Reinventing the future of work: Enabling Workforce Management for SMBs

Credit Unsplash: Pan Xiaozhen

As we go about our daily routines, we interact with some of society’s most underrated contributors. We get caught up in our own bubble, and sometimes fail to realize the highly impactful work done by security guards, civil servants, and among others, cleaners. The ‘overlooked’ nature of this work creates interesting opportunities to advance the future of work through technology — by reducing waste and inefficiency, and improving workers lives and employee retention at all levels of the organization.

In October 2017, Inovia announced a Seed investment in Swept, a workforce management software platform for janitorial companies. In a nutshell, its mobile application helps SMBs manage and communicate with their cleaning staff. The arcane janitorial industry has seen little transformation to date, and we felt it was ripe for disruption.

Swept is based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and marks Inovia’s first investment in the Maritimes, reflecting our belief that Canadian founders can be highly successful, regardless of where they choose to launch their companies. We chose this investment not only because of the business opportunity but also because of how co-founder and CEO Mike Brown deeply understood the pains in the industry through his experience as a former cleaning company owner. We summarized below how these pains have enabled the vision for Swept:

• Janitorial managers have no way of communicating effectively with their cleaning staff given work is completed overnight, while managers are daytime workers;
• Cleaners have no way of communicating with each other, leading to low employee morale, lack of engagement, and high turnover in the industry
• Cleaners are not able to adequately report problems to their manager, and to receive/take steps to solving problems
• Enabling better communication across cleaning teams could solve for many of these costly problems.

After many long nights spent on the floor managing cleaning teams, Mike decided he was going to address these problems head on. He teamed up with tech and marketing specialist, Matt Cooper and ended up co-founding Swept together. After launching its initial app, the company quickly began solving much more than simple tactical communication issues. Today, Swept has evolved into a platform helping cleaning companies win more business, grow their client base, and perform work more efficiently.

Over the years, we’ve been fascinated to see a large cross section of our anchor SaaS companies move downstream and sell to SMBs. We’ve observed some interesting patterns that Swept recognized from the get-go and thought of sharing them:

1. Onboarding is as important as closing: Think about it, small businesses have no time to try new products, they want to make more money. Showing them a product that quickly generates ROI becomes a key factor to adoption. Try to focus on the onboarding process and customer success at least as much as your top of the funnel — retention and high NPS are a better measures of success than growth early on.
2. Follow-up fast: SMB sales are more about responsiveness than quota attainment. SMBs are a tricky nut to crack because of the high velocity at which leads flow through the funnel. Try to really dig in and understand what causes conversion rates. We’ve found that responsiveness (i.e speed of follow ups) often times plays a big role. How would you measure that for your business?
3. Nail it before you scale it: It is a common tendency for entrepreneurs to want to pour money into sales at early stages. What is most important, is understanding how your investment in sales at the top of the funnel converts into sticky customers at the bottom. Make sure the process from sale to onboarded client is streamlined, and capital efficient before adding more fuel to the sales budget.
4. Distribution is hard: The biggest challenge in SMB SaaS is distribution. While we’re seeing a wave of entrepreneurs sourcing software online in a big way, it’s still grinding to reach a large number of small businesses. Yes there are millions in North America, but only pockets of them are reachable through unified channels. That said, a universal pattern we’ve seen emerge is deep verticalization. In other words, successful SMB SaaS companies tend to target very specific businesses that fit within the SMB segment. Stated differently, SMB is not a market, it’s only a vague definition characterizing businesses of a certain size. What are the specific verticals in which your marketing message resonates the most?
5. Remove noise from your cohorts: We’ve found that the causes of churn prior to being onboarding and afterwards are completely different. To remove noise, it can be useful to remove customers who churn within the first 90 day period from cohort analysis.
6. Measuring product-market fit is a science, not a hack: Measuring product-market fit is crucial for SaaS startups selling to SMBs because their customer base requires mathematical models to understand well. The golden standard in the industry is well captured in a great piece from our friends at Social Capital here.

We could not be more proud to support the amazing team at Swept, and could not be more excited to help drive transformation in the janitorial industry. Every new experience creates new insights, and we love sharing them with our community to keep building together.