniversary. In addition to the people reaching their first 5 year milestone, the previous 5 year veterans also join us, and that dinner table is getting longer every year.
The AI Boom
At Ateko, using AI isn’t “extra credit”, it is the baseline expectation. Every member of the Salesforce practice uses Gemini daily, both as a standalone engine and embedded across our productivity suite. Not surprisingly, we’re also deep in the weeds with Agentforce, Slack Agents, and proprietary AI tools for specialized tasks like QA and coding.
2025 was also the year AI search moved from a “cool tool” to a “measurable revenue channel” for us For the first time, we saw concrete opportunities originate from platforms like ChatGPT. This signals a massive shift in buyer behavior; prospects are using AI for deep-dive research before they ever hit our website. AI is consuming our content and actively making recommendations about us.
While overall visibility is still lower than I’d like, our performance across Gemini, ChatGPT, and other platforms, reinforced by attribution signals, is validating our hypothesis that buyers are using AI to evaluate technical partners. Qualified prospects are asking Gemini and ChatGPT tough technical questions, and the AI is answering: “you should speak with Ateko.”
We Slacked Off this year
(Apologies. It is a bad pun, but I’m not deleting it.)
We are a remote-first company. If our team is the brain, Slack is the nervous system. And because that’s a lot of data to process, we rely on our automation workhorse: Ateko Bot.
Ateko Bot is, frankly, our busiest team member. They’re always in the background:
- HR & Perks: Ateko Bot is notifying the team of vacations and celebrating peer-nominated bonuses. New Salesforce certification earned? Ateko Bot validates it and notifies HR to issue a bonus.
- Project Ops: Ateko Bot is managing daily summaries, handling onboarding tasks for folks joining mid-project, and sending weekly team reminders.
- Technical Heavy Lifting: Ateko Bot is creating and distributing QA test documentation and keeping Project Managers updated on rotating tasks.
- Sales and Renewals: Ateko Bot is there, providing real-time updates on opportunities and ensuring the right people are looped in at the right time.
Shout-out to Jen and the team for keeping Ateko Bot humming and the lights on.
The human side of Slack was busy too. Collectively, we sent just under half a million messages this year:
- 34% in public channels
- 10% in private channels
- 56% in direct messages (DMs)
We are trying to trim the DM habit (transparency is better) but sometimes you just need to talk about your day with a coworker.
Our busiest interaction day on Slack was December 4, 2025, with 3,395 messages sent and October 15 was our busiest file-sharing day, with 264 files shared. In terms of where in Slack our team is interacting, the “Every Day AI” channel continues to be a dark horse, rapidly becoming one of our most active hubs.
And for anyone wondering — no, the annual t-shirt tradition did not stop once we got acquired. This year’s shirt was custom-designed by Justin Lee from Double Ghost Merch, continuing a long-standing tradition with an Ateko twist to reflect our new chapter. The retro, old-school toy robot aesthetic was a hit, and the shirts quickly became a team favourite.
Clients
Post-acquisition, some clients were understandably worried the “magic” would disappear. We spent a lot of time proving that, while the name on the invoice may have changed, the level of execution would not.
The results speak for themselves. Our already low client churn dropped by 28%, with most of the attrition driven by budget cuts or M&A activity outside our control. On the rosier side and better news, 38% of clients expanded their engagement and investment with us in 2025.
The Great Canadian Shift: Historically, US clients dominated our revenue stream. That has changed significantly in recent years. In 2024, the split was 60/40 (Canada/US) and in 2025, that Canadian growth continued to outpace new logos in the US, with 77% of revenue now coming from Canadian organizations.
Client stats at a glance:
- Average age: Our client base got younger, dropping from an average company age of 50 to 43, and they don’t look a day over 30.
- The Big Ones: 38% of our clients have a valuation over $1B. When you specialize, like us, in highly regulated industries like Financial Services, Telecommunications, and Utilities, you tend to swim with the whales. Surprisingly though, only 28% of our clients in 2025 were publicly traded, down significantly from 2024 (over 40%). This shift wasn’t driven by venture-backed growth, but rather by an expanding base of large privately owned and public sector organizations.
