Onde Team!

It was a week of finishing up some work with Job Owners that took a few weeks longer than I anticipated. We didn’t get to see LZ or ZA contribute this week due to other commitments they had but both of them have suggested that they will be re-engaged in prospecting for new job owners in the coming week.

Worker Team Updates
Goal: We help workers upskill and connect with opportunities.

Since our last update we were able to place a handful of workers in jobs and continue to onboard existing workers that had not completed their steps yet. Over the next few days Lisa and I will be working to post our Facebook ads and will look to continue attracting workers to our platform. MB was helpful this week working with one worker in particular who may have landed a permanent position with a new Job Owner.

Job Owners Team Updates
Goal: We help companies grow their team using temporary OndeWorkers

I focused this week on getting through the rest of LZ and ZA’s leads which included setting up Job Owner Profiles for them. As of yesterday, we have 139 profiles for Job Owners that have indicated they need workers and are interested in OndeWork. Both LZ and ZA will be contacting each of their prospective Job Owners to ask if they have any upcoming jobs that require workers. We now have a systematic process for finding job owners, creating a profile for them that they can access any time to see which workers match their profile and now need to focus on onboarding them into their first job posting.

To help with the last step, I have reached out to several larger companies to begin the conversation of trying OndeWork on a pilot program basis to see if we can help make a difference in their labour shortage problems. This sales cycle will be longer than the small job owners we have now as they have more layers of approvals and bureaucracy to work through before being able to consider OndeWork. I met in person with a larger construction company that will be trying us out in the next couple of weeks and currently use three (3) different agencies to help them find low-skilled workers for their projects.

A few observations from this week:

1) Most of the Job Owners we are currently working with are small business owners that don’t have a dedicated person responsible for hiring. Many decisions are made in the moment which makes planning ahead difficult. This means that OndeWork needs to continue to be seen as an easy and simple way to quickly secure the workers they need.

2) The behaviour of swiping a credit card and getting workers is quite different compared to existing alternatives. With a job board, a Job Owner pays for an ad and expects to receive and review resumes. With an agency, a Job Owner expects to make a phone call or send an email and get a worker with an invoice following at the end of the month. With OndeWork, swiping a credit card and getting a worker seems too simple. I am not sure what do to about this other than to take testimonials and use them to create trust.

I have also begun sending out our pitch deck to see what kind of responses are given from companies that fund companies in our position. This will be a weekly and continual exercise and I work through what we need to do to grow and hit our goals. I believe that once we have addressed points 1 and 2 above we will be in a position to grow in a meaningful way.

Have a great weekend everyone!

DG

Onde Team – 

It was a short week but was still very busy. As a small team there always seems to be more tasks to be completed than what we have time to do. We either have too much to do in a short period of time or nothing to do…lol

Worker Team Updates

Goal: We help workers upskill and connect with opportunities.

The big event this week was being kicked off of Indeed which is where we were advertising for OndeWorkers. This wasn’t totally unexpected but certainly impacts how we attract new workers to our platform. Over the coming week we will be posting on Facebook and paying for sponsored ads to attract new workers. We also agreed that we would begin looking for individuals that want to do cleaning work not just construction work. We did have some people sign-up and will look forward to growing this.

Our largest long-term challenge right now is creating a network effect that helps us attract new workers without having to advertise or pay for them. Having people tell other people about OndeWork is the best advertising and we will continue to figure out how we can do this.

Job Owners Team Updates

Goal: We help companies grow their team using temporary OndeWorkers

I have now contacted most of the leads that LZ and ZA (and some MB ones) found for us. It’s been a mixed response as I think I waited too long to follow-up. I have created more than 57 Job Owner Profiles which is something I built to help our prospects see how many workers we have that could be working for them. I have also sent out an update to ZA and LZ about continuing with OndeWork to help us find prospective Job Owners and will look forward to hearing back from them.

I had more than 5 companies reach out to me this week that indicated they would like to start using OndeWork and now I will continue work them to get them to post their first job. The biggest learning I have had is that we need to make sure we don’t waste our time with companies that are not really interested in working with us. Many of the leads from LZ and ZA liked the idea of OndeWork but didn’t really want to learn more. However, a very small group of them were very interested and I believe will post their first job with us soon! This small group of companies will also post jobs on a regular basis (every week or a few times a month). The majority of the leads might only post one job every few months which is not a good fit for us as they are not looking to grow their teams using temporary workers.

I am excited to see what happens in the coming week and hope you all have a great weekend.

DG

Onde Team – 

A busy week of catching up on the prospecting calls made by LZ and ZA. With MM no longer helping out I had the opportunity to make the follow-up calls and learn more about how we can work faster with Job Owners. I took the Job Owner Profile from last week’s update and made it available to every lead I followed-up with. Still much to learn but we are on the right track.

Worker Team Updates
Goal: We help workers upskill and connect with opportunities.

