Lightning Lab director Mark McLeod-Smith (left) with Ian Bishop, who says working with the business incubator has helped boost the development of Coachseek.
Ian Bishop was buried in paperwork. He was spending almost as much time in front of his computer as with clients on the tennis court.
"Here I was with a growing coaching business and a team of dedicated coaches and it's embarrassing to admit, but I was running off 150
separate spreadsheets just to keep it all going."
Bishop went shopping, and was surprised to find nothing like a Vend (software solutions for retailers) or Xero (accountancy software for small businesses) occupying the sports management niche. So together with his business partners, IT sales and marketing manager Shaun Fitzmaurice and web developer Matthew Skilton, decided to invent something. They called it Coachseek.
After putting the business concept through its paces in Wellington's business accelerator Lightning Lab, they realised they had stumbled on to a much more common problem than anticipated, says Bishop, chief executive of Coachseek.
"We surveyed hundreds of coaches around the world, across many disciplines, and found that 80 per cent were using some form of spreadsheet or paper-based system to run their business, all to varying degrees of accuracy and reliability.
