Companies, even the ones driven by the most powerful ideas, are not the work of one person alone. Sooner or later, every entrepreneur must come to grips with the need to build a team that can build a dream into a successful reality.
Freshbooks has been on a recruiting tear lately, bringing in talent like Saul Colt , who was behind the launch of ZipCars in Canada, and Mitch Solway , the former VP of Marketing at Lavalife .
In this video clip recorded at Third Tuesday Toronto , Freshbooks founder Michael McDerment talks about the effort that should go into recruiting and hiring and the rewards from doing it right.
“We hire for fit. … You’re building a team. You want an extension of yourself and somebody you can trust has got your back. We spend an inordinate amount of time hiring. That makes some of the other things a lot easier. If you find people with shared values, who are smart people and get things done, then I don’t have to worry about it. … I’m constantly trying to put myself out of a job. My goal is to have nothing to do. Everyone else is doing stuff. Me, doing nothing. … It comes down to hiring. And if you can find people with the right fit and shared values, they will make financial decisions and others that make sense.”
Interested in more about Freshbooks’ appearance at Third Tuesday Toronto?
How many entrepreneurs woke up and said to themselves. Eureka! I’ve got a great idea. I’m going to set up a business so that I can spend all my time doing invoices.
Four years ago, Michael founded Freshbooks which offers small businesses online invoicing.
Look around your current business. You may find a new, better business opportunity
In this video clip from Freshbooks’ appearance at Third Tuesday Toronto, Freshbooks founder MIchael McDerment gives heart to anyone who dreams about leaving behind the sell-it-by-the-hour business model. He was running a services company and found that he needed an invoicing program. So, he built it. And that’s the foundation of what today is Freshbooks.
See other posts and videos of Freshbooks’ appearance at Third Tuesday Toronto:
This looks to be a great day packed with some of Canada’s top experts on word of mouth marketing and social media. Sean Moffitt, the Chair of the conference has a post with a rundown of the speakers and sessions.
I’m looking forward to hearing and spending time with the outstanding lineup of speakers that Sean and the program committee have booked for this year’s conference. Sean tells us that the roster includes:
- Richard Bartrem, Westjet’s VP Culture & Communications – our moning keynpote talking about “Caring Owners – Driving Word of Mouth Through Employee Empowerment and Enagagement”
- Chris Matthews,Specialized Bikes – Vigilante Organization – Global Efforts in Building brand Awesomeness and a Sense of Brand Community – a guide for large companies on how to evoke the passion of your customer base regardless of your size
- Scott Brooks, Chief Evangelist and Co-Founder, ConceptShare – kickass BtB success and the power of testimonials built from of all places, Sudbury, the new hotbed for collaborative creative building
- Mike McDerment, Co-Founder and CEO, Freshbooks – an extraordinary story of a bootstrapping Canadian company turned global success that has taken the pain out of accounting and invoicing clients
- Deborah Kaplan, Executive Director, Zerofootprint – for those that have been sleeping, “Green is in” – learn how Zerofootprint is enabling companies to change and buzz about their green credentials
- Ross Buchanan, Director, Molson Coors Relationship Marketing – how Canada’s iconic beer company makes successful forays into word of mouth worlds and watchouts for those who tread there too
- Dan Hunter, Partner, IMI International – yes, you can measure word of mouth and what a bounce you can get vs. the traditional stuff, Dan shows you how
- Dave Balter, President, BzzAgent – one of WOM’s pioneers demonstrates the ironclad argument for the ROI on word of mouth
Freshbooks has been very successful in establishing an online community of fans, customers and promoters. Third Tuesday Toronto moderator Michael O’Connor Clarke found 1,664 blog posts mentioning Freshbooks. He asks, how has this Toronto-based startup cultivated this level of awareness and attention?
Says Freshbooks’ Saul Colt : “We have a really good product. But we don’t push our product…. We want to tell the stories of our customers and make everything about the company compelling. … We try to push the unique values of our company, the different sort of things that we’re doing and that’s the kind of thing that gets people talking.”
“Invoicing isn’t the sexiest thing in the world. But there are amazing stories that come out of how we are saving people time, how we are making their lives easier. … We’re actually letting people do the thing that they love doing. When you were a kid, no one dreamt of doing invoices. You dreamt of being a PR person, or being a superhero or whatever. So, we’re actually letting you do that stuff and we’re saving you all this time while you’re doing it. We’re giving you your life back. We’re giving you your job back. So that you can do what you actually want to do. And that is why people talk about us, because it’s much more than just a product.”
