Staff Mapper

Fast forward a year later and a lot has changed. The good news: we still have our primary client using the system. They are happy and continue to request customizations that have made the software even more powerful for their firm. In the last year we have:

-Integrated with the time-entry system (Bigtime)
-Synced their staff with Bigtime and increased revenue to ~$700/month
-Built out a fully-functional performance management system, that allows them to conduct reviews 2x a year. More on this later.
-An attrition module to analyze how long staff are in a given position in average
-Time compliance reports which help them corral time entry submissions, improving revenue cycles (beta)
-Dynamic manager assignment based on an intensity ratio - the number of shared hours each staff member has with a managing member of the practice
-Bonus module which automatically calculates bonus based on utilization figures, staff level and partner contributions to individual bonuses
-Lifetime promotion tracking, which also feeds into the attrition module to look at career progression of staff
-Better controls for HR staff as a central manager of the system

So these are all great things. Our client is happy as we’ve been able to expedite their year-end review process, building in notifications to staff to input their mid-year and year-end reviews and just generally keeping all year-end review information in one place for each staff. Using the intensity ratios, we can assign staff to each manager who is responsible for thier reviews. They can of course, be shuffled to other managers using a trello-like board. I’d estimate it’s saved each partner a week of time each review cycle. When you have partner’s billing clients $500+ dollars an hour, the savings / ROI is clear.

The system has also become a repository for these reviews, with the HR manager / staff able to go back in time to see previous year-end reviews. Imagine being able to print your reviews and taking them with you to your next employer. Opening this up for staff is great way to provide career continuity and a footprint for what’s been accomplished.

You’re probably thinking - how the hell can you do this all for $700/month? Well, that’s where our customization clause comes in - for general purpose updates we do not charge. That’s a change that we think will apply to other customers. For things that are specific to our customer (e.g. like calculations of specific bonus criteria or compliance with a specific policy), we charge by the hour. That allows us to keep up with their demands, sharing the load for development cost, and allowing Staff Mapper to continue to serve their resource management needs in a unique way.

Our core philopshy here is that each firm deserves a custom approach to resource management because people management is unique to each firm and tools that help these firms should reflect their management style. Our goal is to make firms more internally transparent and to increase communication potential and to provide tools that make everyone’s jobs easier.

This year we will be focused on streamlining the customization of our product so that each firm can have a unique experience on our platform, while continuing to serve our current clients with the quality they expect from us as their organization grows.

I’ll continue to write about this approach - writing custom software for clients presents a couple of challenges. For instance, how do you scale custom code? The short answer, is it’s really hard. Almost no one does it outside of a platform-as-a-service like Salesforce.

At one point we had a conversation with an investor who told us to avoid it all costs. But that wouldn’t be the right move for our current client. He’s not wrong but we need to find a way to accomodate our current clients while keeping our growth prospects strong, which means, more easily scaling. I’d consider our scope of work to be more aligned to “Productized Services”, rather than a pure SAAS play. And I’m ok with that for the moment - we have a paying customer and we want to do anything we can to make them happy. Disagree? Leave a comment.

Even before i had a true MVP in place, i started reaching out to customers. I felt that waiting too long to reach out and get immediate feedback on product direction from potential customers would be a mistake. With my other product (WorkDive), I did the opposite and learned from it. I simply built the product, pretending that the universe needed it. Looking back, there were well-established products in the time entry space and although I learned from the process, I was building a product that no one really needed at the end of the day. Sure, i had a differentiating angle with SMS time entry, but at the end of the day it would be a dog fight to get users to switch their time entry system to something nascent like WorkDive. It would have been a tough battle and I knew i should move on.

Product development on Staff Mapper started in July of 2017, and interestingly my first email outreach to my professional network about the product also began around that time. While i had just the beginnings of an actual product, i knew that i wanted my customers to drive the product development roadmap, so i started taking to dozens of consultancies, hoping to achieve 1) understanding of needs 2) and early customers.

I spoke with mostly professional service firms, consultancies and other firms who relied on labor as a means to revenue. This was the hardest part of the product development process in my opinon. I had many ideas about what the product was and what i thought it should be. After talking with so many people, I realized that people managemnt is hard - the needs are so diversified and unique.

