Curiosity Crisis Podcast Featuring the Founder and CEO of Fieldd

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At Fieldd, we understand the unique challenges that service businesses face. From scheduling and dispatching to invoicing and customer management, our all-in-one platform provides the tools you need to succeed. With features designed to save you time and money, Fieldd empowers you to focus on what matters most—growing your business and delivering exceptional service. Join us and discover how Fieldd can help you achieve new heights of productivity and profitability.

Growth and automation software

Where did Fieldd Emerge From?

To learn more about the story of Fieldd, Luke McElroy and Khush Dodhia-Shah of the Curiosity Crisis Podcast interviewed Harrison from Fieldd. The conversation consists of Harrison’s entrepreneurial journey from dropping out of school to starting a detailing company, the topic of venture capital funding in today’s tech space, and the advantages of operating a tech company from Austin, TX. Click here to listen on apple or spotify, or read the transcription down below of the full interview.

Curiosity Crisis Ep. 23: The Power of Growth and Automation Software

To learn more about the story of Fieldd, Luke McElroy and Khush Dodhia-Shah of the Curiosity Crisis Podcast interviewed Harrison from Fieldd. The conversation consists of Harrison’s entrepreneurial journey from dropping out of school to starting a detailing company, the topic of venture capital funding in today’s tech space, and the advantages of operating a tech company from Austin, TX. Click here to listen on apple or spotify, or read the transcription down below of the full interview.

“Welcome to the curiosity crisis. We challenge ourselves to explore the world of business, tech, investing, and science. Get curious and be part of our journey as we discuss, challenge and learn.” – Luke McElroy, Co-Host of Curiosity Crisis.

“Today we’re interviewing Harrison Lingard, the founder and CEO of Fieldd. Fieldd is a growth & automation software for home and automotive businesses built to make the lives of service based businesses streamlined, easy and more scaleable. His vision came from running a service based business himself, Refresh Mobile Car Detailing, which he started out of his garden shed. It was here that he realized the need for an optimized and efficient field management solution.

Since starting Fieldd, the journey has been nothing short of incredible. Building his own software solution took him to 25,000 customers and 50 staff in just two years, and he was even briefly featured on Shark Tank Australia. Since then, Harry has moved Fieldd to the States based out of Texas, which has been a big part of the scale-up story.

Harry believes in ruthlessly delivering undeniable value, and we cannot wait to unpack the story of him bootstrapping Fieldd to where it is today and get his plans on the future. So without further ado, Harry, how are you?” – Khush Dodhia-Shah, Co-Host of Curiosity Crisis.

“Hi. Very well, thank you. Good to see you again. It’s going to be quite a while there.” – Harrison Lingard, CEO & Founder of Fieldd.

“Yeah. Well, we just like to kick the show off with a question that we ask all our guests. And that is what’s been keeping you curious?” – Luke

“A great, great question. I can’t lead with my garden like Blake. I can’t do that. But, motocross. I’ve been really enjoying that here in Austin. Got a good group of friends here that we ride every weekend. Just about, and, Yeah, just lots of traveling recently. It’s pretty epic being here in Austin where you can pretty much go anywhere for a couple hundred dollars and, and like an hour, you’re in a new place.

So yeah, that’s what’s been keeping me curious.” – Harrison

“Exploring. Getting around. I love it, and it’s good to see you have still have time for that in this incredible journey of Fieldd. So to kick it off, I gave a little bit of a background. But from your perspective, what is the founding story of Fieldd and how it has evolved from your garden shed to a tech company in the States?” – Khush

“Yeah. Great question. the founding story of Fieldd, while, as, as you mentioned, early start of refresh and, built that company to 25,000 customers and was on Shark Tank and didn’t get a deal. But, you know, it’s it’s a TV show. So it’s not really a, it’s not not a real life scenario. But, after the show, I was pretty motivated to grow the company even further.

And so after the show launched in Perth. So we’re already in Perth, so we moved from Perth to Melbourne, and started sort of growing in Melbourne. So we are all of a sudden in two states and started to get a lot of interest. And people started asking ‘how are we running refresh?’ Like how on earth are you running all these people cross-country with one manager?

