Teamwork founders Peter Coppinger and Daniel Mackey first got together in 1999 to start a web development agency. Both had been fascinated by the possibilities of computer programming since their youth: Coppinger, who cites Bill Gates as his hero, began writing his own online games when he was ten. They were “just two guys from Cork, which in tech terms is the middle of nowhere” but over the years that followed they found plenty of clients in need of bigger and better websites: the challenge was to keep track of their own time management, billing, cash flow and all the other minutiae of administration.
Struggling to manage a growing business on “a whiteboard in the corner”, says Coppinger, they reached a point at which they looked at each other and said: “Either we pack this all in and get a real job, or we make it work... There has to be a better way to run a business.”
Friday is our day
Their first option was to buy what was then the market leader in project-management software. But that meant adapting their modus operandi to fit off-the-shelf products and systems, rather than the other way around. So they decided instead to “treat ourselves like a customer” and develop a homemade product adapted precisely to their own needs. One key decision in that process was that “Friday is our day; we look after clients Monday to Thursday, then on Fridays we’ll work for ourselves.”
That turned out to mean 14-hour Fridays plus whole weekends as well, but the outcome was a first version of the Teamwork product — and they were able to iron out the bugs simply by using it to run their own agency. Another huge moment in the venture’s history, further down the line, was their decision to risk “every penny we had, which was €500,000”, to buy the domain name Teamwork.com. It was a gamble that paid off handsomely as sales “hockey-sticked” under the new branding.
Meanwhile — with a crew that has grown to around 200, including remote workers in 15 countries — Teamwork has developed a broader suite of products that can assist in everything from team collaboration and work management to invoicing and email systems for companies large and small. Coppinger says it offers users “massive efficiencies”, and it certainly seems to have found a gap in what’s called the ‘software as a service’ market. Teamwork now has 24,000 customers worldwide, with particularly strong growth in North America.
A call from Disney
Coppinger proudly reels off a string of client names from Netflix and Spotify to the drugs group Pfizer and the discount supermarket giants Aldi and Lidl. He also recalls the day they took a phone call from Disney: the media giant had been quietly using the basic Teamwork Projects package for a while and loved it, but wanted to know whether the developers could give them a customized ‘enterprise’ version with additional security features. Coppinger and Mackey were delighted to oblige.
Growth targets
One long-time associate describes Teamwork’s founding duo as “good fun but very driven”. Coppinger himself talks about the importance of offering “fanatical customer support” but also of maintaining tight internal controls: Teamwork was self-funded from the start and has passed an important threshold of $20 million in annual sales while taying bootstrapped, profitable and debt-free. It has also been able to give one per cent of its profits to good causes chosen by the staff — a nod in the direction of Bill Gates as a philanthropic as well as business-building role model.
The company’s next target is 40 per cent annual revenue growth to take it to $50 million by 2021 — which will involve a doubling of staff numbers to 400 in multiple locations, as well as a bigger headquarters in Cork. Coppinger and Mackey’s great advantage, of course, is that they have tried and tested Teamwork software to manage their continuing global advance.