CEO Today USA Awards

www.ceotodaymagazine.com 48 CEO Today USAAwards 2017 FLORIDA How did the idea about MyTaskit come about? The idea about MyTaskit came frommy healthcare experience.Although my career began in the corporate world, I moved to the healthcare field in 1995. I worked with VHA Health Information Technologies for 5 years and after that, together with MedicaLogic, we built one of the first electronic medical records systems in the US that we sold to GE, as well as the first physician portal systems that we sold to WebMD. A few years later, I was involved in building the Nation’s E-Prescription Network – Surescripts, a company that connects all the pharmacies nationwide to coordinate care for patients. These experiences in the healthcare sector made me think about the fact that there’s a lot of coordination work that needs to occur outside of healthcare. Thus, my team and I began looking at other markets and industries that were behind in technology adoption, the same way healthcare was when we first started. Our findings showed that the services industry altogether was almost identical to where healthcare was 10 years ago – a platform for coordinating work was non-existent. This is how MyTaskit was born – I began working on figuring out how to build our coordination platform for the services industry, knowing that we would have to integrate it into the processes they already have in place, just like we did in the healthcare sector. Can you remember what was the company’s first big milestone and how did you achieve it? I’d say our first big milestone was the realisation that people started buying and using our product; thanking us for coming up with the concept that has now changed their lives and their work processes. Despite working very hard on a product before launching it, you never know whether it’s actually going to be successful before those early adopter businesses start showing interest in your work. Therefore, I’d say that our first and biggest milestone was to see technicians who are very used to paper, work orders and time sheets, adapting to our platform and using their tablets or mobile phones in the field to actually coordinate work with their service managers. How has the company grown in terms of operations and service offerings in the past five years? When we started the company, it was only me and one other person working on the concept from a small office in Washington D.C. Today, our team has grown to 30 people, considering that we purposely have decided to stick to a being a small team. We devote a lot of attention to the product side and we work with a number of distribution partners and digital marketing specialists on the sales and marketing side. In addition to our focus on the marine market, we are in the process of expanding into three more service markets – construction, property management and the industrial equipment market. In light of this expansion, what lies on the horizon for you and MyTaskit and in the next year? Well certainly expanding into these three additional markets would be our key focus over the next 12 months. Another thing that we’re currently working on is deploying all three use cases that MyTaskit can offer. At this point, we’re only using our technician coordination use case. However, one of our main objectives for the future is to begin deploying MyTaskit’s subcontractor coordination use case, where a subcontractor works for the general contractor on the same platform, as well as the customer coordination use case, where our clients can coordinate work with their customers through the MyTaskit application. What are some of the key challenges that you and your company are faced with? I would say that the two biggest hurdles that we face are change and time. One of the biggest challenge in our field is getting people to change their habits and the way they work. It is also tough to introduce our “Our first big milestone was the realisation that people started buying and using our product; thanking us for coming up with the concept that has now changed their lives and their work processes. “