Hello and welcome to Trades Tools and Talks, a podcast powered by Simpro. Today we've got something special to get your new year off to a great start. A dynamic keynote by Gary Spector, CEO of Simpro. In his speech, Gary shares his vision for the future of Simpro and the trades industry. Ready to dive in? Let's take a listen. Thank you. Good morning. I'm going to go completely off the rails today.
I have this deck that I'm supposed to go through and I've decided I'm not going to go through it and I'll share some of the slides and some of what I have to say. I'll match and some of it probably won't, but that's okay. And the reason that I'm doing that is, as Greg said, this is our this is the third Simprosium that I attended. I wasn't able to go to the Auckland one I was in, in London visiting our Simpro team in London. But I did go to the CAB last night.
We had our first customer advisory board meeting last night. In addition to all the Simprosium’s that we've put on and know, the interesting thing for me this morning, all the Simpro people got together and we were talking this morning about, you know, are we tired? You know, we've been out here for a week and a half. We're doing these roadshows and nobody's tired and we're not tired because we're excited.
And we're excited because every time we've come into a Simprosium starts out a little slow and people start listening to what we have to say, the changes that we're making, really getting a feeling of what we believe is true, which is for you to be successful and Simpro To be successful, we have to create a more vibrant community as much as I want to stand up here and say, you know, here's all the wonderful things that we're doing with Simpro, and there's a lot we are we're doing a lot.
Our focus really needs to be about the ecosystem, how we work with suppliers, how we work with our partners, how we work with all of you, how we work with associations. This is a community and one of the reasons that I wanted to come here was that as I started to learn about the trade industries and I'm the first one to admit I don't come from the trades, I come from a retail background. I built most of the largest e-commerce sites on the planet.
I probably had a hand in building and there were a lot of similarities between what we did there and what we're doing here. A lot of owner operators that own their own businesses and they vote with their own paychecks. It's not like I'm selling to a Wal-Mart or a Target or an IBM or an HP, where people vote with other people's money. And I like these types of businesses. I like being part of an ecosystem or a community where we invest in each other.
And for me, going forward, I want to make sure that that's what we're doing, that we're providing value for the investments that you're making in us. But it can't be us alone. It has to be this ecosystem, because that's what this is. I mean, a lot of you that are here today probably know each other, belong to the same associations, share information, probably not customer lists, but a lot of other details and Simpro needs to be leading the charge.
We need to be helping drive that that community, that collaboration. I'm a big believer that a high tide raises all boats and we need to be helping each other in driving that so that we're all successful. And this is a really great industry. It's a very cool industry.
You have people that are of all ages that want to get engaged, involved in the industry, and your opportunities are limitless, whether you start as an apprentice electrician and you move to be an electrician, then you get, you know, you decide that you want to start your own business. Sky's the limit to what you want to do as an individual, and there's no barrier to entry here. It really just comes down to how hard you want to work.
How well can you network so I think it's an incredible opportunity. I couldn't be more excited to be here. And the more time I spend with all of you, the more excited I get about what I think the possibilities are. So I couldn't be more thrilled to be here.
I'll share a story about how Simprosium came to be, and I know Simpro did roadshows before we did a lot of them and but my second week here I was in a van and I was with our new CMO, who was I was lucky enough that she followed me here from our previous company and she's someone that I had worked with it, I think two or three other companies. So I've known her for quite a while and we were talking to our head of h.r. And our head of customer success, and i asked about these roadshows.
I said, well, what goes on with the roadshows? Everyone says, well, we do a road map and we let people know what we're doing. And i said, well, we're not going to do that Simprosium. And they kind of looked at me, What are we going to do? And I said, Well, go send out a SurveyMonkey to all of our customers and let's go see what they want us to talk about. And if we're going to go spend five or 6 hours with some of our customers in Australia and in New Zealand, it should be about them.
What do they want to know? Do they want to hear about the roadmap? If they do, let's talk about the roadmap. Do they want to hear customer stories or do they want to hear from other customers? If they do, let's run customer panels. So all of the content that you're seeing today is a direct result of what you told us you wanted about today to be. So that's what we're going to do. And going forward, that's sort of the mantra here at Simpro. I need all of you, the community, to drive where we go.
I think we've, you know, Simpro’s not perfect. I think we probably have done some things not super well over the last couple of years. That's probably why I'm here as a new CEO. I've been here for six months. I suspect that somebody thought maybe things should be done a little differently. So here you go. And I think that we have an opportunity to get it right. But for me to get it right and for Simpro to get it right, I need to hear from all of you.
