Business grows in Timely fashion

Timely co-founder and chief executive Ryan Baker (front) with staff members Maddy Stumbles, Jack...
Timely co-founder and chief executive Ryan Baker (front) with staff members Maddy Stumbles, Jack Harris, Keegan Shore and Sam Barton in the office in John Wickliffe House. Photo: Gerard O'Brien.
Timely, which produces a cloud-based appointment management system for businesses requiring scheduling of their staff and services, is the Otago Daily Times Business of the Year. Chief executive and co-founder Ryan Baker chats to business reporter Sally Rae.

Timely is not your usual workplace.

Suits and ties, structured hours of work and even a conventional office space do not fit the ethos of the Dunedin-based tech company.

Co-founder and chief executive Ryan Baker acknowledges the business has thrown out the rule book for the way a company should work.

That means staff work from wherever they want; for most people, that means from home. Or, in the case of a salsa dancing enthusiast, clocking-in from the likes of Colombia or Guatemala. Timely has office space in John Wickliffe House in the Exchange for anyone who  wants to use it but they choose to be based where they will be most productive.

There is no dress code at Timely, which has become a little bit famous for the robes it issues when a staff member reaches their first anniversary. Dunedin Mayor Dave Cull added a civic touch when he dished out this year’s robes.

"It’s not important to wear a suit. It is important to build a great product and look after customers well," Mr Baker (39) said.

He is proud  Timely has been able to hold on to its slightly unorthodox way of working while also growing a successful company. But those factors did  not happen by chance, he said.

Timely was founded in 2012 by Andrew Schofield, Will Berger and Mr Baker. Mr Baker and Mr Schofield were previously involved in BookIt, an online software provider for tourism operators which was sold to Trade Me in 2010.

BookIt was initially developed by Mr Schofield and Dunedin businessman Ian Taylor later bought into it. It was while working on BookIt that the men had a lot of small businesses, such as salons, massage therapists and chiropractors, asking if they could use it to take appointments, and it sowed a seed.

They were later joined by Mr Berger, whom they met at Trade Me, and the trio started building Timely in March 2012, launching it in July that year. This year, Timely made the 2016 Deloitte Technology Fast 500 Asia-Pacific Index, coming 71st out of 500 with 770% growth in the last year.

It was also joint winner of the emerging business category at the New Zealand International Business Awards.

For Mr Baker — the only one of the founding trio  domiciled in Dunedin — it has been a "fun journey".

"It’s one of the funny things about high growth start-ups like this; simultaneously it feels like we started it yesterday and we’ve been doing it for decades — a lot of people  working in this environment say the same thing.

"Just the pace of it and amount you have to change and learn to keep up with it creates that kind of dynamic."

A major highlight this year was reaching profitability in June, a goal  set 18 months earlier.

Timely had taken a different approach to similar businesses; the normal model was to raise money quickly and spend it, raising more before the last lot ran out.

The company had raised money twice then decided to "do it slightly differently" and bring it all the way back to profitability, rather than raising more money when at the end of that cycle.

The main reason for doing that was "it was hard and we like doing hard things". The team knew it would make them learn a lot about how the business worked and why customers used the product.

This year’s accolade at the New Zealand International Business Awards was "extremely pleasing".

"Our mission has always been to be a global business from day one. That’s really what this award celebrates," Mr Baker said.

Timely now has about 7000 customers in the beauty and wellbeing industry in 85 countries — "so it’s quite international".

The company’s team of 33 includes two in the United Kingdom, three in Auckland, five in Wellington  — including the salsa dancing enthusiast — and the remainder in Dunedin.

"I’m really proud of what we’ve done, probably more the way we’ve done it. We’ve kind of chucked out the rule book for the way a company should work," he said.

Mr Baker was born and bred in Dunedin and he and his family enjoy living in Otago. Mr Schofield is based in Raumati and Mr Berger — who was in Malta for a while — lives in Auckland.

Timely’s focus for 2017 is  on global expansion.

"We’ve spent the first four years building a product and I guess proving there’s demand for what we have — and it’s really clear there’s a big appetite for what we’ve created.

"Our job now is to reach as many people as we can in markets we choose to operate in."

Being based in Dunedin was a "really positive driving factor" for Timely.

"We had to make sure from day one we created systems to get customers from New York, Australia, wherever. In a little city at the bottom of the world, we focused on the whole world straight away."

For Mr Baker, what he loved most was having to grow and develop himself personally a "huge amount" over the last four years. What that involved was quite addictive.

Mr Baker believed there was a big opportunity for Dunedin to tap into companies with remote workforces.

There were some "really cool" companies that were not Dunedin-based or even necessarily New Zealand-owned, with staff in the city, often "flying under the radar".

Companies with remote workforces were not something that was new but it was certainly something that was growing.

Technology companies, wherever they were based in the world, often found it hard to recruit talent and that was a "perfect fit" for what Dunedin offered, with an "incredible pool of talent".

When it came to its own recruitment, Timely had been very fortunate and part of that success was being based in Dunedin.

"There are really talented people here that are looking for exciting opportunities like this. Also our lifestyle focus, as a business, has been a way for us to compete against other companies like us," he said.

There was little time to step back and think about what Timely had achieved and Mr Baker had a theory of having to be "perpetually dissatisfied with what you’re doing".

"You have to be in a constant mode of ... saying, ‘let’s do more, we can do more’," he said.

But he did acknowledge that, four years in, having expanded the staff team,  notching up 7000 customers and being profitable made him "pretty happy".

It was motivating to hear the work that the team did "makes a real difference to real people".

"Our customers are really real."

Mr Baker said one of the luxuries of starting a business like Timely was the ability to put together a team of people the executives loved working with.

"That’s been super fun. Chuck them into an environment which is quite loopy, see them thrive and see them enjoy it. That’s pretty rewarding," he said.

If you wanted to have motivated staff working for you, you had to care about who they were as people and create an environment in which they felt safe and that the work they did really mattered, he said.

"You don’t need a lot of rules, you don’t need to see them, you don’t need a dress code. You need to give them direction and have a purpose and they’ll do good things."

Mr Baker has been expanding the business at the same time as expanding a family. He and his wife, Kirstin, have four sons — two teenagers, a preschooler and an infant. His wife also works in the business, undertaking HR and finance work — "and about a million other things".

Working from home, Mr Baker can  often be found barefoot in his usual uniform of T-shirt and shorts. On a cold day, it could be the above-mentioned robe.

Such an arrangement meant he was  there to watch his two younger sons take their first steps and that was "priceless".

"I wouldn’t change that for anything," he said.

sally.rae@odt.co.nz

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