Time to motivate
Author: Martin Port
Building technology today that will stand the test of time
As every tech founder knows, it is almost impossible to create a new piece of software that is capable of supporting hundreds of thousands of users from day one. It’s just not commercially viable. Instead, we have to iterate as we grow, building in more functionality and developing our capabilities.
Back in 2013, when I launched my mobile workforce management platform, BigChange, I could only dream that today we would have 1,600 fantastic customers across the globe and that our technology would be used by 60,000 people. I had ambitions to build a £100m company back then, for sure, but I didn’t know whether I’d reach that milestone – let alone aim even higher.
Right now, we are on a journey that will see BigChange become a leader in every market we operate in across the world. We are currently live across several countries in Europe, and we are expanding New Zealand in Australia and the US. Over the next few years, I hope to reach a valuation of a billion pounds.
This is why right now, at BigChange, we are in the process of a major digital transformation. We want to future-proof our technology platform for this next phase of growth. This is a really exciting time, as we are laying the foundations for the next 10 years and beyond. This is going to involve some really big changes and improvements but we are doubling the size of our development team to help expedite all this work. We have called this endeavour Project Transform.
We are following in the footsteps of tech behemoths like Amazon, Microsoft and Google, who have always maintained a laser focus on innovation and made bold moves to ensure their technology is the best it can be. Over the years, I’ve seen these companies iterate, fail fast, and move on. Some have stumbled but they have always pulled through and emerged more resilient.
As a leader, I embrace change because it means we are constantly striving for more and better. Change can be challenging but those challenges are always constructive, helping to make us leaner and smarter in all we do. I look forward to showing my customers the fruits of our labours in due course, as we put all our plans into motion.
Sometimes, a bold decision today can alter the course of a company’s future. I feel like this is one of those moments for BigChange. Here’s to the next chapter.
BigChange is officially an ‘Outstanding Company to Work For’
Best Companies has officially recognised BigChange as an ‘Outstanding Company to Work For’, granting the business a coveted two-star accreditation.
BigChange has been ranked in the UK’s Top 50 Technology Companies to Work For (39th) and The 75 Best Companies to Work For in Yorkshire and The Humber (51st).
It joins the likes of Intuit QuickBooks on the Technology list, which celebrates companies with outstanding employee engagement.
“Here at BigChange, we’ve made it our mission to build an inclusive company full of talented, engaged people. That is fundamentally the right thing to do and it also makes us more successful. I’m incredibly proud that our employee engagement has been recognised as Outstanding. It shows how far we’ve come towards achieving our mission. And it shows what a strong position we’re in for a future of exciting growth driven by excellent people.”
Martin Port, Founder and CEO
BigChange was recognised for its Motivational Monday speakers, the way staff are encouraged to speak up through the BigVoice committee, and the achievement of a Queen’s Award for Enterprise.
Best Companies works with some of the world’s best-known organisations to measure, improve and recognise staff engagement in the workplace.
JJ Chalmers recalls his remarkable journey for Motivational Monday
“One moment I was talking to my friend. The next second I was on the ground in more pain than I’ve ever felt. I’d been blown up. I woke up every morning knowing there was a one in eight chance. That day, I was the one.”
JJ Chalmers has lived an extraordinary life, but much of the story he told for June’s Motivational Monday revolved around a single, terrible moment. One Tuesday afternoon, during routine patrol in the Helmand Province of Afghanistan, he was caught in the blast of an IED.
It was a pivotal moment. In a second, his active career in the forces was cut short; he was now on a different track – one that would lead to Invictus Games gold, a new career in broadcasting and even a stint on Strictly Come Dancing.
However, it wasn’t a smooth or simple transition. JJ’s story is one of constant determination in the face of great odds, but it isn’t a lonely one.
Far from the caricature of a grizzled military vet, JJ was beaming as he told of the strong support network that helped him face down every challenge: during his service, during his recovery and during his transition into the world of broadcasting.
