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Customer success story

How GoSquared used charlieHR to scale their HR processes from the ground up

With James Gill, CEO

GoSquared case study

700+

automated annual leave requests

94

team member documents safely stored

8+

years using Charlie

GoSquared

Industry

Growth software for SaaS businesses

Headquarters

London, UK

Bio

GoSquared is the all-in-one platform to help SaaS businesses grow. With marketing automation, live chat and customer data all in one place, they give software businesses the tools they need to acquire, engage and retain customers.

Why Charlie?

"Thanks to Charlie, we were able to easily set up all the HR processes we needed to scale our business from the ground up."

The challenge

GoSquared's CEO realised he couldn't afford to spend hours every week looking after HR admin — but still he believed in the importance of smooth operations for their success.

The solution

Charlie helped GoSquared automate repetitive HR tasks like time off management and onboarding, so now everyone can focus on what really matters — growing the business.

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Customers > GoSqaured

As a startup founder, it can be difficult to nail the way you look after the People side of your business — especially at the beginning, when you’re only setting the foundations to then go and grow your team.

What makes it even harder is that HR is only one of the many areas of the business founders have to focus on while scaling their business. James Gill, CEO of GoSquared, knows this dilemma very well:

“If one thing is gonna keep me up at night, it's worrying about the team. Is that person happy? Are they being paid the right amount? Am I giving them enough direction? It's not like all a founder has to do is worry about their team — you've got the finances, the growth, the business direction to look after.”

In 2015, GoSquared signed up for CharlieHR, and things started to fall into place:

“From day one, we got access to a safe place where to keep all employee information. We had a smooth time-off process that literally ran by itself. We’ve never forgotten a team member’s birthday since. Charlie makes it harder to forget or ignore important issues, which helps reduce a lot of anxiety. It has helped us avoid making a lot of silly mistakes.”

James Gill, CEO

James found in Charlie a way to start building People processes into the business. He stopped being the bottleneck for all things HR — Charlie became that central place where the team could independently find the answers to all their People questions.

Refocus your time on what really matters

Small business founders have a lot on their plate, and often not enough time to focus on what they most care about. “I'm extremely conscious of my own time. I know that I want to try and spend it helping the team grow and do their jobs as well as they possibly can.”

Charlie has helped James implement all the HR processes GoSquared needed to succeed — so he could spend more time and mental energy on the foundational aspects of the business:

“No one wins when I am spending hours on admin tasks every week. With Charlie, I get more time back in my day to focus on what I love — working closely with the team to help them grow.”  

James Gill, CEO

Let’s run through some of Charlie’s features and see how they helped James claim back his precious time.

Automate your team’s time off — “Goodbye, spreadsheets 👋”

“Tracking time off was probably the first pain point that we felt Charlie could solve for us,” James points out.

Back then, GoSquared used emails and spreadsheets to keep track of who was on holiday or off sick: “As the team grew, that became unsustainable — it was too error prone as a process, and the amount of back and forth was draining.”

Now, every team member at GoSquared can request time off directly in Charlie. James can see any potential clashes and approve time off with one click, which saves him huge amounts of time. Having the whole company’s time off data in Charlie gives James complete visibility on the team’s whereabouts:

“With Charlie’s Calendar, I know I've got one place to check what’s going on in the team — who's going to be away, when and for how long. It has a real impact on the work we commit to as a company week by week.”

James Gill, CEO

Most importantly, it’s now very easy for James to find out if someone in the team is overdue some holiday: “I've got a number to go by in Charlie — it's always there and I know I can trust it. I feel that enables me to look after the team in a way that’s much more tangible.”

Automate your HRAutomate your HR

A safe place to store your employee data — and make it easy to find

Switching from Dropbox to Charlie, James was able to collect and store all employee data in one place, making it a much more accessible and safe process.

“One of the things I like about Charlie is that there's a lot more transparency to the team. They know this is the place where information resides. They can upload documents themselves and they know they will be in Charlie rather than lost in some ‘cloud’ or email thread.”

James Gill, CEO

With all employee information stored in Charlie, the team at GoSquared can be safe in the knowledge they are handling it the right way: “With GDPR, everyone cares a lot more about privacy, and rightly so,” James explains. “Explaining that we're using Charlie can be enough to reassure anyone who has concerns.”

A smooth onboarding process — to help every new hire hit the ground running

There are a lot of admin tasks involved in onboarding a new employee: “There’s all this administrative back and forth… while all you’d want to focus on is getting the new team member excited about starting and helping them get into their role,” James says.

Before switching to Charlie, James used to have an onboarding checklist in Trello: “It was taxing enough to remember to get that checklist out every time, and find out where it was, and make sure it was all up to date.”

Create a great onboarding experience for your new hires

“Charlie took all of that nonsense away. New team members can go through the onboarding steps themselves and I can track how much progress they made to completion. I feel everything is under control and it’s virtually impossible to forget anything.”

James Gill, CEO

Create a great onboarding experience for your new hires

Having Charlie to help with onboarding is allowing James to let go of some of the tasks he’s always been responsible for — and to focus on other aspects of growing the team:

“Charlie’s onboarding features make it so much easier to delegate. We are starting to change this assumption that the founders will onboard every single new team member. Thanks to Charlie, we now feel confident we can hand that off to other people — which is great progress.”

Why join Charlie? “It’s more about — why would you not?”

“Everytime I recommend CharlieHR to a fellow startup founder,” James says, “I insist that it’s never too soon. Even if it's just for yourself, your one-person company — if you have any intention of hiring, then it's probably a good idea to have Charlie.”

When small companies start to worry about HR, it’s often already too late. They’re triggered by an unexpected People issue. Or simply they start hiring and they realise they don’t have appropriate HR processes to cope with more people joining the business.

“Charlie’s value increases exponentially. The more people you have, the more you realise you need it. And I think it's much easier to have it there before you add more people to the team.”

James Gill, CEO

“Also, why would you not?” James says.

“Having Charlie in place as early as possible is going to save you so much time and energy. If you don't, then you're just giving yourself things to worry about. And that's pretty pointless.”

James Gill, CEO

Life with and without charlieLife with and without charlie

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