And you're going to find that our culture is going to become very, very open. I know sometimes it's been tough to get a hold of people that will come to an end and it is coming to an end. I think we've already started to make a difference in our ability to respond and communicate to people, but that is probably at the front and foremost of everything that I want to do. We will be customer focused and customer driven, and if we're not, I'd love to hear about it.
And I'm going to give all of you my email address at the end of this thing, and I encourage you to reach out if there are sparks of innovation or things that you think that we should be doing so that we can better support you. I'm all ears. That's just how I operate and it's how the leadership team that I brought in operates.
And it's now how Simpro will operate and I think most of the people that have been here for years are embracing and are happy to get reengaged with all of you just to see how much potential we have together before we really get into our presentation. I do want to thank our sponsors. So we've got a row of sponsors in the back. I hope next year that there's a lot more of them.
Again, I'm a big builder or a big believer in building up community, so I want to thank our sponsors for being here and and really being at the shows with us. They've been to all of them and I'm hopeful that next year we'll just continue to grow this thing and make it bigger and bigger. So a lot of people are sitting back in there saying, okay, got a new CEO comes from the US. What does that mean? And what I can tell you is it means that you have a CEO that lives in the US.
That's it. I've been out to Australia. This is probably, I think my second or third time since I started in the role. This is such a vibrant community and I've been to our teams in EMEA I've been with the teams in the US and I can promise you that the trades industry in APAC is very, very different than EMEA and the US. And part of the reason that it's different is it's, it's embedded into the culture here. It's a part of all of Australia, New Zealand, it's a big deal.
And while it is a big deal in EMEA and starting to become a bigger deal in the US, it is a much bigger deal here and I recognize that and I've never had plans to. I get asked all the time, Well, are you going to have are you guys going to move to the US? What's going to happen? Nothing. This is the epicenter of the trades industries is it's APAC. So not only are we going to remain in APAC, we're going to double down in APAC. There's so much more to be done in Australia and in New Zealand.
And we've just started. I know that we've been here for about 20 years, but there's so much more to do. There's so much innovation coming in with technology that can impact the trades industries and we need to be bringing that in and it'll resonate and we'll do these things in in the UK and in EMEA and we'll do these things in the US. But it's going to start here. The epicenter of Simpro has always been Australia and it's going to continue to be Australia.
So for those of you that are going, my God, all these people being hired in the US, we're all coming here, we're not moving, but we are going to be here, we will be present here. And it's one of the conditions. When I started hiring people, I wanted to pick the right people. I didn't care where they lived. The right people will get on a plane and go be with our customers and learn from our customers.
And our customers are global, but a lot of our innovation and our ideas are going to come from here and we need to double down on what we do here today. We have over 8500 businesses, you know, a million jobs created monthly. It's a big deal like this impacts people's lives. And I think, you know, it was really important for me that the people at Simpro, our team understands the impact and the gravity of our situation. People depend on us. They run their businesses on us.
We're at the center of what some businesses do. I've seen slides now and other customers have shared with me and said, Hey, here's all the systems we use. Simpro sits right in the middle. And if, if, if the people at Simpro haven't realized just how important we are and why we need to be so collaborative and why we need to be innovative and why we need to listen to all of you, they're starting to feel it now. We matter, but we matter as part of an ecosystem and a community, not just us.
But we really need it to be about you, our customers, not us as a company. And I'm thrilled. You know, I've talked to a bunch of customers who've said, We need you to be successful. Well, it's right back at you. I need all of you to be successful. If I can help with that, that's awesome. That's what I feel good about. And of course, as a CEO, I run a business. I'm responsible for running a business and I have a number, but the number will take care of itself.
And I have a PE firm that asks me every day, Where are you? What is your growth, what numbers are you delivering? And as long as we take care of our customers and we go on this journey together, whatever targets we set, we'll get to, right? But they don't have to sit and think about the business. I need to sit and think about how we help all of you, how we support you. The business will take care of itself.
And if we can lead the charge in building this ecosystem, the results that we want, they'll come. I'm not too worried about that. They'll come. But our primary objective has to be making sure that each and all of you are successful. What super interesting about the trade industry right now is they're getting more complex and they're getting more complex because your customers are demanding more from you. If you're doing a job, they want to know where you are in the job.
They want to know is is the budget right? Is there a cost overrun? Are we going to hit the dates that you've set? They want bilateral communication from you. When are you going to be at the site? Should we expect you? Do you have everything you need? You know, your customers are getting really I don't want to say more needy, but they are. And the reason that they're getting more needy is because technology globally and everything they do has set that expectation.