Yeah, and that’s when I received an offer for it was like $1.1 million for half the company and a juicy salary and a few hundred thousand cash to myself. So, good offer, but, I saw that it was a bigger opportunity than just selling out of that stage. I thought, there’s a lot more fuel in the tank, so let’s go.

And so at that point, I actually read a book. It’s sitting behind me. it’s called Blitzscaling, if you guys have ever read it before. Amazing book. It basically talks about scaling at all costs, and it can be a dangerous thing. You don’t want to waste money, but at the same time, it can be a very good exercise into sort of scrapping the small initiatives and going big.

And so I went to the gym. I think I literally joined a gym in Melbourne, and after like five minutes at the gym, I had this epiphany and I called Garo co-founder. I was like, ‘Garo, I’ve got this idea. It was idea. It’s let’s just start offering our software to everyone. because we can’t expand fast enough with refresh.’

And I sort of worked out a game plan how to do that, and it kind of all clicked, and I knew I wanted to do it, but I kind of didn’t know how I was going to do it. And it sort of all clicked after in this book. And I realized, yeah, that’s how we can grow a lot faster.

And so that was February 2019. and so I put all the profits from Refresh into a Fieldd for a year, scout up to a team of eight of us. And then from 2020, that’s when things started to get serious and, raise a little bit more money through, friends and, yeah, then Covid hit.

And so that’s a whole other experience after that. But that’s, it’s the origin of that.” – Harrison

“Wow. That is absolutely incredible. And I love just quickly on that story to tell it from Refresh Car Detailing in the Fieldd. It came to you literally in the in the gym. I think a lot of a lot of the other founders we’ve talked to have also said that, you know, the biggest ideas have come to that in the weirdest of places, and it’s just the most random events.

“But that’s that’s super cool.” – Khush

“And to be honest, like I read that book, like, I think I read it in three days straight. I sat there at work, I was just reading, reading, reading, and at the end of the three day I was like, well, that was a waste of time. Like it was like, why I spent three days reading this book.

And then it was literally a week later. I was just completely I must have been processing it subconsciously. And then all of a sudden it’s like, bam! Like, this is what I need to do.” – Harrison

“So you had this other startup called, Refresh and, you know, was it some form of long-held ambition, to be an entrepreneur or it was more of the, the identification of, hey, this could really scale. Like, why did you pursue Fieldd? Other than you thought there might be something there?” – Luke

“Yeah, I think I’ve always been inclined, I guess pushing the boundaries and doing something unique and trying to find, you know, that one thing that’s going to, to make an impact and ultimately, you know, get myself financial freedom and along the way, have a cool journey doing it and build a cool team that I can hang out with every day.

So, you know, that was that’s always something that I’ve been looking forward to, to doing. And I think, you know, people think about it very kind of black and white like, oh, okay, now it’s time to start a business, okay. I’m going to be successful. And like it doesn’t really work like that. So I guess Refresh, and then Fieldd was just iterations of, you know, many, many, many years since leaving school at 16, many, many years of iterations of then leading up to that point where something actually stuck.

And I will say that it’s not like I created hundreds of ideas and you hear these people that are always creating the next best thing and kind of do something for like a month and then go to something else. It wasn’t like that at all. I gave everything a really, really good go. And I feel like that was kind of just the next obvious step for me to start Refresh, and that was the next obvious step to start Fieldd.” – Harrison

“So you, we’re trying other ideas, to start things before Refresh. Is that what we’re hearing?” – Khush

“Prior to refresh, I was selling real estate in New Zealand. And I did that prior to that because I did door sales randomly and was really good at selling newspapers door like no one reads the newspaper. And somehow I managed to sell people that. And that led to Refresh.

I was just looking, looking, looking, looking, looking for something else because I moved to Australia, started real estate again after being successful in New Zealand. Then but starting in a brand new market is really, really hard. And real estate, it takes years to get that going. So I already had like 4 or 5 years of experience in New Zealand.

I was like, oh man, I’m going to start this all over again. So I did that for like 8 months and it was still kind of looking for another idea. And I wouldn’t say that Refresh was the first idea. I just think I was very methodical and did my research and really just kind of kept thinking, thinking, thinking, before I was like, ‘yes, this is it.’” – Harrison

“You know, you’ve talked about, Refresh before leading into Fieldd, but what is the development and scale up journey of Fieldd? And when once you decided to take it to selling the software, those initial steps, how did you fund the iteration? How did you know that this scale journey was going to be it?” – Khush

“Yeah. Great question. So had I have known, how hard it would have been to start a tech company and then, to take it to where it is today, I, would have probably thought twice, I think at the start, like I had no idea what a big task it was. And like, to be honest, this is probably why I understand our customers so well in the early days.

