Timify: Automate Scheduling & Supercharge Your Business Efficiency

So, if you've struggled with double bookings, no-shows, or inefficiencies in managing appointments, this episode is for you. Stay tuned. You don't want to miss a thing. Emmanuel, hello and welcome!

And I also run a huge project in Unicredit globally to transform the bank within a 13 billion euro capital increase on the cost and the IT side before I had the pleasure to join Timeify in a position

where basically Timeify was growing out of the startup into the scale-up, although I don't like the terminology scale-up a lot. For me, Timeify is like a raw but strong teenage boy, you know, became quite tall in height, big muscles, but also still a bit foolish and childish. And now my goal is to professionalize Timeify, to make it profitable, have some very clear organization and also processes, not over-engineered, not like in a bank.

So we have to still be agile, fast and speedy and overall very client-driven. That is basically my goal was for the last two and a half years and will be for the next, hopefully, quite some time.

Whatever that be, rooms, machines, human beings, salespeople, sellers in a department store, whatever the resource of our client is, we make sure and guarantee that these expensive and scarce resources like salespeople are allocated very efficient to the services our client provide.

And then interact with their customers to make sure that the customers of our client do have a seamless and very straightforward customer journey to increase revenues and make sure that the customer of our client is a happy customer.

big figures, big projects. But in the end, I had the opportunity to take over Timeify. And I strongly believe and I have the deepest respect for the decision that especially founders who grew a little baby, their own baby from scratch. One employee, two employees, maybe two, three founders. And you have a couple of first clients. You have 10 colleagues working with you. But there comes a point where you need some kind of different management style, right?

So people who are able to found a company from scratch might not be the right person and might not have the right skill set to grow a company from 50 up to 200 employees. On the other side, I clearly have to admit I would have not been able to found a company like Timeify or any other company that's simply not my home turf, right?

But managing 50, 60, 70, 80 people, giving them a clear strategy, supporting this strategy with a clear vision and mission based on a clear foundation in terms of organization, company organization, supported once again by a healthy amount of processes. Still keeping flexibility, taking also sometimes hard decisions, right? That's what you also have to do. It's not always sunshine every day. That is a bit more my sweet spot.

And if you look back at most likely many founders, sometimes you cannot play business as you want to because you need a favor left, a favor right. You're happy for the first client. You give to this client maybe more than you wanted to provide in terms of services or support. And then how do you get back from this very personal interaction and lift and come to the next professional level, which is simply a more professionalized setup?

The downside is you might lose a bit of your spirit. Yes, that's right. But it's sometimes simply required. As I said, scale-up is, I think, not a right term. But if you look at companies like Tamify after a couple of years, like a teenage boy, I mean, there's a lot of potential, right? There's a lot of power. There's a lot of energy. But it has to be centralized and streamlined. And that is, as I said, pretty much my sweet spot. And so far, this is running, I would say, good.

It doesn't mean that you're doing a bad job, not at all. But if you sometimes have a new input, a little job rotation, it helps, right? It simply helps to increase understanding for the other side. If I change job completely in a big enterprise company from department A to department B, You know, I take my knowledge with me and then I can try to connect and bring people together and increase understanding for both sides. It's like with traveling and understanding different cultures.

That's the same model in a big enterprise. And that's also for small companies. You simply have to see, is the leadership that was able to start a company. Also able to run a company that is growing in whatever size. I have to clearly admit I have the deepest, really, respect of funding a company. I tell you honestly, I would be, I think, even too scared and I would not be in a position to do that.

But then taking over from a certain point in terms of development and also growth is pretty much my sweet spot. And that's where I can really see with a corporate or enterprise know-how and experience, you can create big value add to smaller companies. Is that always the case? No. I'm pretty sure that there are many founders who can go all the way and who are also developing in that way, but not all.

And hence then realizing that it might be time for a change also is something that I have to admire and clearly have to express my respect.

growth at all costs was simply the mantra of the market. You had to show growth. Was growth profitable was not the important question, right? When I joined Tamify, the macroeconomic situation was different. Basically, interest rates rose. Money was worth something again. So I clearly had the task to make Tamify profitable. We had to grow, but we also had to look at cost. There are two sides of a balance sheet. One is top line, but there's also a

bottom line. And in between, you somehow have to manage your cost and make sure that your margin is somewhere there. So this was the second big challenge, making clear that we have to become profitable, which you can influence by top-line growth, number one, but also becoming more efficient, right?

If you produce new features, but, for example, your hosting costs are outrageous and never, never will be covered by the license fees you earn from your clients, well, you have to rethink the whole thing, I would say, right? In the past, the feature was everything, make it fancy, make it shiny, as long as it's there.

