After nearly 40 years as Founder & Chairman of RSVP (Media Response) Ltd, I think it’s finally time I came out from behind the sofa and joined the real world. I’m currently finalising a succession plan that will give my extraordinary team the freedom to shape their own future with the business we've built together. Over the years I’ve been called a serial entrepreneur, but if you only knew me through RSVP, you might not see that side. Truth is, I’ve started many ventures-but always quietly, behind the scenes. Then 2023 changed everything. In just six months I faced pneumonia, sepsis, double pneumonia, Covid, a terminal cancer diagnosis, septic shock, cardiac arrest-and Covid again. I lost over 30 lbs, broke five ribs, have a collapsed vertebra, lost 95% of my bone marrow and 45% of my hip. My skeleton now looks like Swiss cheese. But here’s the bad news: I'm still here. In August, I was officially declared in remission. And while I’m more aware than ever that others face far tougher journeys, I’ve come out of this with an even deeper sense of purpose. Since I can’t be quite so hands-on these days, I’ve returned to my roots: building something from scratch. This time, it’s a SaaS venture-a time and attendance app to support service-based businesses. And I’m proud to say… We launched it this week. New chapter. Same drive.

When someone tries to check in from the wrong location, Team-Trak doesn't reject it outright. It flags the record as pending and puts the decision in front of the manager. That was a deliberate choice when we built it. The manager sets a boundary, typically around 100 metres from the job site, and anything outside that boundary doesn't auto-approve. But the manager decides what to do with it. Maybe the employee had a legitimate reason for being slightly off-location. Maybe they were checking in from the car park before walking to the entrance. They also have the opportunity to record a photograph of where they are, again GPS validated.  The system's job is to surface the anomaly, not make the call. A tool that gives managers better information is different from a tool that makes decisions on their behalf, and that distinction mattered when we designed it.

Something happened when I started posting about Team-Trak on LinkedIn that I didn't fully expect. Construction industry people started showing up. Commenting, connecting, responding to things I'd written. People running small to mid-sized construction outfits who were dealing with exactly the problem I was describing. I hadn't specifically targeted them. They found the content because it described their world in language that matched how they actually experienced it. That told me something useful, both about where Team-Trak fits and about what it means to build an audience around a product. The people who need something will find you if you describe their problem accurately enough. They're already out there looking for the description that matches what they're living with.

The instinct when a mobile team is hard to manage is to add more oversight. More check-ins, more check-up calls, and more of the manager's attention directed at keeping track of where everyone is. In my experience, that approach exhausts the manager and frustrates the workers without actually solving anything. What changes the situation is a system that creates a reliable record without anyone having to chase it. When the record exists automatically, the manager stops spending energy on information-gathering and starts spending it on the exception that actually needs their attention. The workers stop feeling watched and start feeling trusted, because the system is consistent and the same rules apply to everyone. More oversight adds friction to the relationship. A better system removes the need for it.

Most of the service business owners who need Team-Trak aren't looking for it. They've absorbed the Friday afternoon admin pain, the occasional dispute over hours, and the client call that catches them off guard. None of those things feel urgent enough to go looking for a fix. They feel like the normal cost of running a mobile team. That's what I’m here to do in my content more than anything.  Not describe the product, but describe the situation accurately enough that the person reading it recognises their own week in it. Once I communicate the cost clearly, the product becomes obvious.

I worked in the electricity industry for a period, and the time-keeping situation there was something else entirely. The workers had every angle covered. Early arrivals used to clock in the whole crew at once. People who were running late would have someone else sort it. Systems that were supposed to create accurate records were being worked around before the shift had even started. I used to think that said something about the people. Looking back, it said more about the systems. When a process is easy to game and the consequences are low, most people will find the path of least resistance eventually. The systems that reduce that behaviour aren't the ones that crack down harder. They're the ones that remove the opportunity quietly, without making an issue of it. A record tied to your own phone, in your own location, at the moment you actually arrive, doesn't require anyone to be virtuous. It just makes the shortcut unavailable.