I remember talking to my friends, I’m like, ‘Oh, I found this like app code online where I can I can get like an on demand Uber app code base for like $500 all. I was like, look at these idiots. They’re, you know, they’re spending hundreds of thousand dollars on software, like, what are they doing all day? Like, I literally just download the code from this website and then look, we have an app.’ Like that’s how naive I was in the early days.

I literally had no idea how big of a task it was going to be. And I guess every step of the way, the problem just kind of got bigger and it just got more expensive, and then it just took longer. And then there was also like a lot of minefields, like people that were like, hey, I can help you do this.

And I had no idea what they were doing. Like, everyone’s an expert, right? Everyone’s an expert.

No one comes up to me and says, ‘I’m not really that good at this.’ Like, no one. The people come up to you and say, ‘Hey, I’m the number 1. This. I’m the number 1 that, hire me. I’m going to help your business.’ And so it was also kind of because I needed help. I couldn’t do it myself.

I was also kind of learning, like who was the real deal and who wasn’t the real deal, because every bit of money that I was able to save prior to fund this, and then all the money that I pulled out a Refresh over the years, like I mean, we weren’t rich, like we didn’t have a ton of money.

So every hit that we took from the shiny light of someone saying, hey, we can build this ad for you, we can do PR for you, we can do, you know, LinkedIn messaging, all this kind of stuff. It just became very, very expensive. So then, the ramp up journey really became me learning every single part of, like how to run a business or a tech company.

So that was even I didn’t know how to code. So I one day just bought a computer and, literally just sat down next to my one engineer that I had that I ended up hiring in-house and said, ‘teach me everything you know.’ And so that was really kind of the pinnacle moment where we went from trusting other people, blindly and really kind of losing a lot of money, to me actually understanding the lift on the development side of things.

And then also when we needed to, I would just work all night, you know, catching up and coding little bits and pieces to make the platform better. So the ramp up journey, because we didn’t have a ton of cash, was literally just all right, we’re just going to do whatever we can. What’s this? What’s this? And, and I still laugh after I got that offer for half a Refresh, I was like, oh, we can, like, we just need to, like, create a login page where everyone can log in and use the software.

It’ll take like three months. Meanwhile, that’s like, what, six years later now? And it’s only at a point where we’re like, all right, this is really, really, really, really good. Now, we laugh because we thought it would take three months.

But, the sort of ramp up journey was just basically, you know, offshore developers initially because we couldn’t afford anything else, you know, and I laugh on Shark Tank, I was like, oh, you know, to seriously, like get some developers, get a proper tech founder, blah, blah, blah, get someone in-house.

Like with what money? You know, like, how are we going to do that? And like, the other thing is while in the tech industry, I compare it to the pharmaceutical industry in the sense that say you have a normal business, a service business, right? You’re an electrician. It’s just you, you want to get more jobs? Well, you just talk to more people and then all of a sudden you get more clients to start coming back. So you did a good job. And they tell their friends, all of a sudden you’re busy, you hire another van, great. You know, you got two people and then you got three, and then you kind of grow it.

As long as you do a good job and people come back, ultimately, you know, a little bit of marketing, ultimately your business is going to grow. Whereas like in the tech space, you need a team of 10 to 15 at a bare minimum to cover all the functions, from sales to customer support to customer success to marketing. you know, obviously engineering, etcetera, etcetera. And no one will touch your product until it’s way better than the other alternative. And so you just don’t make any money for that whole time and no one will touch it. There’s not really a way to make money along the way. It’s like zero. And then all of a sudden one day people are just flooding in the door like they are now.” – Harrison

“There’s huge switching costs in technology.

Yeah, it’s funny that you mention the, the we’re almost there because we have a joke in my software engineering team that there’s the first 90%, and then there’s the second 90%. Yeah. And I totally see where you’re coming from.

