In this case study
- Key outcomes
- Anequim’s mission and motto
- Challenge
- Solution
- Results
- The future with Hubstaff
Husband and wife Jeremy and Gwenn Aspen lead Anequim. Apart from the two founders, all 1000 team members work remotely.
Anequim has a range of services that help property managers and entrepreneurs grow and scale their businesses with remote professionals.
We want to be the best choice for our employees to live their best life. We try to ensure that everything we do becomes more useful to help improve their lives.
Anequim was ranked #612 on the Inc. 5000 Annual List in 2022. After seven years in business, they still have their first-ever employee working with them, which says something about a company with 1000 employees.
Let’s take a look at the challenges that led them to Hubstaff.
Must have a product development roadmap
Reliable service
Great customer service
Automation
One of my takeaways during research was that you were constantly developing features. This a big requirement for any software partner that we work with.
Customer service is another big one. From where we came, I couldn't get anything done regarding customer service. There was an existential issue operationally. They would shut me down, and I couldn't work with anybody.
We did about a week's worth of research. Hubstaff was on that list. Because the customer service looked like it was an important part of the business (it turned out to be true), and you have a continuous development mindset, the price was fair, and you were not venture-backed.
Time tracking: All remote professionals track their hours every workday. The business can see the hours tracked in real time.
Timesheet approvals: Hubstaff automatically converts time tracking data into time sheets. At the close of each pay period, Anequim knows timesheets are correct and can run payroll and invoicing without headaches.
PTO and vacations: Automated time off and vacations save HR half a day each pay cycle (biweekly) and enhance the remote team experience.
Activity levels: Helps to spot inconsistencies and changes in productivity.
API: API gives Anequim the data they need to automate their business processes.
“A huge value for us is that the remote professional and their assignment can see hours in real-time. We immediately know at the close of the period that they're right. We can proceed with payroll and invoicing at the same time.”
“It's a stable platform. I don't remember a time when Hubstaff was broken. That’s important when you're doing payroll, and when your invoicing depends on payroll, there's some serious exposure.”
“Hubstaff has a user-friendly and stable environment which translates into appearing and being professional. When I work with a vendor or client, I don’t want to have to think about them. There are no complications, or buggy-stuff like that. It just lends itself nicely to the professional environment our clients, and we want to enjoy. That's what I think makes Hubstaff very professional.”
“You can start, stop, take breaks, and track PTO and vacation days. These features create our remote team experience. They are modifications and enhance the remote team experience because they are standardized. They're things that I can use not just in one instance but 1000 instances in real-time, all the time.
That's where Hubstaff makes the remote experience superior. Especially in this modern day and age, you must provide infrastructure, so your remote/hybrid team can do these things without bothering them or tracking stuff on a spreadsheet. It's in the background. It works automatically.”
Jeremy Aspen / CFO of Anequim
Without Hubstaff, we would have to get six more people in payroll and ten more people in client services or client management and remote professional services.
“We operate from Hubstaff, designed for remote activity. If we didn’t use Hubstaff, we’d probably have to get six more people in payroll and ten more in client services. You have a 0% chance to scale into anything interesting if your payroll depends on self-reporting.
We had 200 employees when we switched to Hubstaff two years ago, and now we're at 1000. So that's substantial growth. We might not even be able to do business if we didn’t have a tool like this.”
"Being able to export the information through an API and use it however I want is imperative."
"Anything related to payroll is automated. Technology should be designed to have fewer people working for you, but those people bring more, so you can pay each employee more and have fewer robotic kind of work. Right. The streamlining part is what allows you to achieve that. Use software that automates your world."
“The effect of not having something automated that's important as HR would be catastrophic. For example, bad paychecks damage a company's reputation with its employees. You don't get forgiven for that. You don't get many opportunities to explain yourself if you're not paying somebody what they know they deserve. It could also lose you 10% of your clients.”
“One, your payroll expenses, or rather overhead expenses will be substantially higher. Revenue tracks with both the quality of operations and customer service support so you will have downward pressure on revenue because you're not as good as you could be and can’t keep up which causes ‘production line’ problems. The bigger risk is that if you have a company that is so manual, you don't bring anything to the table like your processes and procedures are not something that helps you stand above the competition, then your multiplier for the valuation of your company.”
“It's the time, and it's also the lack of problems. It saved one person maybe a quarter of their time during payroll weeks every other week. That is a 5% increase in productivity with the PTO feature.”
Jeremy Aspen / CFO of Anequim
I'm never going to be happy until the next iteration of features are rolled out, and then the second that's done, onto the next. I do appreciate the customer service part and that there are things that are continuously in development. You even publish it somewhere, you click on it, and you can see what features are kind of underway.
Curious about what features we’ll roll out next? Check out our product roadmap for more updates.
Explore upcoming features“We have a PEO (professional employers organization) product coming out. We would hire employees in Mexico and assign them to other companies. We have the benefits, the time tracking, and all the advantages of being a larger company that we kind of partition out share with our clients.
This PEO project is about accepting that other companies hire employees in other countries, but they need the scale to enhance benefits. What we're doing is embracing that reality. We have a client right now, an onboarded client that has 90 of their employees. They're plugging in using our infrastructure and then sharing the value of scale.”
Jeremy Aspen / CFO of Anequim
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