Meet the team and see why we started LeaveWizard
Having looked into our purpose as individuals and collectively, on more than one occasion, we have arrived at a short statement that sums up why we started LeaveWizard. That statement reads “To improve people’s lives at work“. This short sentence sums up our purpose and consequently explains a number of decisions. For instance, LeaveWizard is fully bootstrapped and we’ve never pursued investment because we believe staying independent allows us to fulfil our mission without compromises.
We have been running since 2011 and we serve customers in more than 30 countries around the world. We are a UK company, based in Bournemouth, Dorset however our team are based across three continents. Should you wish to speak to us don’t hesitate to send us a message.
We started LeaveWizard back in 2011 because we found it hard to believe that spreadsheets and paper were still the number one tool used to manage staff annual leave and absence. It was hard to imagine that many businesses used to print paper forms to request and approve leave! It seemed that the world around us had evolved dramatically, but employee management tools haven’t kept up with it.
So we decided to develop an online employee leave planner that allows you to track and manage your employee’s holiday and absence at the click of a button and on any device.
As we have started gaining more customers and users, we have been been collecting feedback and learned a lot about the things our users are trying to achieve. Soon we realised that we can do a better job for our customers by doing more of the job they need to do. And so we have been expanding our product so it becomes more helpful – we added overtime management, more flexible work patterns, sick notes, extended employee information, SCIM and SSO (Azure AD and OKTA) and we are working to add ability to store employee documents very soon. Overall these and the countless other improvements we’ve made puts us in a good position to start doing more of the job of managing employees, especially for the small to medium sized business. We are excited to be embarking on this new journey and we hope you will join us and share your experience with us.
Across our team, we have many years of experience in developing software systems in various organisations and managing teams, in many different industries, so we have seen the challenges and pitfalls of managing employees first hand.
We have seen the insufficiencies of outdated or overcomplicated systems. We have learned what employees need from such software as well as what they hate.
We believe that the job of managing employees should be streamlined and so any software that aims to help must be focused on achieving each task as quickly and as painlessly as possible.
Our Purpose is to help improve people’s lives at work. We currently do that by providing employee management capabilities via the latest technology to help our users be better at their jobs, spend less time doing their tasks and not feel frustrated or overwhelmed.
As an organisation, we have never been keen on traditional command and control structures. Over the years we have explored many approaches, including Holocracy, Peter Block’s Patriarchy and we finally settled on the Teal model. So, we are a teal-aspiring organisation and we are making steps towards distributing more and more of our decision making, by introducing the Advice process and other teal practices, so that anyone on our team is free to make decisions as and when they see fit.
We are proud that we have built this business with no external investment. We answer emails personally and we stand by our product and our organisation. We are technical people, so we are always looking for ways to improve, developing new gizmos and playing with new gadgets.
We are passionate, authentic, and driven and we are truly interested in listening to what you have to say.
Each team member brings a different set of skills and expertise. We’re constantly evolving so our entire team are specialists in their area.
Plamen is the organiser, driving us all towards building software systems that make people’s lives better. Plamen oversees all aspects of LeaveWizard’s business processes.
Rich is the passionate one. An active community organiser with unreal knowledge and skills. With this passion Rich leads both the product development and IT teams at LeaveWizard.
Nasko is the cool one, always coming up with the most pragmatic solutions without compromise , even in the most difficult situations.
Paul is our customer champion. Nice to everyone else and unbelievably persistent with all of us to try and get our customers to a happier place, sooner.
We usually work with an additional team of freelancers and external partners, who we cannot list at present. We are however always thankful for their help and we appreciate their contribution to what we’ve built over the years.