This theme – making connections with others to bring out the best in yourself – begins with JJ joining the Royal Marines.
“I was raised in a house where service was held in high regard. I always wanted to be part of something bigger than myself. I wanted to be one of the good guys.
JJ entered basic training:
“They issue you with a lot: boots, hat, a rifle, but more than any of that, they make you realise that you have the attributes of a Royal Marine inside of you. It’s just about bringing that out. They make you cold, wet and miserable. They take you to where you think your limit is and push you further. You quickly learn that hard work and determination can get you much further than you think is possible. It was like a sea change in my head. I realised any challenge which lay ahead of me could be solved with will, cunning and the application of my skills.”
After graduating from training, JJ was sent to serve in Afghanistan. His unit was stationed in ‘the green zone’, a lush, fertile area in the south-east of the country that extends out from the Helmand river.
It was an area riddled with IEDs:
“They’re designed to kill, and they’re completely indiscriminate. It could be a British soldier, but it’s much more likely to be a civilian.”
JJ’s squad was sent to investigate a suspected bomb-making site, to shut down IED production in the area.
JJ said:
“It would be the most catastrophic place I ever visited”
After the bomb went off JJ recalled that:
“It was absolute pandemonium. We’d been taught to give ourselves first aid, but my right arm was almost gone and the fingers that remained on my left hand were barely hanging on. There was nothing I could do for myself.”
JJ received first aid from a fellow soldier. He recalls how he was told:
JJ that’s all I can do. I have to deal with the other lads now. Keep shouting, let us know you’re with us.”
He continues:
“I knew the helicopter would take 25 minutes and I knew there was a 98% chance of survival if I got on it. So I had to grin and bear it. I’d never known pain like it but I knew I needed to get on and getting on was all I could do.”
Despite not knowing the full extent of his injuries, JJ was relieved to be going home. He was put into an induced coma and transferred to the trauma unit of Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham.
“You put broken men and women in at one end, and hopefully get superheroes out the other. I needed to start again like a child. I was physically broken, and in a tough place mentally. Those demons start speaking to you at that point. When they did, I realised I had two choices. Giving up and feeling sorry for myself, laying in the hospital bed and accepting I had a miserable existence. Or I could do what I was told and listen to the doctors, nurses and physios who were putting me back together.”
JJ returned to that moment in Afghanistan
“When I was lying there, I heard ‘I’ve done all I can for you, I need to go for the others’.”
But there weren’t any others in the beds around me.
“Two of our friends and our Afghan interpreter had died in the blast. They were snuffed out in an instant. That’s when I knew I didn’t have a choice. They weren’t given one, why should I be? The only option was to move forward and get better.”
As he went through recovery, JJ regained his independence. He started cycling with the use of a recumbent bicycle, saying.
“I re-learnt the benefits of exercise. I felt a reason to push myself again. But there was a huge part missing, the part the Marines gave me, sharing that experience with a team”.
In 2014, JJ took part in the first Invictus Games. He captained the men’s trike team, in a race that would prove pivotal in his recovery. He says:
“I was there for gold, or so I thought. It was an individual race but we could work together to position better. After 40 minutes all three of us were well placed for the sprint finish, but when it came time to leave the others I couldn’t do it. We’d worked as a team in that race and at every point during our recovery. Why did I deserve gold any more than them? We could only come through and finish together. We crossed the finish line hand-in-hand. I knew then that I wasn’t alone. That I could achieve anything with the help of others.”
That image of JJ and his teammates, crossing together, defined the first Invictus Games. All three were awarded gold and JJ was later interviewed by Jonathan Edwards.
“I knew on the Monday after, I didn’t want to be an athlete,”
he says:
“When I spoke to Jonathan, I said ‘The next time we talk, I want to be sat in your chair. How do I do that?’”
That marked the start of a broadcasting career that’s gone from strength to strength. JJ was a presenter at the Rio Paralympics, got involved in the D-Day Memorial coverage and had just wrapped up broadcasting from the Leeds triathlon the day before his talk.
