It is a pleasure to introduce Richard Harris from Okappy. Richard (on the far left in the picture) is a member of the City Business Library, and here he shares some of his insight to help encourage and inspire.
Okappy is a B2B connected workforce management platform which applies social and market networking technology to a real business need. The need to communicate and collaborate when working with employees, often at different locations. When working with multiple subcontractors and when working for different clients. Okappy reduces duplication, increases efficiency and saves time. Ultimately making a significant contribution to the bottom line. Ultimately it gives business owners complete control of every job, every step of the way.
Richard shared a top tip for people looking to start up in business: The most important learning for me as a business owner is importance of persistence, drive and determination. There are many bumps in the road, and often it’s hard to see how you’re going to get to your destination. But you just have to keep going, have faith in yourself and keep moving forward.
Having previously worked in the City Richard was aware of City Business Library and what it offered. He said: access to company and market databases has been the most useful resource for us, so we can conduct research to help drive our sales, marketing and fund raising.
Here’s how it all began: Okappy was spun out of another company which provided location-based services and vehicle tracking. At the time we realised tracking was becoming commoditised and we were looking for new feature and functionality that we could add as part of the service. We had a lot of trades companies on the platform. They were saying that we were tracking their vehicles and could we also track their work.
As we started developing the functionality, we quickly realised that a lot of the work that our customers wanted to be able to track was actually done on behalf of other companies or by others subcontractors. As the network approach took shape it became clear that this wasn’t just another feature it was a company and product in its own right with massive potential to transform how companies around the world operate.
Hence in 2015, Okappy was born.
As a final note, Richard says they are keen to build relationships with companies who may need to manage their work and need a system like Okappy. They are keen to speak to people or companies who can open doors to other companies and they are also on the look out for bright, enthusiastic people who may be interested in a role with Okappy at some stage.
So, if you would like to contact Okappy for business or for networking then just click on their website link above or check them out on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Small Business Research and Enterprise 