Like if you order something and you want to have it delivered to your house, you generally get an email saying, Hey, your order shipped, hey, your orders on the way, hey, your order sitting at your front door. Sometimes I get a picture from FedEx saying Your order sitting right here. That's the expectation. Your customers now have the same expectation of you and you should have the same expectation of us.
Your business is going to get more complex and we need to do more to help you with that complexity. So when I'm thinking about how we help you, I'm not thinking about just the platform. To me, the platform is table stakes. We have to provide a platform that allows you to run their business, your businesses. But we also have to help you figure out how to do invoicing, billing payments. How do you connect with your suppliers in a more direct way? How do we help you find resources?
If you're running an HVAC company and you need more, more techs, how do you go find them? If you need insurance, where do you get insurance? If you need capital, where do you get capital? I'm thinking about Simpro in a much broader way than anyone at Simpro thought about it before, and probably a little bit different than how our competitors are thinking about it. But that's because of the world that I come from, is a very connected world that was very complex. Retail.
Retail isn't much different than here. You work with an end customer who's made an order. You work with an end customer that has an order. It's just a service. But all of this technology that enables or creates simplicity out of all this complexity, it exists today. We just haven't brought it into this industry. And so I think this industry is really ripe for a transformation.
Some people like the word use, the word disruption and the beauty of of the trades industry is you can't disrupt a lot of things. I don't think that AI is going to come fix your air conditioner any time soon. It's still going to need people that want to use their hands and have to use their hands. But things like AI and machine learning could be used to make that better. To augment what they do, they can respond faster, they can find material quicker. All of those things.
And as the platform that you run your business on, it's it's really our obligation to figure out how to bring that technology in and innovate so that you can run your businesses faster and more efficiently and more effectively, more profitability, more customers, more growth. And that has to be our focus is is to enable that for you. Some of the changes that we're making, you've already seen and hopefully you've felt.
So I know that when I first got here, I spent the first probably three or four months taking a lot of email because the systems were going down. They weren't very stable. And I was told, Hey, you know, we want to move to AWS. Great. When are we going to do that? Well, it's going to take us nine months. I'm like, No, we're going to do it in four. And so in July, very quickly, we moved to AWS. And I'm thrilled to say that since July, I think our uptime has been 99.999%.
And I think that is when Simpro, the company, started to realize that I don't have a whole lot of patience and that we're going to move very, very fast. We're not going to do things in eight months and nine months. We're going to do things in two months or three months, not at the expense of quality. We're going to do good work. We're going to do the right things, but we're really going to focus on the three or four things that matter and we're going to bang them out and get them done.
I understand right now that customer support is an issue a lot of people have called in to support and they don't hear from anybody or the right person doesn't get on the phone and we're not connecting the dots in the right way. And when I got here, for example, there were 12 open head count for support. And I'm like, why aren't we? Why are there 12 open headcount for support? And people couldn't tell me why. I'm like, This is dumb.
So I hired a new head of support and within three months we hired 12 people for support. Now it's going to take them a little while to ramp up. Simpro’s Not the easiest in the world. It's not complex, it's just comprehensive. It's a lot to learn. And so we've got to take some time to train these people. But I already see our time in which we're getting back to people. It's coming down and it'll continue to come down. We have this customer success organization. It's a big organization.
There's a lot of people, but I don't believe that it was formatted correctly to support all of you and the customer base that we have. So we're going to make big changes there. I brought in a Chief revenue officer, who started about four weeks ago. She's been with me at four different companies. We've been together for ten years. That sounds really weird, but it's true.
And the reason that we work really well together is because we both share a common belief, which is the customer comes first and we rebuilt the entire customer success motion and teams at Magento and at Adobe. And I think if we can build a customer success team for a $20 billion company, we can figure out how to do it for Simpro. And so I brought her here to help me do that. So we are now dismantling the entire customer journey, how we interact with all of you.
What are the touch points in which we have with all of you? And then we're going to figure out how to align around that so that, you know, no matter where you are in your journey, whether it's day one is tomorrow or you've been here six weeks or you been here, who is the longest 16 years, Right. I want to make sure that you're supported in the best way for you because you need more support than he does or a different type of support. And we need to adapt to that.
So over the next couple of months, you will see our customer success teams realign around you. Our customer base, communication and engagement. We're here and I've sent out a couple emails to the entire customer base since I've been here. My commitment to you is one a quarter.
