2023 in review: A conversation with Uptick CEO Aidan Lister
1
min read
Aidan recaps a milestone year for Uptick, punctuated by the acquisition and integration of Firemate and rapid growth in the UK, and explains why he thinks the company 'grew up' in 2023.
A year of exciting changes, rapid growth, and many new faces.
Hi, Aimen here - Uptick's Head of Content.
I had the chance to catch up with Aidan in front of the cameras during his recent trip to London to visit our new office and catch up with the team as well as customers and partners.
In our conversation we covered:
- How the Firemate acquisition is going and what's surprised him most during the transition
- Aidan's highlights from the last 12 months and what he's proudest of in 2023
- Why we're investing double the industry average into product R&D
- The new features we're most excited to launch in 2024
Key quotes
On the progress made with the integration of Firemate post-acquisition:
"We've had a tonne of customers make the leap and the early feedback from those customers have been really positive, so it's gone really well. We're really happy with it. I think the early excitement from the first set of customers that have jumped over was probably a bit surprising. There are a lot of people that were ready to make the leap and wanted to be early, so that's been really great."
On the success of the UK business in its second full year:
"I think our growth in the UK, it's been absolutely breathtaking. And building up a team over here of really smart, young, motivated people has been incredibly rewarding. Going into our office and seeing 20 people in there all selling and working on Uptick is just an amazing experience."
On our continued investment in building world-leading software for fire protection businesses:
"I think just in terms of pure ratios. We're probably double the R&D investment in terms of ratios compared to other high tech companies. But I think we can do that because the advocacy that we get from our customers when they start using Uptick. So the product really does kind of pave the way for the growth that we're experiencing at the moment."
On some major updates customers can look forward to in 2024:
"There's two features that I'm really excited about. There's automatic scheduling, which will, largely using machine learning, augment the needs of a human scheduler, and we think there are results on that - again, it helped technicians get one or two extra jobs done per day, which is an absolutely massive bottom line statement to our business owners. The other feature that we're working on is what we call 'Uptick to Uptick', and it enables our customers to share jobs between each other and we think that'll cut down a huge amount of paperwork between our customers."
Finally, what word would Aidan use to describe 2023 at Uptick?
"I think: growing up. I think it's the year that we really transitioned from a startup to a scale up. I think it's when we got our processes right for sales, marketing, implementation, support. I think it's when we saw an enormous amount of maturity go into the operation of the business and really grew a really strong, powerful leadership team. So, yeah, I think growing up would be the word."
That's two words, Aidan, but they're good ones - so I'll let you have it! We wouldn't be here without your support, so we hope you will continue to follow our journey next year. For more content like this, and the latest news and updates from the world of Uptick, sign up to our non-salesy mailing list.
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What else do you need to know?
How long does it take to get started with Uptick?
The biggest factors determining the length of the onboarding process are:
- The size of your team and their training requirements
- The quality and ease of export of your data
Most companies can get up and running within 2 months.
What platforms and devices does Uptick work on?
Uptick lives in the cloud. That means Uptick is available for your desk/office users on any device (Mac, PC or Linux) via your browser with no additional software downloads.
For your field licenses, on-site staff can use either Apple or Android devices. Our fire safety management app is available in the App store on Apple devices, and the Google Play store on Android devices.
How does Uptick compare to other products?
Uptick is the only modern cloud-based solution that is purposely built for the fire protection industry.
Many alternative solutions are either generic job management platforms that you will need to tailor to your business and/or do not have the same modern cloud-based capabilities.
How does Uptick protect and secure my data?
Uptick takes data security seriously. Our customers include some of the largest companies in the industry. As we work directly with government and banking clients we have have successfully passed through rigorous security auditing and penetration testing.
In addition to being secure, we work hard to provide a reliable service. Customers on Uptick can expect an uptime of 99.95% (including scheduled maintenance). This translates to an average of less than 5 minutes of business-hour downtime per month for office users and no downtime for technicians. If you're a large enterprise and want monetary guarantees around reliability, we offer dedicated hosting and Uptick Support SLAs.
How does Uptick pricing work?
Uptick charges a simple per-user monthly fee for each of your desk and field users. Customer and sub-contractor licenses are unlimited and free.
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