In this ongoing series, we share advice, suggestions and insights from real entrepreneurs who fight business battles every day. (Responses have been edited and condensed for clarity.)
Give us your organization’s elevator pitch.
I’m John WaldmanCEO and co-founder of an application for managing teams in small corporations Base. We’re maniacally focused on giving small businesses every thing they should build unstoppable teams: scheduling, time tracking, payroll, financial services, communications, hiring, onboarding and compliance. We are used by over 100,000 corporations that employ over 2 million employees.
How is it different from other payroll platforms?
We are built for local business, a very vital subset of our economy. So it’s neighborhood cafes, restaurants and retail stores. They experience a completely different and unique work environment than corporations. It works on a shift basis. Employees rarely engage with their managers, which creates communication challenges. There is a lot of turnover, which creates a different kind of onboarding and training burden. Many different languages are spoken. So we are built to fulfill all of these specific challenges and more.
What inspired you to start out this company?
Both my co-founder and I have superb childhood friends who own and run restaurants. Some of my friends were in Seattle and opened a salad restaurant. They were very passionate about healthy eating and also cared deeply about providing their team with a great work experience. But they’d no experience managing a team and had absolutely no tools to assist them. At the same time, my sister worked in restaurants and was a unbelievable worker who put in shifts, but she had no easy solution to know if she was making good money. That’s why we created Homebase – it was built to assist our friends and members of the family.
Having interacted with so many small businesses over the last ten years, what do you think are the hallmarks of successful businesses?
I think small businesses are incredibly resilient and great employers. We know from our data that employees at small corporations are generally happier than employees at larger corporations. So my advice to small businesses is to focus on the things that make them great.
We conducted a study titled: 2024 Homebase Small Business Fulfillment Indexand we found many interesting points. The study found that 86 percent of hourly workers enjoy their jobs more when they are appreciated, but only 66 percent of hourly workers said they’d received a compliment at work in the last yr. So there is a easy lever of recognition that any small business owner can use. Additionally, the types of advantages that hourly workers in small businesses care about are different from what many small business owners think. Fifty-six percent of owners imagine the team’s top priority is pay, but in fact, 86 percent of employees wanted more flexibility in their working hours. It wasn’t about the dollar amount. It was about with the ability to plan work around family needs, going to high school, and things like that.
What do you say to small business owners who have been doing things their very own way for many years and are immune to “complicating” things with recent technologies?
We serve so many differing kinds of entrepreneurs – recent business owners who are attempting to work out find out how to do all of it, in addition to individuals who have been doing it for 30 years. The reality cuts each ways: running a small business is incredibly difficult and time-consuming. Maintaining payroll, tracking timesheets, and ensuring people show up. And corporations that have been doing this for 30 years know that it’s getting harder as they face greater regulatory compliance. They are dealing with higher turnover. So our proposition is quite easy: even if you utilize the free version of Homebase, you will likely save five hours a week. And irrespective of who you are, you’ll profit greatly from freeing up five hours of your time.
What is your advice for aspiring entrepreneurs?
My advice to aspiring and current entrepreneurs is almost all the time the same: find a problem that you simply are passionate about solving and that is greater than your organization. And as your enterprise grows, do not forget that you may face a fundamental small business conundrum: The reason you began your enterprise is almost actually not what you may spend your time on. For me, 10 years later, the better part of my job is still talking to local businesses. That’s when I’m in my best shape and it gives me energy. So my advice is to get to know the part of the business that offers you energy and find time for it.