Business owners know it’s hard to balance work and family time, especially between dropping kids off to school and assigning tasks to staff. Paul Christie doesn’t face that problem.
In what could be a record stint of teleworking on the road, Christie ran his small electrical company on the Sunshine Coast from an iPad while travelling 30,000 kilometres with his family in a bus-sized campervan around North America for nine months.
Christie oversaw the day-to-day running of his business using business management software simPro after a day’s travelling with family across 27 states in the US and Canada. “The kids will go to bed and I’ll do an hour of simPro,” Christie added.
Christie used to be tied to an office with “piles of paperwork and timesheets” but found he could work from anywhere after moving to cloud software.
“All of our workers go to each job with an iPad and are able to access everything they need. The software ensures no leads are lost, job progression is monitored and each job is invoiced on time,” Christie said.
If businesses understood the cloud and let go of old ways of doing things, there would be less pressure to physically be at work, Christie said.
Plumbers, electricians and other trade service and contractor industry companies used SimPro’s Software Enterprise to assign and manage jobs among employees. SimPRO was founded in 2002 and was used by 1,500 businesses with 20,000 users worldwide.