MB seems to be having more traction with the new Welcome Page and the introduction of an “Urgent Job” page where we post permanently open jobs or upcoming jobs that allow OndeWorkers to see what we might have for them. We seem to have many part-time/students signing up as well as individuals looking for full time work. Lisa was able to help us create a marketing piece to encourage OndeWorkers to consider signing-up for an asbestos ticket as these workers are in high demand.

Job Owners Team Updates
Goal: We help companies grow their team using temporary OndeWorkers

I noticed a big difference between LZ and ZB’s leads. By next week I would have followed up with all of ZB’s lead and will send around the statistics. I think 1 or 2 of LZ’s leads are close to posting their first job. I have asked LZ and ZB to consider a performance-based compensation structure going forward and in the coming week I will provide details for them to consider.

I think it was a good week and I am looking forward to seeing what happens next week with some of the new job postings we are expecting.

It’s a long weekend with Monday being a holiday so find some time to relax.

Thanks for all of your help.

DG

Onde Team – Thanks for your help this week!

LZ was able to add some new companies to our qualified prospects list and ZA was sick this week but was able to work on a new strategy I have asked him to help with. He has been looking up companies on Indeed (a job posting website) and found 100 companies that are currently hiring “General Labourers” and will be calling them using our sales script. I am interested to see how this works out next week.

Worker Team Updates
Goal: We help workers upskill and connect with opportunities.

• MB continues to refine our onboarding process and we are quite happy with how many workers are making themselves available and following the steps
• We have one company that is looking for 6 workers and this will most likely take up most of MB’s time this coming week
• We have another prospective company that could use up to 20 workers and MB will be contacting them to see if we can help them
• We introduced a “Welcome Page” that a new worker sees when they sign-up and we are hoping that this helps move a few of them to the next step ahead of MB’s Welcome Call

Job Owners Team Updates
Goal: We help companies grow their team using temporary OndeWorkers

• Not a great week for contacting and following up with Job Owners as a result of schedules and MM making the decision to leave the team for awhile
• We have introduced a Job Owner Profile that is the beginnings of matching up Workers and Job Owners
• Over the next week I will be creating about a dozen profiles for Job Owners that LZ and ZA have found and we’ll see how we can begin asking them to post jobs for the OndeWorkers we have in our system

General Updates
Goal: Do we have a business model that works on a repeatable and predictable basis?

• Our challenge continues to be working with prospective Job Owners to have them post their first Job and this will be our focus over the month of October
• We are small so it doesn’t take much to create a large result – it will be an exciting few weeks

Enjoy your weekend and I look forward to chatting with everyone next week!

DG

Onde Team – Thanks for all of your help this week!

Worker Team Updates
Goal: We help workers upskill and connect with opportunities.

• we paused our advertising for most of the week as MB was working through the backlog of sign-ups and helping onboard new Workers
• we had a great response for availability which we have struggled with and even though the numbers are lower than we would like, we have a repeatable process that will help us scale our sign-ups when the time comes
• going forward into the next few weeks, we will be looking to understand how to we line-up specific Workers with specific Job Owners that have let us know how many they are looking for and the requirements they are hoping we can meet 

Job Owners Team Updates

Goal: We help companies grow their team using temporary OndeWorkers

• we had another great week of predictable qualified companies from both Lizette and ZA
• we had new Jobs posted from old leads that MB has been following up with and our goal for this coming week is to see about getting jobs posted from LV and ZA’s efforts
• we learned that we have some work to do in helping Job Owners post their first job with a bit of direction and the ability to turn away Job Owners that simply not a good fit for our platform
• we had 1 Job Owner prove to be very difficult as he was not comfortable with our process (credit card, etc.) and had another Job Owner zip through it like it was nothing (deleted and reposted a job after he realized he made a mistake)
• we have to focus our efforts on the Job Owners that want our help and want to grow their business using our platform. It’s hard to turn away business but sometimes its necessary.
• MM and I will be working this week to finalize our list of companies that have told us how many Workers they would like to add to their teams in the next 3-6 months so we can sit with MB and begin understanding how to connect the dots
• we haven’t figured out the best way to ask for the first job posting and will work through some different variations this week in hopes of seeing some new jobs posted

General Updates
Goal: Do we have a business model that works on a repeatable and predictable basis?

• the next month will help us understand our marketing cycle as we are sending out updates to Workers, Job Owners that are long term prospects as well as Job Owners that have told us their Worker requirements
• With the 3 different marketing pieces going out next week, MB will be watching to see how many and which Workers engage while MM/Dylan will be watching to see how many and which Job Owner engage
• The engagements will be tracked and will help us understand who we need to be following up with

Thanks again for all of your efforts this week.

DG

Onde Team – another incredibly productive week. MB wins the leaderboard award!!!

Thanks to MB for working incredibly hard to quickly implement the changes I made to engage faster with new Worker sign-ups AND to manage the new “Skills/Experience” section of the Worker account. It was also another solid week for ZA and LV who have produced another round of qualified companies looking to grow using temp workers and the results mirror the previous weeks. I think they have this on lock down.