If you've spoken to people that have been to any of the other Simprosiums or you haven't gotten the message here, I'm incredibly transparent and there is nothing I won't share with you unless our owners come back to me and say, Please don't share this. And that's pretty rare. It might be financial. Who knows everything else.
We're an open book, and the people that I've brought in to help me lead this company and the people that are still at this company and have stayed here, they're here because they believe the same thing. We should operate with candor, with transparency, and we should lead with our ears. We need to listen to you in order to understand where we're going to go. But we also need to be really transparent about what we're doing.
And my hope is that if we're not doing the right things, you raise your hand. Go, wait a minute, Could you think about it a little differently? And we're going to be open and receptive to that. I talked early about this renewed focus on community customers, partners, associations. Simpro is bigger than Simpro, and if it's not, it should be. We should be leading the charge in bringing all of these things together so that we can make you more successful because us alone can't do it.
There's all these other components of your business, but we should be collaborating and talking with the other components of your business to make sure that you're successful because if you're successful, everyone else is too. That's the beauty of it. We pull each other along, but we have to start creating that. Those tendencies between each of these pieces of your business.
And my hope is that Simpro will be the heart and soul of that and will drive that communication in that collaboration and then finally, of course, there is a technology roadmap and we want to share what that is. And the reason that we want to share it isn't so much that we can say, Hey, let's pound our chests and show you what we're doing it so that you can say to us, Yeah, those are the right things. Or, Wait, wait a minute, maybe we don't need that. These other things should be prioritized.
And so when I think about us sharing the roadmap and talking about the features and the functions that are coming, I don't think about it in the way that most people do. It's not, Hey, here's what we're doing. It's more of a question, Hey, here's what we're doing. Is this right? And then we want your guidance on whether we're moving in the right direction or not. That communication has to be, you know, bilateral has to go both ways. We share. You share.
So my ask of you is is definitely share with us. And we're going to be sharing that with our ecosystem because I want the ecosystem to come along with us. We have a lot of partners in the back. We have a lot of partners that do implementation work and they do services work. They're not my enemy, they're my friend. They need to know what's in the roadmap. They need to know what's coming. They need to be as knowledgeable about Simpro as we are.
And that is a different strategy than Simpro's had in the past. We need to be both experts and trainers and educators and we need to bring everybody along with us because we all have the same common goal. And if we don't, we should, which is how do we make our customers successful? You're in your voice matters, your feedback, your aspirations, what you want to do. We want to hear from you. I want to hear from you. You're all get surveyed after a simple Rosie.
You'll get a survey in your emails and I hope you answer them and say, Hey, next year, what if we what if we saw this? Or could you provide this or do this? You get to drive where we go, you get to drive where we focus. Take advantage of that. We're your partner. We want to make you better and we're listening. We want to know from you specifically what it is that you would like to see from us. That's my email address. Feel free to drop a note again if you've got anything that's innovative.
Any opportunities for us to get better? Anything that you think we could do that we're doing? I'd love to hear what we're doing. Well, in addition to where we have opportunities to get better. But I'm open to it. I've respond to every email I've ever gotten in my entire life. I don't think I've ever ignored anybody in any of the companies that I've worked for or with. And I'm a big believer in being open and transparent and just willing to talk to people. That's how you get better.
I don't believe that my role is any more important or any less important than anyone else that's in process. It's not the way that I think and it's not the way that I operate. I'm cognizant of the fact that tomorrow probably can't be successful unless the vision and the strategy that I set works. But the vision and the strategy that I set comes from everyone in this room. It's not mine. Sure. And I have to do things in my role in order for everyone at scenario to be successful.
And I need everyone at semi-pro to focus on what they're responsible for. I can't be successful, so I'm no important, no more important than anybody else. I just have a different title and a different role. But we all have the same purpose, which is to make all of you successful. That's my email address. If you want to communicate, please, I'd appreciate it hearing anything that you have to say.
I hope that today's a good day and that you learn and that you get to meet other people and you get to collaborate and talk. I'm excited for the day. I'm thrilled for the day to get started. I appreciate all of you being here and giving us your time because I know you all stepped away from your jobs. And that's hard to do in the industry that we're in, but it's very much appreciated. And I know today will be worth it for you.
But if it's not, let me know what else we can do so that the next time around we get it right. So thank you. Thanks for giving me some time. Thanks for listening to this episode of Trades Tools and Talks. For Simpro, I'm Bill. We're looking forward to making 2024 the best year it can be. Now let's get to work.