JJ finished with some advice for listeners about staying positive post-pandemic:
“My recovery will never be complete. But my support network looks after me. When you’re at the end of a pointy spear, it’s the people behind you that power you. Whether you’re going onto the battlefield, onto the bike, or on air.”
He continued:
“I encourage people to take little victories and learn from little slip-ups. In the last year I was able to look at the circumstances imposed on us and wonder ‘How do I make the best of these?’”
He finished by saying:
“Keep on going. Keep on smiling. We’ll all get there together.”
JJ was joined by Trevor Fudger from Help for Heroes, the charity providing lifelong recovery support to service personnel who have been wounded or injured in the line of duty. He mentioned how the work they do can send an ex service person down a new path where they still get meaning and purpose outside of service. Thanks to our donors, the BigChange network raised £630 for their cause.
Next month, we’ll hear from John Stiles, the former professional footballer, son of 1966 World Cup-winner Nobby Stiles and campaigner raising awareness of dementia in football. Our charity partner will be Head for Change, for whom John is an ambassador. We hope to see you again then.
Are you making use of these automations in BigChange?
BigChange lets you automatically send worksheets to customers and save emails in your Notes at the push of a button. Read on to find out how.
The BigChange platform is designed to meet the needs of your business. An important part of that is automating repetitive, manual tasks, so you are free to focus on what matters most.
Automate Customer Feedback and Confirmation
For example, if you’re looking to get feedback or confirmation from customers, you don’t need to spend copious amounts of time chasing them up over the phone or email.
By using the ‘Third Party Worksheet’ feature, you can set an email to be automatically triggered by a Note or Job activity.
This can be useful in a few ways:
- When you create a job activity, automatically send a worksheet to the customer for confirmation of job details, and include a list of additional services they may need.
- When you complete a job activity, automatically send over a survey about how you performed.
If it’s important to receive confirmation before you start a job, you can prevent work being scheduled until this document has been completed.
Automatically Link Emails to Contacts Notes
Our next tip is to use the BigChange Outlook add-in to automatically link emails to your Contacts Notes.
The add-in icon is displayed on the ribbon at the top of Outlook, and allows you to seamlessly attach selected emails to your Contacts Notes. You can do this from your desktop Outlook app and Outlook Online.
If your contacts email you, you can add the email easily to an open Note, or create a new one.
If previous emails from the same contact have been saved, the add-in will automatically display the relevant Note. It can also recognise the email address and suggest Notes that might be relevant.
This helps you share information across your organisation quickly, and to store the information where you need it, in one place.
This video has more information on installing the add-in for individual machines and via Office 365 administration.
We hope these two tips help you save time in BigChange. We’ll be back again soon with more advice.
“It’s a very, very exciting position to be in” says BigChange Chairman
Richard Warley, BigChange’s new Chairman, has revealed that, of the many positions he’s held in his career, “the one that I am the most excited about, based on all of the companies I’ve seen, all of the experiences that I’ve had, is BigChange.”
Continue reading ““It’s a very, very exciting position to be in” says BigChange Chairman”BigChange appoints US technology leader to board
Mike Profit, a technology leader with extensive field service management experience, joins BigChange as a non-executive director to help guide its product and expansion strategies. BigChange, the revolutionary mobile workforce management platform, today announced the appointment of Mike Profit as a non-executive director. Mike will provide strategic guidance to BigChange’s product and operational activities, and advise the company as it expands into new markets.
Based in Princeton, New Jersey, Mike brings more than 25 years of product and technology leadership experience gained at US-headquartered startups and blue-chip companies to BigChange’s board. He was part of the leadership team that built WorkWave, a market-leading field service management software provider, prior to its acquisition by IFS in 2017.
Mike’s appointment follows those of Richard Warley as Chairman and Nick Gregory as Chief Marketing Officer at BigChange, and a £100 million investment in the company by Great Hill Partners to drive innovation and expansion into new sectors and territories.
