What does it take to equip a global workforce with everything they need for their work-from-home setups? That's exactly what we unravel in this engaging dialogue with Chris Herd, the trailblazing founder and CEO of Firstbase. This episode is a treasure trove of insights into the unique business model of Firstbase, where they provide a cradle to grave service for office equipment and their innovative software that allows employees to personalize their gear. We discuss the ripple effects of remote work, the peculiar challenges it has birthed, and how First Base is navigating these uncharted waters.
Venture with us into the impressive logistical operations of Firstbase as we find out how they help companies manage inventory, save resources, and ensure the right equipment reaches the right person. We delve into the wide array of equipment that Firstbase provides, from the essential laptops to the delightful additions like coffee machines. Our conversation takes a fascinating turn as we discuss the most unique requests they've received since the start of the pandemic. We wrap up our enlightening chat with Chris, reflecting on why it is a sound business decision to invest in Firstbase. So, are you ready to discover how Firstbase is reshaping the future of remote work? Listen in.
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What does it take to equip a global workforce with everything they need for their work-from-home setups? That's exactly what we unravel in this engaging dialogue with Chris Herd, the trailblazing founder and CEO of Firstbase. This episode is a treasure trove of insights into the unique business model of Firstbase, where they provide a cradle to grave service for office equipment and their innovative software that allows employees to personalize their gear. We discuss the ripple effects of remote work, the peculiar challenges it has birthed, and how First Base is navigating these uncharted waters.
Venture with us into the impressive logistical operations of Firstbase as we find out how they help companies manage inventory, save resources, and ensure the right equipment reaches the right person. We delve into the wide array of equipment that Firstbase provides, from the essential laptops to the delightful additions like coffee machines. Our conversation takes a fascinating turn as we discuss the most unique requests they've received since the start of the pandemic. We wrap up our enlightening chat with Chris, reflecting on why it is a sound business decision to invest in Firstbase. So, are you ready to discover how Firstbase is reshaping the future of remote work? Listen in.
Listen & Subscribe on your favorite platform
Apple | Spotify | Google | Amazon
Welcome to Recruiting Daily's Use Case Podcast, a show dedicated to the storytelling that happens or should happen when practitioners purchase technology. Each episode is designed to inspire new ways and ideas to make your business better as we speak with the brightest minds in recruitment and HR tech. That's what we do. Here's your host, William Tincup.
Speaker 2:This is William Tincup and you are listening to the Use Case Podcast. Today we have Chris on from First Base and we'll be talking about the business case, or the use case, why customers and prospects make the case of spending money with First Base. So, Chris, would you do us a favor and introduce yourself in First Base?
Speaker 3:Yeah, nice to be here, William.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 3:I'm Chris. I'm the founder and CEO of First Base. We help companies provide the tools and equipment their workers need wherever in the world they are. Yeah, maybe the one surprising thing to that is everyone still sees us as the remote team for remote workers. We have clients across the board fully remote, of course, but also hybrid teams and office teams as well.
Speaker 2:Oh, interesting. Okay, so when we say tools and equipment, give us an idea, give the audience an idea of what are we talking about? What's the array here?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it varies pretty dramatically company to company, but a standard package would be some form of laptop, usually includes a monitor, a keyboard and a mouse and then from there it depends on the company. Some companies it'll be a desk and a chair, other companies it might include an array of other things which are really more experiential. I don't know, coffee machines perhaps.
Speaker 2:And so do you clone or do you all deal with the laptops? Does the company ship them to you and then you ship them out? Do you all actually get them ready for yeah?
Speaker 3:We do equipment in three different ways. So depending on the company size really dictates it. So if it's a really big company, they probably have great procurement relationships. They're just going to use our software platform and they're going to essentially use us as their logistics service provider on top of that as well. So they ship the stuff to us. We then ship it to wherever their workers are. Version number two is if it's a slightly smaller company, maybe our purchasing power is more than theirs. We're essentially a marketplace where they buy the equipment from, as well as the software and the usage-based stuff. And then the third way is if they want to subscribe to the equipment so it's a hardware as a service model we can do that as well on top of the software and usage too. Oh, that's cool.
Speaker 2:And in the software for them it's a pass-through, or basically you can set it up. They need Creative Suite or if they need specific programs on there, you can image it or have it set up to where the employee didn't have to do any of that.