I think we are now with money worth, again, something, we're in a different world where you have to become profitable, you have to show a margin, you have to show a solid growth that didn't change. But I think the focus became a bit or moved a bit away from growth to the overall picture of a balance sheet.

So that was a big big booster for us um overall also i see that um economic, issues on the in the german and core european industry are pushing our business in terms of, making sure that the that the very cost uh sensitive resources like salesperson, like people who work at a department store have to be, you know, they have to keep busy, right? I mean, if you work in banking, you're obliged to have roughly four to five sales meetings per day.

If you only have four versus five and do that every day, at the end of the week, you have 20% less revenues and your boss will knock on your door saying, hey, Joe, what's going on? Why did your revenues drop, right? So we are ensuring that there is a very efficient allocation of these salespeople, for example, in a bank with the customers of a bank that as soon as somebody is canceling a meeting, there are other meetings coming in or there's somebody actively contacted who

has a meeting in two weeks' time. Hey, we got a slot early up front. You want to take the opportunity and we fill up the calendar. At the same time, we reduce extremely the manual effort, which is a stupid effort, of aligning meetings, right? If it's a one-on-one relationship, you and me, we agree on a meeting, that's easy, right? But just assume there are four or five participants and you're coordinating that, that's crazy, right? And we send out a booking link and you book it, that's fair.

Or let me describe it in mathematical terms where N stands for a placeholder of a big figure. And we solve the equation N times four. N multiplied by N multiplied by N multiplied by N. First N is our clients to have many locations, stores, departments, sales hubs, whatever it is.

Number two, our clients to have many, many resources. As I said, it can be a salesperson, a room, a laptop, a machine, a chair, a table. What do I know?

You can give them tags and attributes, e.g. If you work in banking and you need a special certification to sell mortgage loans maybe you need one certification mortgage loans up to one million and another certification one million at upwards right or you need another certification to sell stock options and derivatives right so we connect the resources with their skill set in any combination we can combine the resources we say well for this meeting we need resource a

because he has this skill set and resource B for that skill set or you choose out of a pool of resources. Colleagues who have the same skills. That's the second N. The third N is the services. You can then connect any kind of service you want to provide with those different resources on any date or place you want.

You can say in the morning, our sales guy is only available in that combination with that skill set in location A and in the afternoon only in location B. And you see if N becomes a big figure, It's quite a complex equation we solve. And the fourth N is hopefully a huge amount of customers our clients do have. And then they're basically going through a very seamless journey. And hopefully in the end, sign a contract, cut a deal, pay a product, buy a product, whatever it is, right?

Our clients offer to their customers. So in a nutshell, basically, excuse me? No, in a nutshell, if you look at Microsoft, allow me the expression, Microsoft Google is pretty much the entry drug into scheduling, right? Once you're not happy anymore with Microsoft scheduling facilities, which is free of charge as soon as you have a Microsoft license, which is quite expensive, basically companies come to us because you don't write Microsoft in email saying,

Hey, I have this edge case here. Can you help me out, please? You do with us. We support. We have a very clear philosophy of supporting and listening to our clients, which we do and we don't onboard them and leave them alone. We are there for our clients, actually.

Which usually means someone has to call the customers, cancel five appointments, reschedule for the next week, whatever it is, right? With our system, the system checks, oh, the customer needed service A. We have maybe other four resources who can provide the service.

And there's one resource free at exactly that time slot and it's automatically rescheduling the meeting to avoid that the client is maybe entering a meeting without having somebody covering from the client side or the meeting has to be postponed. So we make sure that the calendars is filled up properly and our sales colleagues are kept busy and then also creating a positive impact on the revenue creation of our client.

Then you can say, well, I want to increase my paid advertisement on Google because an hour before that, so you start at six where people start looking for that kind of service, that kind of slot, increase your capacity on there, exactly on that time slot, and then make sure your advertisement is placed at the right time, right screen.

and actually I was forced to explain how many upcoming holidays we do have and when they are. Just looking here at my calendar, for example, that the Friday before Easter and the Monday after Easter is a public holiday. And we do have two Thursdays coming up that are public holidays in multiple states of Germany. And we do have with Monday and so on and so forth. So there's a lot you need to explain. Do you also have a solution for that for international clients?

I mean, everybody who applied for a job in the last couple of years knows maybe the first interview is easy, right? But you have to coordinate the meeting. The second interview, maybe you need a team head and an HR guy. And then you're playing with meetings. You get an email, three slots. You say, yes, I want the first slot. Then you get a reply. Ah, sorry. Now the first slot is not available anymore.

Now we have three different slots. Pick one. And then it goes back and forth and you have email ping pong.