Just along what you were saying about, hiring people. I’ve heard that from, multiple founders, that hiring people is actually one of the key learnings that they have, but also one of the biggest decisions that they have coming out of. Okay. Like, I’ve built something that works, and now we’ve moved into the business stage. We need to hire people. And it’s it’s one of these huge things in there and they don’t have any experience doing it.

And you said, you know, that you had a lot happen in that. Do you want to, elaborate a little bit on like how you went with hiring people and where you actually kind of feel like, okay, I know what I need to do now.” – Luke

“Yeah. I learned a lot from Refresh. you know, the the car detailing industry, the, you know, the commercial cleaning industry, residential cleaning industry is it’s hard to get good people that want to work for you. And there’s a lot of people that are doing it that are like very unreliable. And so with Refresh, we kind of developed a bit of a pipeline on how to hire people and how to really understand who’s going to be good and who’s not.

And then combined with my sister, she was she used to work for Shopify, and she used to say to me, ‘Out of 300 resumes we used to get, we’d hire one person on a good day,’ right? Wow. So they were so, so, so, so, you know, critical on every single person. And then basically as people dropped off, you know, really analyzing why didn’t they last. Like what could we have done differently? So you know, with with Refresh hiring hundreds of people over the first few years, I really kind of nailed the hiring process just by trial and error. Because don’t get me wrong, my first probably 10 to 15 people were, you know, I made mistakes. Like I 100% made mistakes. And so if you’ve never really hired anyone before, it can be daunting telling them ‘no.’

It can be daunting when they start performing after the first two days to tell them that they’re out. so that polished approach came a lot of a lot of it came from Refresh. And then also to in this space is a lot of hype-people, I call it, where they actually don’t know how to code, and they’re just going to leverage ChatGPT to run everything, you know what I mean?

Like, ChatGPT is going to be their best friend and you’re going to get ChatGPT code, which to be honest, is actually very, very handy sometimes to polish what you’re doing or debug or find little bits and pieces wrong, or quickly write something that’s a common function. But if they’re not in the office, they’ll just probably have eight jobs and and tell you it’s going to take forever.

So, you know, I know you’re laughing, Luke, but that’s that’s generally a pretty typical, hiring experience. And that’s why we didn’t we stopped hiring, remote as well. We never hired remote. After 2019, you come to the office, you show up, and that’s that.” – Harrison

“So on the show, we’ve had a couple of founders, one of which, Dylan, who went to Stanford Ignite, which is really, heavily tech focused and is obviously based in the US, but we haven’t had a, founder move from their home country to the US. And I was wondering what were the key milestones in Fieldd’s growth and particularly regarding that expansion and move to the US market, why the US and more specifically, why Texas? Not California, given it’s a tech company?” – Luke

“Great question. When I was starting, starting out in Melbourne and growing the team there, it was very, very, very hard to hire people. Like it was just hard to find good people. And the people that were good wanted a ton of money. I mean, I know that’s everywhere, but like the amount of applicants we had was just kind of dismal.

And then looking at the actual size of the market as well, like, I mean, America has, what, 330 million people, ten times the size of Australia. So you hear these stories, whatever you do, it’s the same set up cost as it is in the United States, if not cheaper, because it’s cheaper to buy things here. But you have ten times the population. It’s probably the same reason why, well, they don’t have an Ikea in New Zealand because like, New Zealand is too small. They’re like, ‘why would we call. It’s another market, but it’s the same amount of set up cost. That is this is a set up New Zealand if not more because it’s smaller, but the population is so much smaller.’

So we could it doesn’t make sense. Let’s just go to a bigger market and or invest extra marketing dollars in existing markets. So I was always kind of a bit of a dream to move to the US, but initially moved, actually moved to Canada for two years. So what happened was, is I had flights booked for the 10th of March 2020 to go to a, so go to Perth for a friend’s wedding. And then I think it was like the 20th. I was booked to go to Vancouver. And so Covid hit and everyone’s like, oh, I got to shut everything down, can’t fly anywhere, blah, blah, blah.