Speaker 3:Exactly so cradle to grave for the equipment, making sure that the image is on it. So the worker flips the lead, puts their password in for the first time, they're ready to go, and then the software on our side is a two-sided platform. So on one side, generally used by IT admins, it operators, sometimes CSIOs, sometimes CEOs of a smaller company. For them it's a single source of truth for where all their assets are, and on top of that they can create catalogs of equipment that their workers can choose from. On the worker side, we basically serve you up an e-commerce-type experience. Where you go through it, you choose the laptop that you want to work on, the desk, the chair, the headset, the microphone, but crucially, you're going to personalize that to your preference, which obviously workers really love.
Speaker 2:I was about to ask you is at one point it was a Mac versus PC thing 100 years ago. Have you seen a more fluid experience with employees and environments where you pick it's a budget, of course, but pick. If you want to be on a PC, great. You want to be on a gaming laptop, you want to be on a Mac, whatever. It doesn't really matter as long as the work gets done. Have you seen letting the employees pick out the things that they want, that they think they're going to make them successful?
Speaker 3:Exactly it's really about how do we give the worker the equipment they need to do the best work that they've ever done in their lives. And if that's on a Mac, if that's on a Windows machine, if that's on a Linux machine organizations generally give them that choice and, again, various in all types of companies. If it's a small startup, maybe they're predominantly a Windows sorry, a Mac shop. Maybe the finance person comes in and they need a machine that can do Excel better than a Mac can. So they start to reduce the Windows stuff. And, of course, as you go into bigger and bigger companies, they generally have a wider spread as well.
Speaker 2:Right. So you did say at the beginning that you could just started with remote. Okay, we're going to help people through the pandemic, you got your talent all over the place, etc. But the model is obviously expanded since then and so you can help people with hybrid. So, again, a setup to where they can take their laptop from one place to another, etc. Or an office itself. Okay, there's setting up a new office in Aberdeen a place, and so they need they needed the entire office, especially the stuff that they can get from you. They need all of it set up and shipped to their location.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and that's been the crazy thing for us, where we found the business pre COVID, that we have this vision of the world and where it's going to. And then obviously there's this mass acceleration that we didn't expect which is like we're 10 or 15 years in the future.
Speaker 3:And yeah, there's that irony where, like during that whole thing, we're like great, the thing we bet on has had this acceleration. But also, as you dig in on the product usage data, you start to see these this like weird things where people are like San Francisco office or hybrid employee in Europe. So we just start to double click in there and be like okay, guys, this seems weird, what are you actually doing with the product? And they're like we're using it for hybrid workers, we're using for office based workers and we're like okay, but like the product isn't really designed for that and we don't imagine the experience is that great, so maybe let us make it a little bit better. And that's what we've been doing. So, like, everything you say is true.
Speaker 3:It's shipping a stuff to people that are working remotely at home. It's shipping stuff for people that are working hybrid between two or three locations. It's shipping a lot of equipment to people that are in an office. It's also the other side, on the software piece, where you can, if you can imagine like you use us as a remote company. We do all the stuff in the back end, so we make sure that the right person has the right laptop associated with them. When people leave, we collect the equipment as well. We cleanse that both technologically and physically so we can redeploy it again. But in a hybrid world, some of these companies are going to be shipping stuff back to their own office locations rather than our warehouses, so you need to expose that side of the platform to them as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I can see that being not a logistics nightmare, but I can see that there's another step or a couple other steps in there that the companies are going to have to think about and y'all are going to have to think about too. So tell me a little bit more about the marketplace in terms, especially like for employees that are going to go in and pick stuff. What is that? What's that experience like?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So on the company side it's really about can we give them the equipment that they need and they want to provide to their workers? And then historically that has been giving them full aperture of whatever they want. They're a window shop. We're going to give them Lenovo's, hp's, dell's, and they can have whichever model of those things they want.
Speaker 3:So you start off with the basic spec models which are off the shelf and then you end up with these custom to order models which clearly aren't on the shelf, and then same for every other piece of equipment. Right, there's off the shelf keyboards, there's off the shelf monitors. So we start out with that conversation with the company and say let's build this catalog for you and then from there you can pull a subset of that equipment per catalog that you're creating. And those catalogs companies generally define in three ways, or one of three ways. They might do it by geography. So if you live in the US, you can choose from equipment spec Y it might be on job role. If you're a salesperson, you can choose equipment spec Z it might be senior. So if you're above a director level, you get to choose this equipment. And that really is the marketplace for them to go into and say these are the things I want. These are the things that are going to empower me to do the best work that I've ever done in my life. I love that.