Terrible. right or how cool would that be if you apply for a job you simply click on the booking link you have the meeting scheduled with the two people or three people you need um after that the hr guy says hey that was a good interview we continue automatically our system sends out another email saying hey congratulations you made the next step now you're into you with the big boss another hr by a team colleague, whatever, again, click here.

And a couple hours or days or an hour before the meeting, you also get a reminder or SMS to make sure that you do not miss your meeting. So in that perspective, if I look at the HR case from the applicant point of view, our clients have two scenarios, right? If you look for a DevOps developer who is highly skilled, Basically, companies are happy if those people simply...

Apply right so they need name email address maybe a phone number that's simply apply right there are other jobs where you say well i want to you know make it a bit more tricky to receive applications so i want to have an upload of your cv i need a i don't know your driving license uploaded some comments a free field where you enter some text about you and i need your residence etc pp so that you avoid that

everybody is applying for the job and you have some kind of criteria as why people apply, right? So in that perspective, from the booker side, I always want to make it very easy to book an appointment. What I want to say is that there are also situations where you can make it a bit more complicated so people do not book appointments, right? Nevertheless, from a customer or a booker point of view, It simply has to be seamless and very clear, right?

You need a couple of clicks, and then you enter into your appointment. And, of course, we don't have to talk about reminders and synchronization to your preferred email and Outlook mailbox and calendar system.

Why don't you want to book a meeting with whatever your counterpart at your trusted bank you're working with or something like that? These are skill sets AI supported where we basically, with the intention to reduce once again the manual effort regarding scheduling and support our clients in optimizing their interaction with their customers. Our goal is basically quite easy. This whole back and forth email scheduling should be optimized, right?

That's very easy. You should not worry about, oh, goddammit, I have to coordinate meetings for groups, for single bookings, for multiple bookings, for recurring bookings. You should not. You should press some buttons, best case in our Timeify environment, and then everything runs automatically.

We're not specialized on any vertical. That's the beauty of Timeify.

If you tomorrow say instead of selling cars or e-bikes, I want to sell red gummy bears, you sell red gummy bears. we don't stop you to do so. And tomorrow you offer services selling red gummy bears. You can do it actually in milliseconds, right? So we don't stop our clients to grow. Actually, we want to partner up with them. We want to support them to grow. If you want to open a new store tomorrow, well, don't worry about scheduling and making it possible. We are there.

In terms of product development, next to our Tamify assistant, We just released queuing will become our next big thing because queuing and scheduling is related. And my colleagues are working heavily on an extremely outstanding queuing solution that is then fully integrated into your scheduling where you can prioritize.

You can define VIP clients. You can maybe prioritize even people who, I don't know, if a mother with two kids and pregnant is coming in, boom, you prioritize her and she gets the next free slot for the services you offer or whatever you fancy, including a hardware support. We don't do that by ourselves, but we have a partner who is providing a hardware support in terms of tablets and screens, et cetera, for your point of sales.

If you say, well, selling a bike brings more cash to my company than having a service for a bike or just adjusting the wheel of the bike, it's just two euros, but selling a bike brings you 10,000 euros. You prioritize and you offer more meetings to sell bikes. But then a day before the day comes, you say, well, if I don't have enough meetings for selling bikes, I open the calendar for those service meetings to make sure that my people are still busy.

And then basically you have people who don't book a meeting, but they come in your store and say, hey, I want to buy a bike, right? So either way, you have a big screen in your entrance and they type in their credentials and you have someone in your store checking who it is. Or you have somebody with a tablet in your hand typing in the credentials. And this client says, oh, I want to buy a bike. You prioritize him. And the next available slot, boom, he gets.

Waiting time, two minutes. Or he says, well, here's my old bike. Please, can you check if my wheel and my brakes are properly working? They say, well, that's like a 10-euro job. This guy has to wait an hour maybe because prioritized is the meeting to sell a bike, which is from a margin point of view much more attractive than simply checking the brakes of a bike. I hope this example was understandable somehow. Yeah. And you can do that in every industry.

If you look at the high-end retail industry, we're based in Munich. If you go here, downtown Munich, there are sometimes queues in front of the high-end companies, the big brands. So how cool would it be if one of your VIP clients is checking in and you realize, oh, this guy just checked in, so I prioritize him. Although there's a big queue outside, this guy shows up and you sent him a QR code. The guy at the door is scanning it and you prioritized him. And this guy is surpassing the queue.

And just imagine what reaction that is. Everybody in the queue says, what the hell? Who is that? How can I become as important as this guy? How much do I have to buy to skip the queue, right? To skip the line. So these are the funny things you can do with queuing in connection with scheduling. And then whether it be for bikes or big fashion brands or for government, if you go to one of our Kreisverwaltungsreferate or official… Which.

