Nov 19, 2018
Todays guest joining us on the show is the founder of Freshbooks, the cloud accountancy company that you hear advertised on many podcasts across the globe. Now this isn't just a cloud accounting firm, but the world’s #1 cloud accounting software for self-employed professionals. Its a global hit, but his journey to creating this success was far from assured, even to the point of perhaps not even being part of the plan. You see most businesses are started from the position of an individual's pain with the service that they are getting, and deciding to go and do their own thing to solve this problem. And this was the case with today's guest. He was running a small design firm in 2003 when the frustration of billing his clients overwhelmed him — so he built his own solution. He moved into his parents’ basement for 3.5 years to save money and completely revamped how he ran his design firm (to the point where he worked 19 days in one year and generated over $200,000) to bootstrap FreshBooks to what it is today. Since launching in 2003, over 10 million people have used FreshBooks to save time billing and collect billions of dollars. As he says " I went through an incredibly scary time for 2.5 years while FreshBooks was rebuilding their entire platform, which is typically viewed in the software industry as the worst strategic mistake that a company can make. I even bounced back from a $1.5 million disaster — proving overcoming failure is possible, and often how to succeed in business to begin with." So its ok to say let's build this thing and solve this issue, but how do you start, where do you get the funding? And with more and more similar platforms being built, does this just increase his enjoyment everyday, or leave him in a whirl of panic? Well let's find out as we bring onto the show to start joining up dots with the one and only Mr. Mike McDermott. Show Highlights During the discussion with the Mike McDermott from Freshbooks we hit such deep subjects such as: Why you need to ask the question "Does the destination appeal to me" to truly work on the legacy of a passion project. We chat about the funding that you never thought you need when you start a business, but comes at you from every corner. Mike reveals why many of the metrics he chose to look at as success, are based around his employees happiness. Great way of operating in a business. And lastly......... Why life is a series of hard lefts no matter how much you try to make it a straight path. You just have to cling on and do your best.