“BigChange has established itself as a market leader for SME customers in several key sectors and is perfectly poised to expand in the UK and internationally. I am honoured to join BigChange’s board and be part of its innovation and growth strategies.”
Mike Profit, Non-Executive Director, BigChange
“It’s fantastic to appoint someone of Mike’s stature to BigChange’s management team. His experience building field service management and Software-as-a-Service businesses is hugely valuable for informing our technology strategy and achieving our global ambitions.”
Martin Port, BigChange Founder & CEO
1,500 organisations across a wide range of sectors use BigChange’s field service management platform for job scheduling, customer invoicing and payments automation, mobile workforce management and customer engagement. Customers include Sunbelt Rentals, Silentnight, Recycling Lives, HSS and EDF.
BigChange partners with Transaid to support road safety training initiative in Zambia
BigChange, the revolutionary mobile workforce management platform, is celebrating the delivery of an HGV driver training simulator at the Industrial Training Centre (ITC) in Lusaka that will help meet growing demand for professional driver training in Zambia.
BigChange is one of four organisations from the transport and logistics sector to have supported Transaid’s efforts to provide a professional simulator in Zambia, enabling new HGV drivers to spend additional hours behind the wheel in the safety of the classroom. It has worked alongside Clipper Logistics, Malcolm Group and XPO to help supply the simulator, supporting the initiative with donations of cash and expertise.
“BigChange is passionate about safety and sustainability. We are delighted to support Transaid and partners from across the transport and logistics sector in this incredibly worthwhile and potentially life saving endeavour. ”
Martin Port, BigChange Founder & CEO
“We are hugely grateful to BigChange, Clipper Logistics, Malcolm Group and XPO for securing the simulator and working with the talented team at ITC to ensure it was installed in Lusaka. It’s an amazing resource; and we’re confident it will help drive standards of training at ITC even higher, alongside the existing classroom, workshop and practical on-road teaching.”
Caroline Barber, CEO, Transaid
Don’t fall into this customer service trap
Whenever I see a company offering different levels of customer service based on the size of spend, I feel incredibly frustrated.
How are businesses getting away with it? If you are a customer, you are a customer, end of. You have paid your money and the service should come wrapped around that purchase, regardless how much you spend each year or how many licences you hold. Platinum, silver or straw packages? No thank you.
At BigChange – and in all of my previous companies – I have always treated every single one of my customers with the same attention and devotion. Here’s why:
Small becomes big
If there’s one thing I’ve learned over half a century in business, it’s that if you support companies while they are small, they will remember you when they get big. If you treat a customer with 10 employees as though they don’t matter, as soon as they can take their business elsewhere, they will. Instead, we have seen many smaller companies – some micro businesses – flourish in partnership with BigChange, doubling or even tripling in size. Their success is our success and we can’t do enough to help them.
It makes you smarter
Yes, you may have to invest more time and money into your customer service function but you will also be more innovative and effective. At BigChange, we have created a whole online knowledge bank full of useful guides and videos for our customers of all sizes, so that they know just where they can get an easy solution. We also realised that many of our customers often don’t have time to play with our technology and really experience the full functionality. So, we created the BigChange University, where we take them through a different feature each session. Customers don’t have to try and figure anything out in the evenings or weekends. Instead, they have a whole hour blocked out in their diary dedicated to getting to grips with the platform. It’s been incredibly successful, with thousands of attendees. And while it took forethought and planning to get the university up and running, it’s also an invaluable way to get insight from our customers and inform future product development.
Innovation in all its forms
And on that point about innovation, smaller companies often really push boundaries when it comes to finding new and better ways of working. Keeping our ties with the ‘S’ end of SME means we are constantly seeing new trends, new industry needs, and new solutions. Working in partnership with smaller companies means we can get in at the ground floor, creating the features and products they need to tackle these challenges as they grow. We also learn so much from our enterprise clients, especially how to roll out efficiencies at scale. Working with businesses at both ends of the spectrum means that we can cherrypick best-practice across the whole ecosystem and apply it to our technology.
