Rob Rawson - Time Doctor - Advisr Founder Stories

Rob Rawson, CEO and Founder, Time Doctor

Business website: Time Doctor  

How can people connect with you:

Linkedin  

When did your business start?

Time Doctor started in 2011, so is coming up to 10 years next year!  

How do you describe to others what your business does?

Time Doctor provides time tracking and productivity software for managing remote teams. Time Doctor helps you to understand how your remote teams are spending their time whilst working for you.

Time Doctor can be used to manage anyone who does work on a computer, so Time Doctor could be used for managing developers, designers or digital marketers.  

What are three things someone should talk to you about regarding your business?

1. The power of having a remote team. Remote Teams have huge benefits such as being able to recruit talented people from any location.
2. The productivity benefits of tracking time. Knowing how you use your time and where your team is focused can help lift individual performance and what your team can deliver.
3. What types of work can be effective with a remote team? Whilst most roles can be done remotely, some are more difficult, such as sales. So understanding what you need to consider when building a remote team is important to me.

What changes do you see happening in your industry? How are these a threat or an opportunity?

We are a software as a service (SaaS) company with global competitors. Competition is fierce. There are hundreds of new startups competing with us, although these startups usually have a slightly different angle or approach to what we're doing at Time Doctor. As the pace of innovation continues to accelerate and customer expectations increase. It is critical that we continue to iterate and develop a product that customers love to use.  

Where do you see your business in 5-10 years?

For Time Doctor, we are aiming to have 1 million paying users with about 50,000 paying customers. We aim to be the number one productivity app in our space. In addition, we also run a conference called Running Remote which is focused on enabling Remote work.

We want to have the number one conference in the world focused on remote work.  

What are three things that could go wrong in your business that keep you up at night?

1. The servers could go down! We're an online tech company so if our servers go down, customers can't use our software.
2. We're implementing some new marketing and sales strategies. These could not achieve all we expect, leaving us short of our growth targets.
3. We're a big remote team, so keeping our team focused and productive is critical. When key team members leave Time Doctor it can be painful.

What are some of the steps you have taken to protect your business?

Our servers underpin all we do. To protect our systems we have solid disaster recovery plans in placed and a robust process around backups for our servers. Generally, we don't have a problem with team members leaving because they like the flexibility of being able to work remotely.  

Out of 5, how do you feel about business insurance? (1 Being "See no value / grudge purchase" 5 being "Love knowing I'm protected")

2  

What types of insurance coverage do you have?

Professional indemnity, liability insurance and cyber insurance.  

How did you buy your business insurance?

• Direct from an Insurer
• Via an insurance broker
• Online