[Internal Memo]

Hey team,

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about who we are, what we actually stand for, and what “winning” looks like for Intoria this year.

Part of why I’m thinking about this is simple.

2025 was a restructuring year.

We pivoted from being a web design company (as our primary focus) to being a software company (as our primary focus). That transition required real investment. It also exposed some gaps in our systems and discipline. It was, without question, the most financially challenging year we’ve had since 2002.

I’m not saying that to be dramatic. I’m saying it because clarity matters.

If we’re going to build the next version of Intoria, we need to be aligned on three things:

Our mission.
The meaning behind it.
And what success actually looks like.

Mission

Here’s the simplest way I can say what we do: We recreate integral processes that allow companies to condense ten steps to two.

We take legacy | manual | paper, “this is how we’ve always done it” work, and we turn it into digital systems that run automatically and frankly, bring transformation to our clients' businesses.

That’s the upgrade.

Meaning

I care about ROI, obviously.

But the meaning goes deeper than money.

When we do this well, three things happen.

(A) The business gets a return that is undeniably worth it. Productivity goes up. Waste goes down. Sometimes by orders of magnitude, not slight improvements.

(B) The people feel relief. That word matters to me. Relief is emotional. It’s a department exhaling after years of frustration, anxiety, and workarounds. And there’s often this second thing right after relief: surprise. Like “I didn’t know work could feel like this.”

Not ego. Pride.

The pride of building something beautiful and technically challenging, and shipping it with the kind of quality where you’d actually want your name attached to it.

What success looks like

I want to be clear about this too, because vague success is fake success.

For our clients, success means clear ROI and serious time savings.

For users, success means relief and surprise.

For the product, success means premium feel. Fast. Intuitive. Secure. Low defects. Strong testing. No “almost done” purgatory.

And for Intoria as a business, success means we stop giving away the farm.

Generosity stays. Craftsmanship stays. Caring stays.

But unbounded hours that ignore budgets and timelines does not stay. We are building the guardrails now. This year.

Values (and what they look like in real life)

Last summer, I spent a long time with a brand specialist named Justin (amazing guy) on a two-day intensive workshop to determine the values I want Intoria to have going forward. I'm happy to publicly share them now. These are now the values we hire, promote, and operate by.

1/ Responsibility

Responsibility means role ownership. Budgets and timelines don’t manage themselves.

Responsible developers know the budget, ask for help early, and track hours with integrity. Responsible PMs own the budget and timeline, spot problems early, and have the hard conversations before a project hits the finish line incomplete.

**Responsible teams don’t blame, complain, or make excuses. **

Please read that last sentence again. Blake and I came up with that years ago and it has been a mantra that has stayed with me for over a decade. I would love everyone at Intoria to internalize it professionally.

For more on this value, see Responsibility.

2/ Generosity

Generosity is the lens we use to add extra clarity, care, and delight.

But it has to live inside discipline. Otherwise it becomes scope creep, and scope creep becomes pain for the whole company.

For more on this value, see Generosity.

3/ Craftsmanship

Craftsmanship is the standard of premium.

Elegant logic. Secure systems. Beautiful UX. Code you’re proud of. And yes, craftsmanship shows up in how we communicate and how enjoyable we are to work with.

Bugs, outages, hacks, and illogical code paths are the smell test. We do not accept those as normal.

For more on this value, see Craftsmanship.

4/ Speed

We spent a long time on this one at the branding workshop. How can speed and craftsmanship live together?

Speed matters, but it’s disciplined speed.

Speed is senior talent, clear checklists, definition of done, deep work, and using AI with human judgment. Speed is not rushing. Speed is not skipping review. Speed is not hiding when a ticket is harder than expected.

For more on this value, see Speed.

2026 scorecard

This is what I’m aiming for. Not as fantasy. As a standard.

$1.3M+ CAD revenue.
For every project: we set a delivery target after the SOW is signed, and we hit or beat delivery dates on 80% of those targets.
Zero projects that drift into “profit = $0.”
July to December 2026: zero AWS security-deficiency emails.
We measure NPS, and we beat our relevant benchmark by 10%.
We end 2026 at 10 people.

If you read that and feel a mix of excitement and intensity, good.

That’s how I feel too.

A few questions I want all of us sitting with:

Are we building “ten steps to two” systems, or are we just shipping features?
Are we protecting deep work, or are we letting meetings and noise destroy our speed?
Are we being generous inside discipline, or are we slipping into budget ignorance that creates scope creep and invisible debt?
Are we shipping with craftsmanship, or are we normalizing bugs and sloppy thinking?
Are we owning our roles, or are we letting “not my job” creep into our culture?

I’m proud of this team. I’m also very serious about where we’re going.

We have a chance to catapult this year. We have the experience. We have the talent. We have a clearer foundation than we’ve had in a long time.

Now we bring the discipline.

If you want to talk through any of this, or if you see a gap we need to close fast, bring it to me. I’m paying attention. And I want your eyes on it too.

Clarke Schroeder

Clarke Schroeder, Founder, Intoria Software Architects

Mission, Meaning, and What Success Looks Like at Intoria ​