253: Growing FreshBooks with Mike McDerment
The How of Business - How to start, run, grow and exit a small business.
Henry Lopez, Levante Business Group
4.7 • 522 Ratings
🗓️ 3 June 2019
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Launching & growing a business with Mike McDerment, the Co-Founder and CEO of FreshBooks, the world's #1 cloud accounting software for self-employed professionals and small business owners. Mike shares inspirational stories from his early days as a business owner, and how he launched and grew FreshBooks (19:17) while living in his parent's basement! Mike is an insightful and thoughtful entrepreneur who shares honest opinions and experiences which we can all learn from.
Henry Lopez is a serial entrepreneur, small business coach, and the host of this episode of The How of Business show – dedicated to helping you start, run and grow your small business. (TheHowOfBusiness.com)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the How of Business with your host, Henry Lopez, the podcast that helps you start, run, and grow your small business. |
| 0:13.1 | And now, here is your host. |
| 0:16.5 | This is Henry Lopez and welcome to this episode of the How of Business. |
| 0:20.0 | My guest today is Mike McDermott. Mike, welcome to the show. |
| 0:23.9 | Thanks, Henry. Delayed to be here. So in today's episode, Mike is going to share his entrepreneurial journey and we're going to chat about the early days of growing fresh books, which is this current venture, very successful company. |
| 0:38.0 | And we'll talk about that a bit, but I want to focus on how he got there in those early |
| 0:42.7 | days of launching and starting fresh books. |
| 0:46.3 | If you want to receive more information about the Hawa business, including links to the |
| 0:50.9 | show notes page for this and other episodes, just text the word biz, B-I-Z, to 31996. |
| 0:59.1 | So let me take just a moment and tell you a bit about Mike. Mike McDermott is the co-founder and CEO |
| 1:04.4 | of FreshBooks. FreshBooks is the world's number one cloud accounting software for self-employed professionals. |
| 1:12.7 | In January of 2003, Mike was busy running a four-person design agency, and he was using Microsoft |
| 1:20.2 | Word to create invoices for his clients. And so one day, and this has happened to me as well, |
| 1:25.7 | he accidentally saved over an old invoice, and that's |
| 1:29.8 | when he had had enough, and he knew there had to be a better way. So over the next couple of weeks |
| 1:34.7 | after that happened, he coded up a solution, which he eventually turned into a side project, |
| 1:41.4 | and it's now what's called FreshBooks, a very successful company that offers |
| 1:45.6 | these online services, these cloud-based accounting software services. To save money back when he was |
| 1:52.2 | starting, he moved into his parents' basements for three and a half years and completely revamped |
| 1:57.5 | how he ran his design firm to the point where he was only working 19 days in a year. |
| 2:03.7 | We'll have to talk about that while generating over $200,000 to bootstrap the company that we're just talking about fresh books. |
| 2:13.3 | Today, Mike has grown fresh books to nearly 300 employees serving more than 10 million users |
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