Mhelpdesk, an Ashburn, Va.-based startup in AOL's Fishbowl Labs, has doubled its ranks. The company recently hired four new employees, bringing the total number of full-time staff to eight. According to Ryan Shank, Mhelpdesk's COO for business development and partnerships, the organization will hire another 20 people by year's end.
Mhelpdesk provides management software for computer repair technicians, painters, therapists, property managers and other service-based businesses.
"We've figured out the software and nailed down the outbound game," Shank says. "We've landed the model. Now we scale." In addition to a product specialist, the three most-recent hires were all in the sales division, including a senior vice president of sales. Shank says the additional hires will all be "sales talent."
Mhelpdesk's product frees small businesses from entering the same data multiple times in different software programs. "We follow the entire lifecycle of a service call," Shank explains, including setting appointments, tracking work orders and time spent, managing customer information, and invoicing customers.
The company recently integrated with
Stripe, a web-based payment processor out of San Francisco, to take mobile payments on the fly. "The average time for an invoice to be paid is 45 days," Shank says. The integration of Stripe helps reduce the time it takes for businesses to collect on invoices, which "improves cash flow and is a good ROI [return on investment for our customers]."
Shank says that Mhelpdesk also recently added the ability to track time spent on a work order and to take pictures through its mobile app and attach them to a work order. Both of those features came as a result of customer requests. "Our community of customers are very vocal," Shank says. "They submit feature requests. We're on the phones. We hear the feedback on Facebook and on our [web] forum. Our field reps make 150 dials a day."
Mhelpdesk is certainly growing; Shank says that the company adds 700 new customers every month, and that the product is "sticky. It's a real part of their business. They use it all day, every day." He would like to see the growth expand exponentially. "We're trying to get 70,000 new signups a month," Shank says.
That kind of growth will take some hustle. According to famed Twitterer
Gary Vaynerchuk, Mhelpdesk has it in spades.