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Gavin Zuchlinski Show Notes Gavin Zuchlinski is the founder of Acuity Scheduling, the slickest way for businesses to automate and manage their appointments online, allowing clients to schedule themselves. Gavin is a self-professed tech geek and espresso maniac (a word he does not use lightly), who wholeheartedly believes that business should be fun. Most passionate about Acuity Scheduling is my baby. We are helping small businesses all around the world to offer appointment management online. There is so much we are looking to do with it. We are trying to help you, as the business owner that uses the system, to get anything you need around it and getting all the logistics taken care of, so when your client sets the appointment, they can figure out the best time, fill out any form you want them to fill, they can add any link or information they think you should know ahead of the meeting, pay for the meeting, etc., and then you can send them reminders in advance, let them know about their tasks from the previous meeting or what they should prepare for the meeting, you can send a follow up right after the meeting, book the next meeting, and so on. There are so many things we want do in order to make it the perfect tool for our customers. It’s about helping small business owners run their businesses a bit more smoothly. Gavin’s Career My career started far away from where I am today… I studied Mathematics and then worked for the government on technology projects. Acuity started as a side project. I started Acuity in 2006, for my mom who is a massage therapist. We were riding together on the car and I saw her getting so many messages and trying to schedule appointments with customers and struggling with that, so I said that there must be better tools out there, so she can set her appointments more easily. When I first started, it was built for my mom. After I reviewed a few tools, there wasn’t anything good enough, so I developed the tool for scheduling for her. And I did think it can be a good product for other business owners like her, and thought it can be a nice side project to what I do for the government. It started with my mom and grew up to tens of thousands of businesses using it. In 2013, I had to make the choice between the government job, which I loved so much and Acuity full time; I took Acuity full time and it has been fun since then. Gavin’s customers Business who’s day to day revolves around appointments, like coaches, health and wellness, guiders like lawyers, accountants etc. It’s not so much the type of businesses but how they run their business. Not necessarily what the business is. We are not focused on big companies, but on businesses that have fewer than 10 employees whose day to day revolves around appointments; it’s not for people that have an occasionally appointment here and then. Gavin’s best advice about approaching the customers Acuity started at 2006, and only in 2013 did I take it full time. It grew and grew, I was only one person there, I actually read and took care of any support emails that came in and I was really focused on the customers. I remember I was really scared at the time, because when I handled Acuity by myself as a side project, I read on TechcRunch and other blogs and magazines about all these big competitors with millions of dollars in funding, but today, these competitors are gone and I’m here and I really think that it because I was so close to the customers and understood their needs so well. And because I was so close to the customers I could build Acuity as something they really want and I was very focused on their needs, and that’s the reason we succeeded and we grew from just me to 25 people working in Acuity. We try to stay very close to the customers, we are really customer centred and try to understand our customers better than anybody else and that what help us succeed. So this is also my best advice to any entrepreneur, stay...