Some firms didn't want a stand-alone tool, they wanted an integration with their CRM tool, like Salesforce. Here are some things I heard while pitching the product:

"I'd prefer something we can visualize and manipulate in salesforce. I don't want a stand alone tool, i want to use the tools we have now." -- CEO of a Salesforce consulting company

"Our staff are organized by several small agile teams, so there's no need" -- Manager at a Fair Market Value company

"We just implemented an in-house solution for the entire company" --Consultant at E&Y

"We thought you were a floor planning product" -- some random contact who reached out to me about the procuct, referring to StaffMap.com

"We could use the tool as a waste management company to help us coordinate waste pickup at labs all across the northeast" --manager of a waste management company

"We're using salesforce" -- consultant

"We could use it, but were a team of 5" -- consultant

"Our culture is not interested in big brother monitoring" --consultant

"The partners here would prefer to retain control over their individual staff" -- consultant

"We need to move quickly, decided to go with Everhour" -- consultant of a long-term client

"We are certainly at a point where staffing has become a burdensome process. There is a subcommittee of us, of which I am a part, that's trying to streamline it. Let me know if there is something I can look over, or if you want to set up a call. Certainly looking for practical solutions." -- Partner at consulting firm, eventually become our first customer

BAM! After quite a few conversations, i finally had a warm lead. As you can see, there were quite a few difficult conversations. I was glad that i hadn't invested all this time into building a product before I had these conversations. I learned quite a few important things:

1. The product should be flexible enough to accomodate for varying cultures at these firms
2. The product value proposition was not clear enough (e.g. StaffMap.com and Waste Management Pickup Logistics was a fundamental misunderstanding of our objectives)
3. Some kind of integration was important to some of our customers.
4. Needs are vastly different at each firm

This really wasn't going to be easy, but I thought, let me figure out what this one interested client needs and we can go from there. After an initial demo with the partner, he offered up a broader discussion with the rest of the partners. I was suprised - i thought the buyer was Human Resources. Turns out that the c-suite / partners at consultancies will always be the buyer - they are the most interested in increasing efficiencies and recouping potential lost consultant time and reducing burn out. My pitch to them was simple:

"If you can recoup an hour of a consutant's time, the solution pays for itself".

That was the pitch. Our tool enabled that with ease. The feedback from the demo was that the tool was well recieved. They wanted to move forward, but they wanted to see a few things in place first.

So I built some of the main features that are still in place today:

1. Desktop tool to broadcast staff availability, utilization (e.g. how busy a consultant is on billable projects), PTO, both in the short-term and in the long-term.
2. Long-term calendar view of staff availability
3. Projections of staff availability and ability to help with a project given current restraints
4. Ability to claim a consultant's time with the click of a button (this allowed us to track ROI to our consultant)
5. Some simple reporting metrics
6. Ability to add their staff roster and ability for staff to upload skill sets

These were the main features that was just enough for the client to pull the trigger on a monthly subscription at $6/user/month on a trial basis - this means that they loaded a few test users and evaluated how the system worked for them. It was a great way for them to gain comfort with the system and for us to work out the kinks with a live client.

We handled and still handle payments through Stripe, which reads the number of active staff they have in the solution and bills them monthly accounting for fluctations in the staff count over the course of the month. The first invoice for $208 went out on June 6, 2018 after about a year of development and the first pitch.

A YEAR'S WORTH OF WORK. More on this soon.

After working at a few consultancies from 2011 to the better half of 2017, I realized something astonishing. Many professsional service firms, despite being people-focused, had a terrible system for tracking their people!

While at Huron Consulting and Berkekey Research Group, I realized that tons of time and resources were spent on resource management, through manual efforts like excel sheets where each staff member would jot down their availability. At Huron we used a resource management system called Retain, which allowed each staff member to project hours on their long-term assignments. It then constructed a large gantt chart to visualize pockets of capacity 2-6 months out. Cool, but not exactly helpful day to day...

At Berkeley, there was a desire to track shorter-term availability of staff to handle "just-in-time" requests for people's time. Due to the highly dynamic nature of the work, immediate requests from clients and law firms often left consultants over-extended or with nothing to do. While i was there I built a small desktop tool to help staff put their hands up and broadcast their availability. The goal was to smooth out our resource constraints, by shifting hours from employee to employee so that no one was working 14 hour days. Eventually, this became a standard way to track and request people's time. We built the ability to add skills and in some respects, became a two-way market for consultants looking to get staffed and project coordinators looking to staff.

I left Berkeley in Dec 2016 with no real aims to build anything related to this. I spent the year consulting on various projects in the healthcare analytics space, slowly moving to other industries of interest using my software and analytics background but I continued to have this nagging desire to build a SAAS product. I had the skills to get an MVP in place. What to build was still on my mind. During this year, I was already working on another project, WorkDive, which allows freelancers and small businesses to track their time via SMS, but I realized that marketing and building a B2C business was HARD. And there were a ton of competitors, so I just continued to use it as my own home-grown time-keeping system - still use it to this day.

I then got an itch to build a second-related product - you guessed it! Staff Mapper was meant to address some of the resourcing issues i ran into at Huron and Berkeley, but i wanted to build the proof of concept and of course, only sell to businesses. This made sense, since most of my contacts were in consulting, so I knew where my customers lived.

After speaking with some potential customers, mostly friends in the consulting space, they almost all universally claimed to have a need, but i was sensing a little pushback. More on that in another update...

So I put pen to paper and with some very brief market research product development began in earnest in July of 2017 (per my first Github commit :).

I didn't realize I'd still be working on it today.