Video: 10 Minute IT Jams - Who is Tradify?

Making life easier for tradespeople is the mission at the heart of Tradify—a job management solution that's rapidly gaining traction across several countries. Tradify's CEO, Michael Stickler, says the company was born out of a simple objective: to take the paperwork and administration drudgery out of day-to-day life for tradespeople and contractors.

"Tradify was set up on the notion of trying to make tradies' lives easier," Stickler explained. "What you find in most tradies all over the world is they want to spend time on the tools—the tools of their trade—not doing admin and paperwork. Tradify was really set up to make admin and paperwork really simple, fast and easy using cloud-based software."

Tradify handles everything from quoting, invoicing, and job scheduling, to managing external workers, timesheets, supplier costs and more. "We're principally managing that kind of end-to-end workflow of a tradie's life, from the moment they start off to the moment they finish the job," said Stickler.

The platform is structured to be intuitive for both customers and tradespeople. "If you were looking for a trade service online, maybe a plumber or an electrician, once you've found the appropriate person, that becomes an enquiry in Tradify," Stickler explained. "As soon as the tradie wants to quote for that work, they would use Tradify to quote. That then becomes a job if the quote's accepted, and everything is tracked through the system—right through to invoicing and receiving payment."

Importantly, Tradify has invested in CRM capabilities, allowing businesses to capture customer data and easily manage repeat work. "We wanted to become synonymous with software for tradies and power great trades companies," Stickler said. "That's the future we're focussed on."

While the majority of Tradify's staff are based in Auckland, New Zealand, the company is going global at pace. "Most of the company are based in Auckland," Stickler confirmed. "But we have a very fast-growing operation in the UK, with a team over in London that's growing quickly. We're trying to hire a lot more product and engineering people in New Zealand as well as more sales and marketing support in the UK."

Indeed, most of Tradify's customers now reside outside New Zealand. "The majority of our customers are outside New Zealand. We have customers in the US, UK, South Africa, and Australia—a very big and important market for us," he said.

The company prides itself on regularly improving and updating the product. Stickler emphasised that changes are driven by deep user research. "When we approach product enhancements, we do deep user research—a number of ways, from focus groups to actually speaking to individual customers to figure out what they need and what works or doesn't work," he noted.

Recent enhancements have focused particularly on getting tradies paid faster and making follow-ups seamless—pain points for many small businesses. "One of the big things that came through was really trying to speed up the process of quotes being accepted, and at the other end, tradies getting paid on time," he said.

Tradify has introduced automated quote and invoice reminders to address this. "If you're a customer paying someone to do some decking, for example, the tradie would send you the quote using Tradify," Stickler explained. "If the customer doesn't respond, we send an automated email—so in the old days, the tradie would have to chase the customer, ring them, send them an email. Now, it just happens automatically, prompting the customer to accept the quote, and the tradie sees when the quote has been viewed."

The same goes for invoices. "For invoicing, a real problem for tradies is getting paid on time, and cash flow. So we do a similar thing—we send reminders if invoices haven't been opened or paid. That all happens in the background—the tradie doesn't have to do anything. It just happens seamlessly, and they get paid a lot faster," Stickler added.

Responsiveness and agility are clear hallmarks of Tradify's engineering team. Stickler noted that the company operates in small squads of around six people, focussing quickly on defined product needs. "During the COVID pandemic, we saw a need to do tracking and tracing for tradies out in the field, so we integrated a track and trace feature very quickly," Stickler said.

Mobile usability is another top priority. "Tradify was built from the ground up to work across all platforms, whether Android, iOS or desktop," Stickler said. "More of our users in the future will be using mobile-based devices—iPads are very popular with tradies, for example—so we're spending a lot of time thinking about how we can improve the user experience on mobile."

The pandemic has, of course, loomed large for all tradies. While restrictions impacted their work, digital tools like Tradify have helped soften the blow. Contactless operation and payment have become pivotal to how the trades sector works.

"We did a number of things in the product to really help tradies keep doing their work—tracking and trace was an obvious one," Stickler explained. "The other was just contactless payment and making that easier, so we integrated payment tools which allow tradies to get paid more frictionlessly."

Tradify also commissioned research in New Zealand, Australia and the UK to understand how the pandemic affected its customers. The platform's data made it easy to track the flow of quotes, jobs and invoices. "You definitely saw a drop in those numbers during severe lockdowns," Stickler said. "But, as soon as we came out of lockdown, you saw a very very quick recovery. The feedback from the survey is that the vast majority, certainly in Australia and New Zealand, have almost seen complete recovery—in many instances, a boom. People had disposable income that would have been spent on holidays, now used for home improvement, and being at home meant people spotted more things that needed doing."

For UK tradespeople, recovery is well underway. "There has been a definite growth back to pre-COVID levels, but clearly we're not out of the woods yet. We don't know what the next six to nine months hold, but at the moment the general feedback is pretty positive for our industry, for sure," Stickler concluded.