Serendipity had a hand in the birth of China-based branding agency Thread Design. Its co-founder, Ben Weldon, didn't even imagine he'd end up staying in China and heading a design agency almost a decade after he first set foot in the country as a curious backpacker. When it came time to choose a CRM, however, Weldon left nothing to chance. After exhaustive research, he found WORKetc.
When Ben Weldon arrived in China in 2005 as a backpacker and a freelance designer/programmer, he had no idea he was going to stay for the long haul, let alone found a company. He was using his freelance skills to fund his travels, and originally, Shanghai was going to be just another stop along the way.
“I came here as a curious backpacker when I was 25,” he recalled. “I was a designer and programmer, not a businessman. There was so much freelance work in Shanghai back then it was insane, it still is. So I decided that I would stay in Shanghai and become an entrepreneur, as you do.”
He set up shop in shared office space in the middle of Shanghai, where he met his soon-to-be business partner, Louise Lai, a business consultant who specialized in helping international companies break into the Chinese market.
“We were both running freelance and consulting projects from an office space in an old villa house in the center of Shanghai,” said Weldon. “When that space’s main tenant went out of business, we were left with an office, a receptionist, a designer and a few computers. We decided to take on the lease and salaries, and the rest is history.”
Weldon had no idea that in just a few short years he and Lai would be running a thriving international branding agency with a client list including Disney, Ford, and Gap. “We just grew from two people, and our two golden retrievers, to an agency of 25 people at our biggest.” Today, Thread Design employs 20 people and has completed over 700 branding, digital and design projects for clients.
Thread Design has completed hundreds of digital projects for many high-profile clients.
But with a bigger staff and bigger projects came bigger problems. Weldon and Lai chose to base their agency Thread Design in Shanghai because they both love living and working there. But Weldon also missed the freedom and flexibility of working remotely, and Thread Design’s business processes at the time made that impossible.
“It was just chaos,” he recalled. “We had accounts doing financing. There was stuff in Excel. You’ve got accounts using SugarCRM software, and then we’re using Smartsheets for project management. We had all this stuff, and having everything stored in different ways by different people made it just impossible. We needed something different.”
He tried everything…
Weldon knew that it was vital that Thread Design move to a completely cloud-based solution. He went on a quest to find the best possible business management solution for Thread Design, using trial and error to figure out what he did and did not want.
“I spent an insane amount of time learning about different systems and comparing prices and functionality and weighing out things like, ‘Do I get SalesForce and plug in Quickbooks? Do I get that and do this? Do I get this and do that?’” he said.
He signed up for multiple free trials of various software solutions and tested them out himself, unwilling to bring any other team members on until he was sure of his decision.
“I didn’t want to try something out, get the whole team onto it, and then six months later go: ‘This isn’t really working, let’s change,’” he said. “It had to be a decision for at least the next three years. It then took me probably two to three months before I chose WORKetc.”
So what was it about WORKetc that made it stand apart?
“Every other system might do one single thing better than WORKetc, but nothing does everything that WORKetc does,” said Weldon. “And because it’s an all-in-one solution, you only have to learn one system and you only have to pay for one login or one system for each person. So, financially, it makes sense. From an education or training point of view, it makes sense.”
“To have a real person actually going through problems in real time with you rather than just sending you an email to ‘here’s a page we wrote on how to do it,’ was so valuable. That was probably what sealed the deal for me with WORKetc.”
— Ben Weldon, Co-Founder and Creative Director, Thread Design
One-on-one training ‘sealed the deal’
“As a small company you get into a way of doing things,” said Weldon. “So, for example, we had a process at Thread Design for quotation, proposal, contract, invoice, and WORKetc didn’t work in the same way that we’d been doing things. I had a one-to-one Skype call, with live video and screen sharing. Steve from WORKetc in the UK taught me how to set up milestone billing in a way that solved the problem that I hadn’t been able to work out myself.”
It was that personal touch that convinced him that he’d found the right all-in-one business management solution for Thread Design.
“To have a real person actually going through problems in real time with you rather than just sending you an email to ‘here’s a page we wrote on how to do it,’ was so valuable,” he said. “That was probably what sealed the deal for me with WORKetc.”
In addition to the one-on-one Skype training, Weldon was also able to book WORKetc training sessions for his project manager, saving him the time he would have spent training her himself.
And whenever Weldon runs into a problem in WORKetc, the support team is ready to answer his questions in detail, with customized videos. “The support team actually makes screenshare videos for me and emails them so I can just watch the solution,” he said. “It’s not just ‘here’s something we made.’ It’s ‘Hey Ben, let’s look at the problem you’re having. Watch me do this example.’ So the videos are specifically for me, not just a ‘how to do it’ page.”
Payoffs
Once WORKetc was implemented by Thread Design and everyone was brought up to speed, Weldon found that WORKetc did more than just keep everyone in the loop and make it so remote working was possible again.
WORKetc was able to:
Keep track of Thread Design’s invoicing: “We run 30 or 40 projects at any one time, and there’s often add-on charges or other extra things that were discussed. ‘Oh, can you add two more pages to my website?’ ‘Sure, we’ll just tack the money on at the end.’ And then it never happened, with the old system,” said Weldon. “But with WORKetc, a reminder about unbilled charges pops up every day, so you never lose track.”
Save the company tons of time preparing quotations: “Having a predefined product list to pull from to build quotations, plus everyone being able to watch as you’re building quotations, has cut down on mistakes,” Weldon explained. “WORKetc saves a huge amount of time on doing project quotations. Louise [Lai] and I have an overview and that’s probably saved us countless hours every week. It’s probably saving us a few days a month, just being able to build quotations in WORKetc.”
From capturing leads with webforms and CRM to quoting and invoicing with billing tools, WORKetc has it all.
And even help overcome a language barrier: “We have a bilingual office, and there are some people that don’t speak Chinese and some people that don’t speak English,” Weldon said. “We have a few people in our office where it’s impossible for them to talk to each other, so they have to share information through WORKetc.”
Anticipating future improvements
No software solution is perfect, but Weldon appreciates how WORKetc keeps its customers up-to-date on all the improvements that it is planning to roll out in the future.
“I’m looking forward to an overhaul of the dashboard,” he said. “At the moment the dashboard’s kind of boring. But the great thing is when we look at WORKetc’s “Request a Feature” form, WORKetc already has design mockups of what’s going to happen in their next updates. The dashboard’s going to get a lot more exciting and show reports and stats and be an interesting place to start your day. So I’m just waiting for that to happen rather than moaning about it.”
Ben’s Top Tip for Managing a Growing Business
“Get your business processes in place. Having processes frees you up. Make sure everyone uses them, and then review and improve as you go. That’s my number one thing I’ve learned in moving from being a solo entrepreneur to co-managing a company of 20-plus people. And it took a long time before I realized how important it was.”
— Ben Weldon, Co-Founder and Creative Director, Thread Design
About WORKetc
WORKetc is a cloud-based, all-in-one business management software that breaks down the barriers between your customer relationship management, time management, and project management. With WORKetc, here’s what you can accomplish in one platform:
- Consolidate multiple apps into the one platform
- CRM, Projects, Scheduling, Invoicing, Help Desk & more
- iPhone, Android and web apps
- Gmail, Outlook, and inbox gadgets
- Open API and integration tool set
For more information, visit our Features Overview page.