And I’m I stop and like, there’s no global pandemic that’s going to stop me doing what I need to do. So I jump on that flight to Vancouver amidst everything. And, I was only because I couldn’t if I didn’t have a work visa for the US. And so I was born in Canada. I never grew up there. I lived there for three years. And, so it’s easy for me to get to Canada. So I’m just going to go to Canada as a stepping stone to then move to the US. And so the reason why Austin, I mean, since 2012, I’ve been doing a lot of traveling to the US just with friends and whatnot. So I’ve been to a lot of states, and Austin was just a cool place that I made a lot of friends here. And, just always saw it as an awesome place and to be honest, right before we did move down here, I did go to San Diego and always loved San Diego. If anyone has ever been to San Diego, it’s a wonderful place.

Big fan of San Diego, high living costs, gas costs, and ironically, everyone from San Diego is moving to Austin. So, that’s why it was kind of like a double double kind of a thing here. And, I mean, it’s cool being a tech city here. I mean, we’ve got the big Google buildings downtown and, you know, there’s a lot of tech here.

But at the same time, like, we kind of just do our own thing and trying to create our own own sort of ecosystem here at Fieldd. So we don’t really sort of get involved too much with what’s going on. But Austin, it was more just a place that I, I loved from coming at 12 years on 2012. So it’s like 12 years ago, and traveling ever since. And then it just, it just kind of all made sense. I had like a bit of a head start because I knew people and knew the area really well. So, yeah, that’s why.” – Harrison

“You mentioned a couple times in that, you mentioned the VC funding show too, in Melbourne. and then earlier you were talking about how tech, I suppose you need to hire a lot of people and a fair bit of runway to actually get customers across. And then once once you have it, it’s a bit of a point, a tipping point, but you haven’t taken VC funding, you’ve bootstrapped it till now. How like, what’s the story? Yeah, because I know that that’s a big thing for tech companies. And actually hitting scale, you know, like Spotify is only just, becoming profitable now. How have you done it?” – Khush

“So great question Khush. Great question. We ran a very, very, very lean machine. And I owned nothing for many years. And like, just grinded to the bone. And then, you know, Garo has been very, very influential and key in the process with raising money as well. And like I guess he throughout I took on a lot of the stress. And then Garo, was able to go, ‘okay, I understand.’ And then he was able to kind of like internalize that and then be able to voice how big of a thing we were building and how how valuable it is, and it’s going to be and, and really kind of played like a key part in the growth of Fieldd in the early days. So, you know, big ups to Garo. So, you know, that was definitely like a lot of moments where we were like, we were never going to shut the doors. It was just kind of like iffy moments were like, how on earth are we going to come up with payroll? Like how on earth we’re going to pay these bills and just maxing out every credit card we could find, maxing out absolutely everything because, you know, a team of up to ten people with no income, where do you get that kind of money from? And even now we look back and we’re just like, ‘how on earth did we fund that?’

I don’t know, but we just kept the costs so lean. And then we were able to show, I guess, good progress. And then everyone that was getting paid or took money would just work hard every day. And so we really were able to find out who our true team members were, like, who actually cared and who actually was behind the mission.

And then at the same time, like there was no room for spilled milk, like we had to really, really understand what we were building, why we were building it, and really analyze, okay, is this going to make us money? Is this going to actually get us more customers? Is this important or is this just hot air? And I think that, I guess living on the edge of disaster and pure adrenaline for 3 to 4 years was really what made Fieldd what it is today.”

So the early days were just literally just grinding and doing anything we could to stay alive. and then being very, very careful who we hired. And so I guess it taught us a lot of good habits. And then now guess what? We’re profitable. And we have a very, very stable platform. And you look at the other bigger companies, it’s like they kind of they’re not designed to be profitable. Like they’ve just created a lot of bloat within their workforce. They don’t want a fire everyone because it will upset the culture. But they will fire everyone because they need to become profitable temporarily so then they can sell it to a new VC. But then the new VC comes in and realizes that it’s chaos.

No one wants to work there. They’re understaffed and the customers hate the product, but because they’re so big, they exist. But what if you actually got product market growth? And what if you actually found your organic fit? And what if you actually built a true SaaS product? Like, how about that for an idea? Why don’t why don’t actually build a SaaS product who can log in and use it and pay you money? And then it just grows itself like that’s that’s what we’re building. And that confuses me why people don’t look at it like that.” – Harrison

“So just on that, like now when you, when you look forward, in terms of the longer, longer term vision of Fieldd and you mentioned, you know, VC is there and stuff like that now and you’re looking forward. Are you building to sell? Like so what I’m saying there is, do you have a set of metrics and evaluation figure in mind to build towards? So if I build at all of these products, all of these features get this many customers, get this much SaaS revenue, this is what it should be worth, or you just need to grow and scale to infinity?” – Khush

“Well that’s a great that’s a very, very good question. And like younger me would have been like, oh yeah, if I do this and this and this and this, and this is going to mean this and this and this, and this is what we’re going to do. I think a lot of people are kind of naive in the sense that they think growth is is that linear?

