Tomorrow is my final day working at FreshBooks – it’s been such a huge part of my life and career that I feel like I should take some time to try and share my journey. If you will indulge me, I’ll take you through that 20-year adventure and try to deliver some parting thoughts you can all take with you.
If you asked my 30-year-old self where I thought 2ndSite (www.secondsite.biz – now FreshBooks) would be when I was 50, the answer you would have got would be impossible to connect with the reality of today. I had just finished a 5-year stint with a software consulting business and was ready to give something new a try. My best friend Joe was working with a new friend, Mike, on a dev project, converting his invoicing tool into a subscription platform and transforming it into a business with real revenue.
My first days working out of a room in Mike’s High Park home he rented were very slow going. I was tasked with figuring out a way to integrate our product with the Quickbooks desktop application. Combing through the developer toolkit that Intuit provided was really boring and brought up way more questions than answers. Every day that went by, I feared more and more that we were doomed and that I would have to update my resume and start applying for jobs.
Once we moved into Mike’s parent’s basement and brought Jeff Sarmiento on board, I started to feel more confident that we may last at least a few more months. The first business plan we put in front of potential investors had us getting to the magic number of 17,000 customers, which would be a home run and provide the investors with a great return and us founders and first employees a fantastic result. We thought this was an unrealistic, pie-in-the-sky target, and so did all of our potential investors. After failing to get any investment and failing to get any significant number of customers signing up, instead of giving up, we kept at it.
A massive part of that early passion came from Mike. He was our visionary and marketing innovator. He just kept on going and kept on adapting our business and himself and his strategy and tactics until it actually started to work. He pushed Joe to bring more and better products to market, he pushed me to keep our customer service and operations at the highest level, and he pushed himself to bring on brilliant teammates to keep the dream alive.
If anyone saw what we were up to in those early years in the basement, they would probably laugh and point out a million mistakes we were making. None of us had ever built a production-level piece of software, none of us had ever run a company with more than 5 employees, and none of us had ever raised any capital. But somehow, it all worked! We had just enough smarts, just enough know-how, just enough passion and just enough time to grow a business.
We are who we are today not just from those early years in the basement and not just from our incredible small business owners who took a chance on us, but from the team that joined us and built us up one customer sale, one github commit, one production release, one support ticket, one month end, one data pipeline, one FreshBooker onboarded, one laptop fixed, and one marketing campaign at a time.
I am so grateful for everything FreshBooks has provided in my life over these past 19+ years. I’ve had so many incredible experiences and worked with so many talented and passionate people that my thank you’s and shout-outs would fill up a book. I know you have probably already stopped reading since you’ve got a lot of stuff to get to, but I’m going to mention a few key moments and a few key people who helped us – and me – along the way.
From the basement days, two pivotal moments and three key people come to mind. In those early years, it seemed like something pivotal happened every day…but I think one of the high moments was our name change. Coming up with the name FreshBooks and rebranding in the form of a fake murder mystery called Brand Murder was a great example of the creativity and hard work we put into the company that paid off in spades.
Not only Mike but Jeff and Daniel worked so hard day in and day out to develop the core parts of our business in those years, which were critical in our growth and led us to our first growth spurt. One of the less fun, and more challenging events was when our server’s power supply died and subsequently took down our application for the first time for over a day; Mike, Jeff and Daniel didn’t leave or so much as take a break until they had restored all of our customer data and brought our product back to life. I was on vacation in BC, and somehow, I managed to walk them through the restoration process over the phone.
Our customers were upset, but what was crazy was that they actually ended up loving and respecting us more because we were so transparent and up-front with our messaging. The honesty was refreshing for a web company, and that moment, as stressful as it was, may just have inspired Mike to come up with the 4E’s.
The Dufferin and Golden days of FreshBooks really were exciting. We grew from 7 people to over 200 people in about 6 years and really formed the core of what FreshBooks is today. The PORCHFEST values, the 4E’s, the FreshOWeen’s, the Festivus’, the Customer Dinners, the SXSW events, the Cloud Accounting rebrand, the customer support team, the building of evolve, the support Graduations, the PORCHFEST camp weekends the more I write, the more memories keep popping up. It was during these formative years that the FreshBooks culture was established and solidified. It was also during this period we brought on our first institutional capital thanks to the infamous “7 Reasons Not To Invest in FreshBooks” 7 page investor deck, and some innovative investors who believed in our story and had followed us all the way through our journey.