- When we worked: Our busiest months for client delivery were a tie — October and December
- Giving back: We maintained our Pledge 1% commitment, donating 1% of our profits and 1% of employee time to non-profits chosen our team members. As part of that commitment, the team volunteered with organizations including Souls Harbour Rescue Mission, Feed Nova Scotia, Children’s Aid Foundation of Nova Scotia, QueerTech, and We Are Young,
- Growth without dilution: Across all departments (even including Operations, Finance, and Leadership), team members hold an average of 3.9 Salesforce certifications each. The figure is even if higher if we include additional credentials like PMP or Scrum Master certs.
Content
We continued to invest heavily in content throughout 2025, and the results were consistent with what we’ve seen in prior years: high-quality, deeply technical content continues to resonate with the Salesforce community.
Once again, Salesforce Data Cloud Model Explained held the crown as our most-read blog post with 8,817 views, more than double the next most popular one. On the video side, Dan Stratton’s How to Calculate Conversion Rates in Salesforce Reports (originally published in 2022) continued to punch well above its weight, reminding us that practitioners really, really care about reporting.
We’ve long believed that content plays a critical role beyond lead generation, it helps prospects validate us before they ever reach out. Referrals still drive the majority of our revenue, but our data shows that referred organizations spend significant time on our blogs and videos, vetting our expertise, before making contact. Content also plays an active role during sales cycles, where we often share relevant posts or videos after a prospect walks us through their challenges. Measuring conversion lift perfectly is difficult, but the pattern is clear: great content shortens sales cycles and builds confidence.
Content also continues to matter on the hiring side. Recruiting top-tier Salesforce talent is no different than any other sale; we’re asking the best and brightest to chose us. A significant portion of our strongest candidates already know who we were before applying, thanks to our content and ongoing participation in the community. After they’ve been onboarded (and are perhaps a little more open and frank), we often find out that they’ve learned some of their craft from our best practices material and look forward to contributing to future posts themselves.
Content only works if it reaches the community. In 2025, we continued to focus our distribution efforts on LinkedIn, where our audience engages most actively. That focus paid off, with our social audience growing by over 20%, a 17% increase in engagement, and a 44% increase in post link clicks year over year.
On the video side, we transitioned our YouTube presence to the Ateko channel, preserving our existing content while continuing to publish new videos under the new brand. As with previous years, we aimed for a mix of practical, technical content and team moments. Once again, some of our best-performing posts were the simplest ones, including an image carousel of our Halifax team competing in our annual video game tournament.
2025 also marked our first year of publishing French-language content, with 20 blog posts translated to better support our Canadian audience.
Oui, c’est vrai — on a aussi fait parler le contenu en français, avec 20 billets traduits.
Misses
This was a very strong year for the Salesforce practice at Ateko. We nailed our financial targets, content KPIs and overall, the majority of the metrics we track. In several areas, we didn’t just exceed our goal, we set new records. A lot be grateful for and proud of.
Our primary miss was hiring. Our continued selectivity around the perfect fit for every new team member meant that we did not onboard as much top talent as we would have liked, particularly team members who are fluently bilingual in French and English. That area of growth remains key as we continue to expand with the Canadian public sector and organizations with significant footprints in Quebec.
We began the rollout of the Ateko brand and the unification of our organizations under a single banner. While we’ve made strong progress, not everything was fully migrated from cloudkettle.com to ateko.com, and there is still rebranding and systems work ahead. Bringing together a family of acquisitions takes time, but the trajectory and finish line is clear.
Conclusion
Year 11 was a win. Our clients and team members made the explicit choice to stay with us post-acquisition, they didn’t have to, and we don’t take that for granted.
As we head into 2026, a sincere thank you to everyone who has been part of this journey. Now, let’s get back to work.