Mobile workers don't want to be invisible, and they don't want to be surveilled. What they want, in my experience of managing mobile teams across several industries over a long time, is a system that's fair. Same rules for everyone. A record that accurately reflects what they actually did. No relying on the manager's memory at the end of the week, which is convenient for the manager and not always accurate for the worker. No disputes where the worker knows they did the right thing but can't prove it. Team-Trak creates a record that protects both sides of the arrangement, not just the employer's. That's not an obvious benefit, but it’s a key advantage to what we do.

I know what it’s like when starting a business. I've spent more time than I'd like to admit on Friday afternoons trying to piece together a week's worth of time records before I could run payroll. Texts to dig through, memory to rely on, a few calls to make when neither of those worked. I've done that across cleaning businesses, call centres, and service operations in more than 1 country, and I never once thought the problem was the people. The problem was that the information just wasn't there when I needed it. When I started building Team-Trak, I wasn't drawing on research or a gap I'd spotted on a spreadsheet. I was drawing on every Friday afternoon I'd lost to admin that should have been automatic. Every dispute I'd had to settle without a proper record to point to. Every time a manager had to take someone's word for something that should have been verifiable. I built this for every service business owner I've been or worked alongside over the past 50 years. Someone running a mobile team of 10, 12, 15 people with systems that hadn't meaningfully changed since the clipboard. The product isn't complicated because the problem isn't complicated. It just took someone who'd lived on the wrong side of it long enough to decide it was worth fixing properly.

Building Team-Trak meant going back through a long list of moments I'd mostly tried to move past. The Friday evenings that ran into Saturday mornings because the time records didn't add up. The arguments over hours where both sides were certain they were right and neither had anything to prove it. The client who called to say the job hadn't been done, and the employee who was equally certain it had. Every one of those situations had the same thing in common: No record settled it. At the time, I dealt with each one as a one-off and moved on. Looking back, they were all the same problem in different forms: a gap between what happened and what anyone could prove happened. I built Team-Trak to close that gap.

A service business's reputation can take years to build and about one phone call to damage. The call usually goes like this: a client rings to say the person you sent didn't show up, or left before the job was finished. You have no record that contradicts it. So you're managing a reputation problem with nothing to go on but your instinct about which version of events is more likely. A proper check-in record removes that situation almost entirely. If someone was there, the record shows it. If there's a dispute, the data becomes the starting point rather than 2 people's conflicting accounts of what happened.

Every time-keeping system that came before Team-Trak had the same vulnerability built into it. The record wasn't tied to the individual. Punch cards could be passed to a colleague. Paper timesheets could be filled in by someone else, or from memory, or optimistically. Hand scanners required physical presence but were shared devices in a shared location, and when they broke down, the whole system broke down with them. Even the phone-call check-in, someone rings to say they're on site, is only as reliable as the person making the call. The mobile phone changes that in a way none of those systems could. Your phone is registered to you, carried by you, and the GPS record it creates is tied to your physical location at a specific moment. The QR code can be placed on the property and if necessary photos can be added to the record at the same time.  You can't check in for a colleague through their GPS. You can't fill in a location record from memory after the fact. The record is created at the moment it happens, by the person it belongs to, from the place they actually were. It doesn't eliminate every possible way to game a system.  Nothing does. But it removes most of the obvious ones without adding any friction for the people who weren't trying to game it in the first place. After completing the work the same system can be used to record time of completion.

3 questions every service business owner with a mobile team should be able to answer immediately. - Is everyone on site right now who's supposed to be? - Did anyone check in late or from the wrong location this week? - What did last week's labour actually cost, broken down by job? Most owners I've spoken to can't answer any of these without making a call, pulling up a spreadsheet, or spending half an hour going back through records. The data exists somewhere. It just isn't being captured in a way that makes it easy to find.

Workforce management for a 10-person service business is a straightforward problem. Are your people where they're supposed to be? Did they arrive on time? Did the job get done? Those 3 questions cover most of what a small service business owner actually needs to know about their mobile team on any given day. The software that answers them doesn't need to be complicated. It needs to answer those questions reliably, without creating more admin than it removes, and without requiring the manager to become a software administrator on top of everything else they're already doing. Only anomalies need confirmation everything else is logged automatically.  That's the version of workforce management most small service businesses have been waiting for.