Proudly the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, England's second city Birmingham has had a tough post-Industrial story. Now, however, the increasingly regentrified downtown is growing in confidence and starting to take a lead in a very 21st century revolution – field service management technology. The leader in this area – Joblogic – has been on a decade-long growth spurt, supercharged recently by a cash-for-shares injection by Axiom Equity. The first fruits of this new liquidity was Joblogic's recent acquisition of UK competitor Protean Software.
"Birmingham was once the 'workshop of the world' and 'the city of a thousand trades'," said Joblogics's charismatic long term boss James Whatmore. "While traditional manufacturing has been in decline, the emergence of Birmingham as a modern tech hub is exciting – and we're proud to be a part of that renaissance.
"Our area of specialism – field service management software – is a fragmented market – and our biggest competitor is still the humble pen, paper and spreadsheet. We are one of the market leaders in this space with 2,000 customers in the UK – but the addressable market is some 50,000 businesses – so the potential for us to grow is enormous."
And grow Joblogic has – from 11 people a decade ago to today's 400 people – with revenues mirroring this upward trajectory. Some of the reason for this has been the company's early embrace of both cloud computing and the subscription model offered by SaaS – software as a service. With customers as diverse as AXA, Eon, CBRE – even Budweiser – the company is creating some clear blue water between itself and the competition.
"Not all of our customers are large commercial corporations," said Whatmore. "Part of our attractiveness to investors is the safety net offered by our spread of small, medium and big companies. Most of our customers are field service contractors. They are servicing the built environment and doing a high volume of low value jobs. They buy our services because they are experiencing growth – and know they can't do it with bad tech, or no tech."
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Joblogic's platform does the heavy lifting in the process – helping with everything from enquiry quotes to final invoicing. In-between there is easy scheduling to boost productivity, compliance (making sure assets that need to be serviced regularly, are), and reporting internally and to clients. It can even monitor profitability – working out how much was spent on a job and what it therefore needs to be billed out for. And, of increasing importance now, the system can drastically cut the carbon footprint of customers, ensuring jobs are routed effectively, miles driven minimised and first-time fix rate maximised.
At the heart of Joblogic is the partnership between majority shareholders James Whatmore and Yacoob Moolla. While Whatmore is front-of-house in driving sales, Moolla, as COO, is responsible for the relentless updating of the technology platform. Both enthusiastic champions of all things Birmingham, they have breathed new life into the company. A grammar school boy from a local working class family, Whatmore joined Joblogic as a telesales executive. He moved up the corporate ladder to sales director, but the company remained stubbornly small, handicapped by old tech and an outdated business model. But with Moolla's arrival – and his genius for coding with him – Whatmore saw an opportunity for the pair to buy the company and modernise drastically, a process that began in 2013. Revenues have consistently increased, and are now some 20 times bigger than a decade ago.
"I just wanted to create a product that I was proud of selling and that customers would really want to use," said Whatmore. But are the partners still friends? "We've remained close – although we annoy each other a bit," he laughs. "But Yac is a very generous person and if I was ever stuck in the jungle and needed someone to send a helicopter to pull me out – he'd be the guy I'd ask. I also go to bed secure in the knowledge that he's totally on top of the tech, and I don't need to worry about that."
A foundation of the success of Joblogic is the system's architecture. All customers are on a resilient, scalable infrastructure and all enjoy the latest variant of the software. The release velocity of updates is high – with a new version going live every two weeks. (Nb. The company's biggest competitor hasn't released an update for more than a year.) "That speed of development is something that differentiates us," believes Whatmore.
With the Microsoft tech stack underpinning the system, the platform consists of three parts: back office system, mobile app (IOS and Android), and customer portal. The development team also comes in three – being based in Birmingham, with growing teams in Pakistan and Vietnam. They have their hands full – working out how new tech such as A.I. and large language models such as ChatGPT can help make customers' lives easier
With a solid development plan for the tech, and the deep pockets of their equity partners offering the prospect of acquisitions, the Joblogic team is bristling with optimism. Firstly, they're targeting clear leadership of the UK market, then a concerted launch into the colossal US maintenance sector. The company is moving into the enterprise space just as large companies realise they need to modernise their tech and secure their data.
The Peaky Blinders factor is helping make Birmingham cool again, and, thanks to Joblogic's field service management software, the company is helping make sure that the rest of the country's building stock remains cool, and warm, and safe – and profitable for the companies managing it.
