Running a business is not easy. But running the business side of business – logging time, tracking projects, sending out invoices, responding to customer issues – is harder! SherpaDesk helps businesses focus on their strengths, be it providing IT services, web design or software development, while they handle the equally important albeit a tad mundane support services. This prevents wasted efforts and keeps the customers connected throughout the process.
About the Startup
SherpaDesk is founded by serial entrepreneurs and leaders. Patrick Clements is the CEO and started his first company (hay hauling business in western Kentucky) at the shockingly young age of 14 and co-founded a non-profit in Atlanta to give back to kids in need. Whereas CTO Jon Vickers, has done everything from flipping houses in high school, to starting a chain of video rental stores in college, to launching a multi-million dollar real estate fund in Atlanta! The duo originally started out as an IT support provider catering to government, K12 and city library institutions. Says Patrick, “We did everything from desktop setups to network administration but we were in need of a solution that would allow us to effectively support our customers as well as give our tech team an easy ability to log their time.”
SherpaDesk basically combines two essential business functionality of Help Desk and accounting system into one easy to use customer management tool. It is a complete off-the-shelf customer support, time tracking and billing software solution. They also provide a mobile app.
Patrick talks about the challenges they had to face, “Moving from a product-centric company to a market driven company has been an arduous journey. We are all engineers by trade and always had more of a ‘build it and they will come‘ mentality. But that is not how it works in marketing! It is very important to let our potential customers know we exist.”
About their Plans
SherpaDesk faces competition from traditional Help Desk solutions like ZendDesk, Desk.com and FreshDesk which have integration into leading accounting solutions. But while the competition are more interested in bigger firms, SherpaDesk is focusing on SMB who are in need of a simple unified package.
On the expansion plans for SherpaDesk Patrick says, “SMB personal service is a huge space with a market cap of $16.3 billion and approximately a CAGR of 17%. We are looking to position ourselves as the leading provider of customer management solution for this fast growing market.”
The service is based on the freemium model – allowing free access to the system with some limitations that can be circumvented on a pay per use basis. This allows the system to be flexible according to the organization’s needs.