Later in the evening, O’Connor Clarke asked Michael McDerment to tell The Triscuits story. Brief version: A resident of Fiji responded to a blog post McDerment had written about Triscuits, indicating that he can’t get Triscuits on Fiji, but that he’d love to. McDerment sent him a box of Triscuits. The fellow on Fiji wrote a blog post about McDerment’s gesture which was picked up by other bloggers – and Freshbooks ended up being talked about positively because of it.
Says McDerment, “It was born out of doing just what seemed natural. How would you like to be treated? Well, this is how.”
Adds Colt: “It’s really about being authentic. … Stories like that you do not because you’re hoping it will grow into something. You do it because it’s part of what you are. And that’s really part of the personality of Freshbooks. … And that’s also why a lot of people talk about us, because the company actually has a personality as opposed to a faceless, nameless corporation.”
What’s one of the secrets to success for a startup company fine tuning its offering to respond to customer needs? At Third Tuesday Toronto , Michael McDerment and Saul Colt of Freshbooks said that the top executives of the company regularly take support calls from customers.
This was “born out of necessity,” says Freshbooks founder McDerment. “I read the first three and a half years of every support request that came through. We were a pretty small company at that time.” Now that the company is growing, new support systems are being put in place. But, McDerment insists that the involvement of senior executives in support calls “is conscious and it is something we’re going to hold on to. … Just to ground you, it’s huge. Because otherwise, you start thinking, ‘we don’t need to change the products. We just need to sell more.’ …“ I’m doing more support now than I ever used to because I’m afraid of losing that touch.”
Here’s the clip. (Yes, the lighting is bad. But the content of what Michael and Saul were saying was just so strong, I really wanted to share it. We’ll get better lighting for future Third Tuesday events.)
But execs aren’t expected to be up to speed on technical issues, are they? How does Freshbooks ensure that their execs have the technical knowledge to respond to the support calls they take? Says McDerment, “For the most part, tech support for us is answering simple questions and holding people’s hands. … We build teams … a marketing person, a development person, a management person all doing support on the same day. So they get to spend time together, communicate, collaborate, get things done, get all the answers within a team.”
Now, you may be sceptical about whether the company actually lives this every day. Well, spontaneous validation was provided by Connie Crosby , a Freshbooks client, who spoke up to offer her story about how Saul Colt had responded to her support request late on a weekend night.
Impressive.
I’ll post more Freshbooks at Third Tuesday Toronto clips over the next week.
Freshbooks is an online invoicing and time-tracking service that is making book-keeping and invoice preparation a lot easier for small businesses.
Freshbooks Founder Michael McDerment and Saul Colt , Head of Magic (yep, that’s what his business card says) recently gave the Third Tuesday Toronto participants an insiders’ view of how they have built this Web 2.0 startup.
In the next series of posts, I’m going to publish video excerpts from their presentation, each of which has been edited to capture a single topic or theme. I think you’ll find Michael and Saul’s clips chock full of good ideas and tips for setting up a successful small business and harnessing social media to promote it and connect with users.
I travel more than I’d like to and I stay too way too many nights at hotels. Like every other frequent traveller, I know what it’s like to be stared through, made to feel like an anonymous widget being throughput at the security line, in the airport, on the plane.
But Fairmont Hotels delighted me tonight when, out of the blue, they upgraded me to a suite. Not just any suite, but the Prime Minister’s Suite. Now they’ve got a customer for life.
I stay at Fairmont Hotels because they were once a Canadian chain that traced its lineage back to CP Hotels. And they have some of the most unique properties in North America. All of the great old railroad hotels in Canada. The Chateau Frontenac . Banff Springs . Lake Louise . A few years ago, CP Hotels merged with Fairmont and picked up properties like the Copley Plaza in Boston and the Fairmont San Francisco . Yes, they aren’t the trendy properties that people flock to for something new. But they have something special. Every one of these hotels has character.
