Chris Day had made it very clear he was done with startups and the entire process of building companies from the ground up.
He’d already done that and he was the driving force behind some of the top technology solutions in the managed service provider (MSP) space.
Early in his career, he founded Fully Managed—a managed cloud services and cybersecurity provider. He scaled the business from a one-man IT consultancy to one of Canada's largest and most respected MSPs with over 150+ managed customers and 12,000+ users globally. In fact, it was recently acquired by Telus .
A decade later, he founded his own early-stage investment firm, Top Down Ventures, and just months later, IT Glue—an award-winning IT documentation platform. After five years of growing IT Glue, he made a successful exit via sale to Insight Venture Partners and Kaseya.
Just two years into scaling IT Glue, he also co-founded Warranty Master (now ScalePad)—a platform that automates warranty quoting, purchasing, renewals and service requests for IT service providers.
At this point, Day was thinking it was time to take a step back and focus his passion and depth of experience on his role as an investor at Top Down.
“I’d served as the CEO of a company for more than a decade and a half and what I really wanted to do was help others succeed in that role,” he said.
But of course, 2020 had a way of throwing a wrench into some of the best laid plans. And when a perfectly timed opportunity came knocking, who was he not to answer the door?
Creating the solution to a glaring MSP problem
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, a blinding light was shone on the state of digital transformation and the entire digital workplace environment. Businesses were forced to speed up their technology evolutions by several years to accommodate work-from-home mandates. And the challenges began to emerge.
Early in 2020, Day was approached by Joel Abramson and Mark Scott, Chief Strategy Officer and Chief Executive Officer of Fully Managed, respectively. They were seeing a wide-spread problem in the MSP space that was begging for a solution.
“In this remote-first work world that we're now in, we have no idea what people are doing, if they're productive or if they’re delivering any kind of results—it’s just painful," said Day.
That was the problem MSPs were feeling, and Day, Abramson and Scott all quickly agreed the solution was not a new kind of employee monitoring software .
“The leaders of these companies just need to know what's going on,” said Day. “It's not that they need that information to crack the whip on people. It's more like they need to know what their people are doing so they can make better decisions on where their business is headed and what things they need to invest in.”
Despite not wanting to do another startup, Day knew this pervasive and growing problem was an opportunity he couldn’t ignore.
“We’re going to have to start a company,” he said to Abramson and Scott. “This is needed.”
Examining the digital work patterns of remote teams
You might have two remote sales reps at your company—one who’s great and one who’s...not, said Day.
“Could it be that the one who's not successful is sitting on a beach not doing anything? Maybe. But more likely they're both working and they're just doing different stuff,” he said.
Knowing the work habits of your remote team members and being able to identify which are the winning habits is incredibly valuable.
Seeing how your most successful employees structure their days in terms of app usage and work patterns enables you to understand exactly what’s working and then use that information to lift up the productivity and performance of the entire team.
“What we're trying to do with Produce8 is help companies understand the good stuff versus the bad stuff,” said Day. “It could be anything from, ‘this person blocks research time and this person doesn't' to ‘this person doesn't jump between 500 apps the entire day. They seem to have a pattern where they're more focused’.”
In fact, the goal might not even be to have direct conversations about the individual patterns that get recognized over time. Instead, the insights gained may become the catalyst for creating better training, improved processes and procedures, or even evolving the technology stack from a team or organizational perspective.
“An MSP goes and buys software and then literally has no idea if their people are using it for the next year,” said Day. “It's wild. We buy into this idea that it’s going to make us more productive or reduce our risk or increase our revenue.”
But how do we know if the software we’re investing in is actually delivering on those promises? And how do we know if our people are even using it?
“If a company finds they have a person who doesn't use their CRM at all, is it because they don't want to use it? Or, is it because they don't know how to?” said Day. “Again, we just want to know so that we can make better choices for the business."
These are the kinds of things Produce8 draws out for digital-first and remote teams that nobody's drawing out today.
Building better remote work environments with employee experience at the core
“The biggest ‘aha’ moment we've had since starting Produce8 is that the problem is so much wider and deeper than we thought,” he said.
Day, Abramson and Scott were initially very committed to launching Produce8 in the MSP space—an industry they know first-hand is struggling with challenges around remote and digital-first teams. And while they’re still committed to this initial launch direction, they also realize this has become a very common problem across every industry.
“I don't think keeping Produce8 as a purely MSP-focused solution will do it justice,” said Day. “As we think about remote work patterns and where the modern work environment is headed, we realize this is a much bigger opportunity.”
Enabling digital-first and remote work transparency is crucial for the future of work and business success. But ultimately, it’s the people at a company who drive it forward. Re-thinking the overall experience of the remote workplace environment with individual employee experience at the core will create wins that go well beyond the world of business.
Having deeper insight into where each team member is spending their time creates opportunities for them to make changes that will improve not only their work performance, but also their lives. Cultivating positive and productive work habits and learning how to work more effectively with team members—and with less digital distraction—leads to accomplishing the necessary output, but in less time.
And freed up time is invaluable. It allows for the restructuring of the workday in ways that actually work for real people.
“That's going to be the ultimate goal,” said Day. “The individual being able to take action based on assessing themselves and their personal work patterns. And if we get to that point, then we're really winning."
This article is the final in our three-part series on the founding and founders of Produce8: Chris Day, Joel Abramson and Mark Scott .