Just just let it grow. It’s going to be linear. And like the process is going to be linear. I mean, I’ve had so many meetings, with VC’s and, and you know, I’ve flown all around the country on a wild goose chase and had meetings with Garo, with Australia, UK, you name it. And it gets to a point where, you know, are we building a business to attract someone to pay us money, right, by doing bizarre things just to make our valuation look better than what it is? Or are we building a business that is going to be around for the long run and is going to be profitable?

As soon as we started to get closer to profitability, I stopped worrying about what other people would think and realized that, hold on a second. I don’t need to care about, if we do this right and if our numbers work and, oh, we’ve got to manipulate this through this and done it. like, you can make any chart look great, right? It’s just depends what angle you look at. But the reality is, is do you have a resilient business that is going to stand the test of time?

And it’s actually going to work like, because the reality is, is most of the funded companies don’t work. And so like, I mean, okay, where this came from, I went to a, a pitch competition in San Antonio. And I indirectly pitched Fieldd. You weren’t allowed to pitch what you’re working on. You up the new idea and I pitch Fieldd.

And then the person that won it was like, the most obscure pitch in the world, right? They didn’t care about it. They weren’t. When the going got tough, they would run. Right. but they were just the best at pitching. And I could tell that a VC was like, oh, my God, I got to invest in this now.

Like, this is brilliant. Those people are gonna take your money and run. And that’s what the industry’s full of. And so I’m realizing now that, like, I love doing what I’m doing, and I love the team that I’ve built around me, and they love coming to work every day and every day we start to make these big, huge, gigantic moves because we actually have the bandwidth and the team and the resources to do that.

And so it’s something special that you create that I don’t want to say no to. And I don’t want to just sell out. And at the same time, like, if you’ve got a business that is making you money, why would you sell it? We’ve built a base that is going to be the category leader in the next couple of years. And, and we’ve built a gigantic moat around us just by pure determination and hard work.” – Harrison

“So how has Fieldd as a product changed from its inception to now? I’m sure it looks very different.” – Luke

“Yeah. Very different. I mean, UI, UX, it’s it’s just night and day compared to the early days, right? I mean, it’s, it’s. Yeah, it’s had a lot of love. but in the early days, our legal name is Refresh Bookings. But the reason why is our accountant, it’s like we need to name quickly. And I was like, well, it’s Refresh but it’s software. But you’re doing bookings, right? And so we called it Refresh Bookings because we thought we would just be like a, a front end booking platform, like almost like a, a web form, just, handle people’s bookings for services. And they could use that. Right. The product has changed dramatically because having a solution that you built for yourself bespoke to solve a problem that you understand because you understand it is very different to offering a consumer product, and then offering, an enterprise product, You don’t need to do a lot of that hard work. But very few products have transitioned from enterprise to consumer. The best products in the world of started out as a consumer product that’s very easy to use, and then added more and more features and gone upstream to enterprise, it doesn’t go the other way around. So initially it was purely just going, okay, well, we were probably like a bespoke enterprise product that was hard to use because it was built just for us.

And then now we’ve we spent the last few years just unraveling how to explain all these really complex features that do not exist on the market, but offer tremendous value to any service business. How do we explain that? Because they don’t know they need it, they don’t know that they it exists and they don’t know what to look for. And so like how you need geofence is like, what’s a geofence like I get it, it’s a new it’s something completely new. And then it’s not just one product. They go, oh I don’t need a switch. I’ve got this. And then you realize, okay, well, you’re duct taping your business together. So now we need to do more and more and more.