And Fairmont has worked hard to achieve a level of customer service that matches the architecture of their hotels. For the past two days, I was at the Fairmont Waterfront in Vancouver. And from the time I checked in through every meal to check out, I had the feeling that people actually cared about whether I was happy at their hotel. The Waterfront’s employees make it a special place by acting special. They really seem to like working at the Fairmont and they project a sense of pride in the hotel and the job they do there. Yes, it’s intangible. But I truly feel it.
So, that brings me to tonight. I flew from Vancouver to Toronto. And because I had a morning meeting, I could only take a mid day flight. All the direct flights were full. So, I had to route through Calgary. That means 8 hours with a connection. A long day after a meeting and an arrival after 10PM in Toronto.
(The fact that the first news I heard when I stepped into a taxi was that my hometown Ottawa Senators had just completed one of the greatest NHL chokes of all time by being eliminated in four straight games from the opening round of the Stanley Cup playoffs by Pittsburgh only added to my sense that this was one of those days…)
But when I pulled myself out of the taxi and went to the registration desk of the Fairmont Royal York my day changed completely.
First of all, Fabio Gamberdella, who frequently checks me in when I arrive at the hotel (Fairmont, you’ve got a great employee in Fabio) told me that my room has been upgraded from the standard room I’d reserved. That’s nice. (And it’s even nicer that Fabio addresses me by name and actually remembers me.)
But when I arrived at my room, I discover that I haven’t just been upgraded to a nicer room. I’ve been upgraded to the Prime Minister Suite. Let me say that again. The Prime Minister Suite. Nice. More than nice. Spectacular.
Fairmont didn’t need to do this. I was staying in one of the lowest priced rooms in the hotel on my corporate rate. So, I’m not exactly a high roller.
Fairmont could have simply left the room empty tonight and put me in the type of room I’d reserved. But they didn’t. And that was very, very smart of them.
Many other businesses would simply decide that because the higher value unit had not rented, they would simply leave it empty and deliver to the customer exactly what he had paid for.
But Fairmont has a database. And they know that I stay with them over 90 nights a year. And tonight Fairmont made me feel special. And that’s worth a lot. It’s definitely earned my loyalty for some time to come.
Now, the cynic would say that Fairmont should do a lot more for a frequent traveller who spends more than one in four nights every year at their hotels. And they do. Of course, I’m a member of their President’s Club frequent frequent guest program. And I receive all the privileges and perks that their marketing material promises.
But what was so special about tonight was that the upgrade was unasked for. Unexpected. And announced to me by Fabio, an employee who treated me like someone he recognizes.
Why aren’t more businesses smart like this in the way they treat their best customers?
And so that you know what I’m talking about, here’s a video that conveys how I feel about Fairmont tonight.
Episode 106 will be posted next Tuesday. To whet your appetite for the complete show, here’s a video segment of the panelists setting up and opening the podcast. The lighting is poor and from the rear (audio producers don’t always set up the room with video in mind.) But one thing you can see is that the only apparent element of advance scripting is David Jones reading the opening sequence from notes in his Moleskin. They really do make this stuff up as they record it.
Steve Lounsbury, Julie Hach and I will be presenting FriendsRoll and TopLinks at DemoCampOttawa8. This will be our first public presentation of these plug ins. So, we’re hoping for some good feedback on both the concept and how we could improve the implementation.
Recently, Montréal joined Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver and New Brunswick in having its own Third Tuesday social media meetup.
I had an opportunity to talk with Michelle Sullivan, the driving force behind Third Tuesday/3e Mardi Montréal, about why she wanted to have these events in Montréal. Michelle talked about the bilingual community that makes Montréal such a vibrant city and the unique opportunity to bring both English language and French language social media enthusiasts together in one room to talk about their shared interests.
By the way, the second Third Tuesday/3eMardi Montréal is taking place tonight. According to Michelle’s post, tonight’s session will feature “‘la gang’ de Pourquoi bloguer dans un contexte d’affaires. Trois des dix auteurs de cet ouvrage collectif, dont Marc Snyder, Claude Malaison et Martin Lessard, nous parleront de l’importance grandissante des blogues.”I plan to be there tonight. If you see me, please make a point of saying hello.
ProPR is authored by Joseph Thornley, CEO of Thornley Fallis and 76design. Thornley Fallis helps companies and organizations build relationships with customers, clients and stakeholders by integrating social media with public relations, creative design and word of mouth communications.
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