Worker Team Updates
Goal: We help workers upskill and connect with opportunities.

We now complete the Welcome Call with new Worker sign-ups after they register. We were doing this after they connected their bank account but discovered we were missing a lot of opportunity. Thanks to MB, we have fixed this and saw some incredible results this week.

We are using the Welcome Call to help Workers understand what OndeWork can do for them. This was not something we were doing previously as we didn’t realize there was a need to provide an overview of our Goal.

We released a “Skills/Experience” section of the Worker account that allows us to track and manage the soft skills that a Worker has so we are in a better position to help Job Owners with their requests.

We are using the Stripe connection to ensure we can verify the identity of our Workers AND make sure they can get paid when they complete a Job. We are discovering some challenges that this step is bringing and made some significant strides with three (3) days to improve the results. This coming week will give us a chance to improve it even further. Our goal is NOT to have every Worker who signs up connect a bank account and verify their identity. Our goal is to have the interested Workers connect their bank account and verify their identity. This means there will always be a percentage of sign-ups that go through our steps while many will decide not to.

Job Owners Team Updates
Goal: We help companies grow their team using temporary OndeWorkers

Thanks to MM, ZA and LZ were able to understand how they can refine and improve their prospecting calls and how to ensure only qualified Job Owners are making their way into HubSpot for further follow-up.

MB and I are figuring out when the best time to follow-up is based on feedback and engagement.

We have identified two (2) types of Job Owners. The first group is interested in using OndeWork AND knows how many workers they would like to hire in the next 3 – 6 months. The second group is interested in using OndeWork and does NOT know how many workers they would like to hire in the next 3 – 6 months. For Job Owners in the first group, MM and I are creating “Deals” in Hubspot to track and manage them (feel free to check this out in Hubspot for yourself). For Job Owners in the second group, we will be marketing to them once a month and monitoring their interactions with us so we can decide how to best build a relationship with them.

For our Deals, beginning the week after next, MB, MM and I will be spending some time on Tuesday mornings to manually review our Job Owners and Workers to see how we can begin to match them up. Over time we automate this step but we need to learn the behaviours and the organic path that both Job Owners and Workers are taking.

By the end of next week, ZA and LZ would have contact 600 prospective Job Owners!!!
Within the next two weeks, MM and I will have learned our sales cycle including how long it takes and what we need to do to get our first Job posting from new Job Owners

General Updates
Goal: Do we have a business model that works on a repeatable and predictable basis?

We are hyper focused on Calgary right now and by the end of October we will be in a position to approach the Edmonton market using our learnings and experience.

I have made some great connections inside the local Ukrainian community and OndeWork was featured yesterday in an email thread that is distributed weekly to decision makers in the Ukrainian community. I learned a lot this week about what is happening inside of this community and what opportunities exist to work with them including the sponsorship of their next career fair which happens in mid-October

I am focused in the coming few days at understanding how we can incorporate text messaging into HubSpot as I am using it for my sales follow-up and having great success. If we can add texting to our toolkit, I believe we will improve our overall communication with both Workers and Job Owners

Lisa and I enjoyed this past week and it’s pretty hard to argue with the last two weeks of work and results. It seems to me that within the next two weeks we should have a pretty good handle on what our basic business model looks like, how we talk about it and how we are able to generate profitable results for everyone.

Thanks so much for your work and input this week – take the next few days to relax and catch your breath as I think this coming week will be a busy one!

DG

Thanks to ZA and LV we now have a repeatable process for identifying companies that are looking to grow using OndeWorkers on a temporary basis until they find the best people to hire permanently. They will be working through another 300 prospects over the next two weeks and we expected to generate another 45 companies for MM and myself to follow-up with.

Thanks to MB we have significantly adjusted how we focus our time on new individuals signing up on our platform as OndeWorkers. Redefining what an OndeWorker is as well as clarifying the steps we can help people get through to become “engaged” OndeWorkers was refreshing and exciting because we now can see how we will be able to provide individuals with an onramp to permanent employment with companies that are looking to grow. Still a lot of work to be done here but we are definitely moving in the right direction.

Thanks to MB for affirming our strategy shift in onboarding companies and how we can best serve them. Over the next two weeks MB and I will be refining what we do and say to help build a pipeline of companies that will be using OndeWork to help them grow their teams. Still a lot of work to be done here but our goal is to figure out how to create a repeatable process for turning qualified and interested companies into OndeWork customers. We will then show LZ and ZA how do to the same thing while they train the next two people that will prospect for us.

I had some great networking calls with folks in the industry that continue to help me understand how we need to position OndeWork and some of the blind spots we still have. We had hoped to raise some money this month but Lisa and I think it is premature and would like to see the momentum build on a repeatable basis to know that everything is working before looking to raise capital.

Lisa and I had so much fun this week and enjoy working with each of you. We have something special with OndeWork and it is already impacting people’s lives.

Have a great weekend and get rested up for another exciting week!