Greetings from Levi, Osh and Mark, the partners of RevvWorks. We’re three ex-tech founders who find ourselves driven to help the business owners we know to become happier and more successful. We started meeting up regularly earlier this year, each of us at a stage in our careers where we’re lucky enough to control our time, and be pretty choosy about who, and what, we work on.
Aside from a shared desire to launch “one more thing” out in the world, it was pretty obvious from the earliest conversations we wanted to work with entrepreneurs. Levi started FreshBooks along with Mike McDerment in Mike’s parents’ basement, and it grew into accounting software used by millions of small businesses. Mark and Osh have worked with dozens of founders as both investors and advisors, and are builders with their own startup journeys at Quickplay, DIVE Billboards, Microsoft and others.
And as we started to reach out to business owners we knew about what might be missing in their lives, we gravitated away from VC-backed tech startups, and found ourselves drawn to services businesses. Our friends, and their friends are running businesses in travel, law and health care; they’re running agencies, storefront physio and special needs practices. Design companies with worldwide clientele. More broadly, despite being a huge part of the economy, businesses like these–especially the smaller ones–don’t get the attention from banks, investors or governments. Their owners are essentially working alone, despite collectively being responsible for huge swaths of the job market and GDP.
We found we had learned many useful processes, models and tools during our different careers in tech, and we set about building a service offering that could apply some of this learning to these Main street firms. There’s a lot of work to be done.
Small businesses in general, and services businesses especially, do not grow as fast as their bigger counterparts. Fundamentally, they could be more productive. And given the productivity challenges in the US, and especially in Canada, small improvements in a sector that provides about half of all the jobs in North America can make a huge impact overall.
We have lots of ideas about how small businesses can be run better, and thereby contribute more to their owners, employees and to society overall. That’s our mission at RevvWorks, and that’s what we intend to write about here on the blog.
As you’ll find, we have a global outlook, but we’ve started locally. The three of us have worked extensively in the US and Canada, and we’ve worked for and with companies that do business all over the world. But our first customers have been our family, friends and neighbours in the west end of Toronto, Canada. We’ll expand outwards, sure, but we’ll always try to remember where we started.
You can always reach us at [email protected]