It’s the right thing to do
We live in an age where it is no longer acceptable to behave unethically in business. It has been huge gratifying to see this shift, and to know that our values and commitment to customer service make us one of the good guys. Over the course of my career, I have kept in touch with many happy customers from both big companies and small – only to have them join my businesses or become customers again in new roles or ventures. In business, as in life, you get out what you put in. By treating people fairly, with respect, and always giving your all to help them when they need you, you create a social currency that is absolutely priceless.
Kevin Keegan OBE relives Leeds United memories
BigChange ambassador Kevin Keegan OBE has many great memories of Elland Road from his career playing for and managing top-flight football teams.
In May 2021, he returned to the home of Leeds United FC for an online event sharing the leadership lessons he learnt from the beautiful game with BigChange customers.
Stuart Dodsley, Head of Commercial at Leeds United, gave Kevin and BigChange CEO Martin Port a tour of the iconic stadium. (During the tour) Kevin told tales from the tunnel, reflected on stand-out games and discussed his time playing for, and against, the formidable Don Revie.
Read the video transcript below
Kevin Keegan OBE (KK): When I come here it makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up because of so many great memories.
When you looked at the Leeds side, it was just full of international class players. I always used to think, you know, this is going to be the toughest game of the season. Whether it was Reaney, Cooper, Yorath, they were all such good players.
[In the tunnel] I was always looking to see where Norman was, and whether he’d got big studs on, ready to sort me out.
Stuart Dodsley (SD): Did you come out together or separately?
KK: We came out separately in those days, so we didn’t have that confrontation luckily.
Martin Port (MP): [Pointing to pitch-side advertising boards] Our advert appears, I think at three minutes thirty. Does it put the players off you think?
KK: I don’t think that one does, but there is one where the dog runs around – you think ‘there’s a dog run on the pitch’.
SD: So you’ve got your Leeds United Roll of Honour here. Perhaps the disappointing thing is it’s down to you some of this!
KK: This was my first year, 70-71, and this is when I got sent off with Billy Bremner. So just take that out of there [pointing to ‘1974 FA Charity Shield’], we’ll just cover that up.
[Pitch-side] That’s the biggest difference. We’d never play on a pitch like this even at the start of the season.
SD: Elland Road here, fans are close to the pitch, they create their own unique atmosphere. There’s a reason England chose here to come, to play before the last World Cup.
KK: Most grounds you come out the middle, there’s a couple you come out the corners, but Leeds is off-centre isn’t it.
[In the dressing room] The whole squad would’ve fitted in here. The whole training squad when Don Revie was manager. [To Stuart] Is this the home one then? I bet the away one isn’t as good?
SD: No it’s a bit tighter (Both laugh).
KK: My dad used to come and watch me when I played at Leeds because he only lived up the road at Doncaster.
The thing that really gets me is if I start to look at the names on the stands. Don Revie, who was my manager with England, he was the biggest enemy in the world when we played Leeds. But when I got to know him, one of the really great people I met in my life.
You know, the scouts from Leeds came to watch me play and I thought ‘Wow, that would be some move for me, because obviously I’m from Doncaster, I’m a yorkshireman, but it never happened. So I had to play against them, which was fantastic.
[Pointing to the 60s period on the Honour Roll] Don Revie was here wasn’t he when they were just a fantastic side. That’s the sort of standard they’re trying to live up to now right.
In the next 10 years it could be Leeds, Liverpool, you know, as dominant forces in the country.
MP: You made our youth enjoyable.
KK: What even scoring the goals against Leeds? You seen how many goals I scored against Leeds? (laughs)
MP: No, Bremmner and Keegan in our garden, it was the best.
KK: Who was Bremmner? MP: Not me. (Both laugh).