Stephen Jagger and Michael Stephenson have been business partners since 2000. Veteran entrepreneurs, together they have built four companies together, both sharing a true passion for entrerpeneurship; PayrollHero, representing their latest creation. Having a knack for interesting concepts their three other companies include CombustionHosting, a web hosting company, Ubertor.com, a real estate website platform and OutsourcingThingsDone.com, a leased labour business based in the Philippines.
As part of the Feature of the Week, The Asian Entrepreneur has a short talk with Stephen about their unique industry in Asia and the story behind developing PayrollHero.
What exactly is PayrollHero?
PayrollHero is all about optimizing work productivity with happiness. In a nutshell, we’re talking about consumer-friendly time, attendance, scheduling and payroll services in the cloud for web and mobile. We use your employees face as our primary biometric to avoid buddy punching and ghost employees. These clock-in pics are further given a mood rating to establish an array of business intelligence to your companies corollaries between productivity and mood.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=WUUOp8gw4GQ%3F
Why did you decide to set up PayrollHero in Asia?
We had come to the Philippines to setup an outsourcing company, OutsourcingThingsDone.com and it was in that company that we learned the pains of time, attendance, scheduling and payroll in Southeast Asia. We saw a hole in the market and decided that we could fill it. We are working to be the market leader for time, attendance, scheduling and payroll in Southeast Asia and have clients all over the region.
Do you guys follow a specific method of business development?
We follow the scrum methodology and work with our clients to shape a platform that is best of breed for their needs. Our engineer team is made up of “Adventure Engineers” who are focused on building tools that will help our clients streamline their operations.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=DyyaprfMifg%3F
What kind of difficulties have you guys met working on PayrollHero?
A startup is almost completely based on overcoming difficulties. We are building a platform for multiple cultures, languages and countries in a place that is just getting used to cloud technologies, credit cards and smart phones. We believe we are in the right place at the right time and are focused on achieving our goals. For specific difficulties; payroll is one of the more complex platforms to build, raising money in Southeast Asia offers its own challenges and understanding the way different countries do business has been a learning experience.
Tell us about the HR industry.
HR and payroll industry is full of passionate people eager to help their colleagues. It is a great opportunity to work with them as we implement our platform that increases transparency within a company as well as systemizes many of the manual process HR and payroll people have to complete on a day to day basis.
How have you managed to stay relevant in this industry?
By constantly pushing forward, working with our clients to continue to shape the platform to suit their needs.
What do you think about startups in Asia?
I think it’s a really exciting time to be doing a startup right now but remember that Asia is not Silicon Valley.
Why did you become an entrepreneur?
Myself and my business partner started as entrepreneurs in high school and never really looked back. It is exciting to build something that people need with a team of passionate people.
Connect with Stephen Jagger and PayrollHero today:
Linkedin: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/stephenjagger
Website: http://www.payrollhero.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PayrollHero