Sometimes, and I totally understand that, companies don't even want Tomify to appear, so they connect us via our very well-defined and structured API, and we are a white-label solution totally embedded into the IT architecture and landscape of our clients. So you don't even realize that you book a meeting, except you read the data

privacy policy. That's where we mentioned. But operational, you don't realize that it's time to find. And we do not have an ego saying, well, but we need our logo on your landing page. As long as it works for you, I am a happy service provider, right? In the enterprise segment, I clearly have to say the coverage of clients is important, right? It is very, very important. I think...

Not being for ages now part of the SaaS industry, I think many companies underestimated the effort and the requirements needed to keep clients, to basically not only sign a client, but also keep clients as happy clients for quite a long term. Because you need to interact, you have to schedule your fixes weekly, monthly, by yearly, whatever it is, right? But you need a counterpart. You need somebody you can play with on the other side in a big corporation. Those people change.

They move on to new jobs, et cetera, pp. So you need a good coverage not only before you sign a contract, but also after you sign a contract. And then it always sounds easy to connect and implement new IT. But in the end, that is many, many times still people business to make sure that everything runs smoothly and your software is properly used on the client side.

Plus, just recently, much more insecure world with the Trump tariff introduction here, which may or may not wreak havoc on the global economy.

So you have to invest it in terms of more sales, more product, whatever you currently need. So honestly, I can't give you an all-answering and all-solving answer. It's simply a trade-off, right? Sometimes you have to be a bit more on the risky side. Sometimes you have to be a bit more on the safe side. Nevertheless, as we touched it before, profitability is key these days,

and at the same time, you have to grow. So you have to find a proper balance that I think depends on your shareholder structure. Are they willing to provide more cash? Then you can be more aggressive. Are they not? Then you should be more restrictive. So there is no right or wrong. I think every company has to find its own way based on the very clear requirements. Become profitable. Become self-sustaining. But you also have to grow. And somewhere in between there, you have to find your own way.

In the end we find agreement we find a compromise And then I don't care what happened before or who was on the other side of the discussion. After we exchanged all critical points, after everybody raised his position and clearly showed speak up culture, we go in the same direction. That's number one. Number two is clearly teamwork. And the funny thing is people always ask me, what do you understand by teamwork?

And the reality is on a daily basis, it's different. On a daily base, you work in different teams, different groups, different colleagues. So your position, your role, and what is required to make this team a well-performing team is different, right? So just ask yourself, what can I do to make this project, this sprint, this team a good one? If it means that nobody's taking notes and I, as the CEO, should do that, well, hell, I do.

If it helps, I do, no matter what, right? I can ask somebody or I make sure that somebody's taking notes just as a stupid example. But every team has to make sure that it's professional, it's working and to simply enter into a different role. So teamwork for me is super important. I don't like finger pointing culture. I hate that. Okay. And number three is clearly ownership and responsibility.

I worked long enough in big corporates and I'm always exploding if I hear the sentence, somebody should do something. Well, I worked in companies with over 100,000 employees and I never had a colleague whose name was somebody and I never saw the somebody doing something, right? So take ownership and responsibility. If you want something to be done, ask this person, ask this team very clearly. And if you realize a spot, I could hire 100 more people in Tamifar, right?

But currently, that's not the time to do so. So I have more jobs to allocate than people I can ask for, right? And that means just take ownership and responsibility. Do things. I'd rather have people do 1,000 things and do 100 errors rather than doing 10 things and one error, right? I don't care about errors, do errors. If you do things, even if it's in relation to clients, we can talk about that. But not doing things, not answering to clients, not picking up a ball, not picking up a loose end.

Sometimes we simply have to accept, okay, after we talked about it, nobody's taking care. Let's leave it there until we hire somebody who is taking care. But at least we should tackle that topic. We should pick it up. We should not be afraid of picking up things. We might not be an expert. That happens, then we look at it. We push it as far as we can. If we make an error, we learn. But we get up the next day. So take ownership and responsibility is the third.

Speak up culture, teamwork, ownership, and responsibility. That are my three core values.

right? So honestly, I underestimated how wavy the journey is to grow. It's not, you know, every day a little step. It's sometimes a big step forward and then also a big step in the negative way. And I think as long as the trend is in the right direction and this wave is going upwards, you're on a good track. but simply accept that there are also times and challenges that hit you hard, right?

Many clients from us already asked. It creates a lot of traffic and tension and basically having a great and powerful scheduling tool. It's just, you know, we don't start from scratch for queuing. It's just a little add-on we produce. Honestly, I want to see many happy clients using Timeify and people using online appointments. That would be my dream.