And then all of a sudden we have this suite and well, like, well, how do we explain this suite. What is it? And it actually took me like 4 years before I learned the term field service management software. Like, I actually didn’t know that that was a thing. But even now, it’s not really like field service management software. We don’t really help you manage your business. We help you grow your business and automate it. If you have a big company and you just want to manage it, great. Well, we can do that. But most companies want to automate and most companies want to grow if they’re small and have anything to manage. So we basically out people from a startup, brand new business out the gate, all the way to small business, midsize business. And then now we’ve actually started doing, we launched a franchise dashboard. So we help franchises so you can manage multiple-brand franchises, which is unheard of. All from one dashboard and toggle between all the accounts, set everything up and sync. See all the reporting leads, you name it from one corporate dashboard. So the products changed dramatically over the years from basically the booking and the customer side of things to then completely rebuilding the CRM to then offering marketing.

We realized, okay, the lights are on now what what do we do? Oh, we find customers. Well, people are just throwing money at Google Ads, Facebook, Instagram, which is definitely a part of it. You have to do you have to have an online presence. I agree, but it’s kind of like a 2-pronged approach where you can burn a lot of money on on Google ads and not necessarily get the results.

So what do we do? So in the US we built a direct mail marketing system. So for home services and automotive services say you go up and you clean someone’s car or you paint someone’s fence or whatever, you fix someone’s HVAC unit. As soon as you complete the job, you hit, ‘done.’ Fieldd will send ten postcards to the neighbors around that property saying, hey, we just fixed your neighbor’s HVAC unit, you’re having heating problems as well. And then if that person scans the QR code or they put the address into our system, we own the database. So we’ll go, oh, that’s a lead at that address. And then you can enrich the lead and you can contact the leads straight away. So now we’ve become a sales and marketing side of things that is fully integrated into the CRM, which has been fully integrated into the booking side of things.

So you can autonomously run your business as long as you set up all the services, in that so basically, if you can, if you can answer the phone and give people a quote over the phone, you can download your brand into Fieldd and we can take bookings for 24/7 without any double bookings, which no one does that anywhere.

And all the way through to now, we’re launching Fieldd Pay in the next couple of days, which is our own payment gateway. It’s been running in Australia for, you know, sort of six years now, but, open in the US market. So better rates than Square and Stripe fully integrated into Fieldd with a lot more features customized and designed for a service business. And so we’ve got that and then also payroll as well. And so it’s a just an all-in-one system that can be used by everyone.” – Harrison

“One of the wrapping up questions we’d really like to ask is, what would be your best pieces of advice for a younger Harry? We have a lot of budding founders listening in, I’m sure, and particularly those in the early stages. So I guess if you if you could just give them something to be aware of or something to to take on board in their journey, what what would you tell them?” – Luke

“It’s going to take you a lot longer than you think it’s going to take. A lot longer. I mean, just have faith. I mean, there’s always that that mean of like the person digging, right? And then they’ve got like a little sliver left to go and all the diamonds are behind that. I mean, that’s definitely the case.

And your journey is only, over when you decide it’s over. And so, you know, you shouldn’t be flogging a dead horse or a dumb idea. 100%, but, like, I feel like the only reason why certain businesses succeed and certain businesses fail, is because the founders just got a little bit more grit than the last person.

And, you know, my job is literally every day dealing with problems and putting out fires. That’s my job. It’s not glory. I’m sitting on a podcast is nice. Thank you for the invite. That’s a that’s a good piece of the glory. But it’s just putting out fires and just doing horrible things all day. But those horrible things and those problems are what gets you to the next step and the next step and the next step and that, instead of going, ‘it’s too hard.’ Well, guess what? It’s going to be hard and you need to get used to it. And if you can thrive when it’s when it’s hard, you’re going to really, really enjoy things when they’re good.” – Harrison

“Yeah. I, I think that’s incredible advice and a really good reality check that it’s not all glamor and glitz. We’re going to wrap up really soon, Harry. But before we do want to say an absolutely massive thank you for coming on. This is been one hell of a story. And, I’ve loved capturing it. So, huge thank you.” – Khush

If you are looking to learn more about what Fieldd has to offer and how Fieldd can help grow and automate your business, check out our website at fieldd.co and sign up for a free trial today!

Conclusion: How will Fieldd help my business grow?

By automating many of the items mentioned above, your task list can be cleared and focused on scaling your operations. Additionally, we offer business strategy and marketing calls for FREE. As you grow, we’re here to support you, helping you to focus on one tool for your entire business, saving you time and money, and most importantly, making you money!

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