With the new investment, a shiny new office on Dupont and a ton of new teammates, FreshBooks entered the Dupont days with a whole new front end and thousands of customer user testers that gave us confidence we could pull off a full-scale re-platforming. After months of running the New FreshBooks with a stealth name – BillSpring – we unveiled it to the market, and although well loved by our team and our core users, the bulk of small business owners who happened to be running their whole business off of FreshBooks Classic had no intention of migrating anytime soon.
The entire company dug deep and pivoted from growing the new platform to concentrating on providing our customers with the experience and features they really still needed to run their businesses on the new platform. As we migrated, we still had to grow the business and raise the capital for our next phase, not to mention migrate on to Google Cloud.
We did everything we could to compete trying out new business models (Sprout $9.95 and FBPay), new marketing techniques (Free Invoice Creator and TV) and new channels (Accounting and Sales), and although not everything worked (Naspocalypse blew up our dev launch environment, customer payments halted when PayPal tried to refund everyone at once, our site went down for hours and our product team almost quit en-masse from out-dated laptops), enough did go right for us to beat the odds, and complete a full scale re-platforming while growing and maintaining world-class support. It’s actually hard to believe we did all that now that I look back, but we had the greatest team of all time pushing and pulling us through, and we somehow had a blast doing it.
With Migration done and the largest Festivus of all time delivered, we entered the new age of expansion without batting an eye. We brought on Don to lead us, opened new offices, acquired companies, built a successful DIBs program and team, survived a pandemic and came out the other side a Unicorn!
And now here we are, a global tech company still growing like crazy, still delivering the 4E’s on every level and still fostering that FreshBooker culture we all know and love. It is thanks to all this success that I built up the confidence to move on from this special place. Although I love to think my SQL reports can still deliver our monthly revenue reports and my passion for the business is enough to scale our processes and pass all our compliance needs, I think, in all honesty, the business is more than ready to move the next phase without me, and selfishly I am now ready to embody the fourth FreshBooks Value – CHANGE – and jump into something new.
We have the core culture intact, we have so many OG FreshBookers still spreading the culture vibes, and we have all those incredible entrepreneurs and small business owners who make up the most diverse and passionate customer base any company in the world would be jealous of. Not just that, but we have a senior leadership and executive team that is set up to deliver the results, provide the development and continue to build the team that will go after our 4E mission.
After almost 20 years, I am now moving on, and I know that with me on the sidelines, FreshBooks will succeed in our mission, and we will get to our vision and well beyond, all while living our PORCHFEST values and scaling the culture.
And with that, I’ll leave you with my #parting_thoughts/advice for y’all:
- Do not take our culture for granted; take it upon yourself to connect with other FreshBookers both in your work and for fun – start a club, start a team, join a fantasy group, start a band, follow your passion and include other FreshBookers in it – the culture has taken a big hit due to the pandemic and company re-org, so it is incumbent on all of us to lift it back up
- Use your volunteer hours – they are there for you to help your community, which, if you haven’t noticed, needs help everywhere you look
- Join the #freshfriends slack channel and/or come on into the office to see people; it’s a great way to meet other FreshBookers – your best friend could be working in another department – you maybe – just haven’t met them yet!
- Dress up for FreshOWeen
- Talk to our customers directly, either through support or through meetups, and share your interactions with Bea for her amazing Voice of the Customer videos
- Stay stubborn on hiring – only the best should be good enough to join your team, and only those who will be a great addition to our culture should be on the team
- Stay curious, keep doing the surveys and giving feedback to your teammates, your managers, your senior leaders and the executive team – they are remarkably transparent and all live all our values and if you aren’t convinced, then test them out and challenge them
- Be yourself at work – you belong here, and we need your best self to succeed
Thank you so much to all of you and all the FreshBookers that came before you. FreshBooks is a special place, and I’m incredibly grateful to be a part of it.
– Levi
Keep scrolling for a walk down FreshBooks memory lane!
Icy Knees 