Speaker 2:I also love you mentioned inventory. I can see that being really important to the accounting folks. Not just we talked about it being able to know where these things are coming from, especially data understanding who's got what laptop and if something goes wrong they can track back pretty easily to where that is, et cetera. But the accountants this is a part of what plans properly equipped this can be depreciated. Do you? Do you all depreciate the things that come back to you? Do you appreciate to depreciate those things as well, or is it really the company side?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So what we're going to give the account and say team is is a way to take the information off the platform and plug that into their models.
Speaker 3:So we're going to say that if it's a Mac Pro, it's got a three year life cycle. Maybe it's a four year life cycle. We're going to let them define that. So what we're going to make really clear is when this piece of equipment is due for renewal. The company can then obviously pull that out, push that into whatever system they use to model the depreciation or anything else, and then on the back end, when this stuff comes back to us at the end of the three years, we're going to help them recycle that as well.
Speaker 3:So where you end up there is OK. This is a big part for the account and safe part of an organization. It also is about giving the GNAR, more broadly, superpowers. So how can we help HR? How can we help IT? How can we help finance? How can we help facilities save time? So they're not spending time on these menial tasks of shipping laptops all around the world? Right, they can focus on the things that really matter. Number two how do we help them save money?
Speaker 3:We're going to collect equipment that they generally can't collect themselves. The average rate of collection is somewhere between 50 and 70 percent. We collect 97 percent, plus there's the redeployment of that equipment, so they're not buying as much. There's security. So we have the sort of cradle grave audit trail of where the equipment's been, who's had it, what's happened to it. And then the final piece, which I think is growing in popularity, is the carbon piece. We're not buying as much equipment. We're getting more from the equipment that we do buy, and then, when it's end of life, we're recycling it in the same way and really giving those pieces of data to the organization to say this is the value that the GNAR is bringing the company. I love it.
Speaker 2:All right, before we do some buy side questions is the craziest request that came across. That's come across your desk so far.
Speaker 3:Yeah, a month in the pandemic, one of the big banks in New York asked us if we could do multiple Paladin bikes to a executive's place.
Speaker 2:Multiple Paladins to one executive's place, to one location.
Speaker 3:And, to be clear, we ended up not working for them, but that was for sure the question that was.
Speaker 2:Can we do it? Yes, should we do it? No, that's funny. It's funny. I have a gaming laptop. So I've worked on gaming laptops for my work work for a long time because I just found them really powerful. I don't game off of them, that's not the bit, but I use them because they're just so powerful. I never have them. They don't break down. They're just built differently, clearly, and they're more expensive. But I find that it's better for me. When you get to show, I'm gonna say the demo, but basically it's like you get to show first base people to the first time. You're gonna get a mixture of being able to show software and show the power, logistics, work, etc. What do they fall in love with? Like when you get to show them for the first time. They've never seen it, they have a vague idea of what you do and you know that if I can get to this screen, they're gonna. They're gonna get it.
Speaker 3:For us, it's the power that we're giving the individual who is doing this all on their own One. If GNA organizations outside of finance, you know they're all under invested in right, they don't have tooling, they do a bunch of manual tasks. So for us, it's about saying hey guys, hey girls like we, we're gonna take this pain all the way from you. We're gonna take care of procurement. Here's how we're gonna do that. We're gonna ingest your existing asset registries, so no more managing the equipment that you've supplied will treat it as if it's equipment we have. Here's all the data. We're gonna report on that.
Speaker 3:Here's the dashboarding. Here's how we integrate to your HRS system so you never have to come in the platform and put something in manually. And here's how we're gonna empower the worker as well. So we're gonna make your life better. We're gonna make you a superhero in the organization. But on the other side, this is the experience of what it would have looked like had we onboarded you inside your business, and the combination of those two things. Here's how we're gonna help you. Here's how great your experience would have been if it was this. I think that generally blows them away with the power across this, the spectrum of all the stuff that we do for them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's also global. I think people can. Yeah, okay, if it was just in one city, okay, everybody's in a box. We can, we can do this or we could do this ourselves. Now they're not not that they should, but they could do it themselves. Now you're dealing with employees Are talent that's all over the world and some of that's like really remote, and so it's okay. You weren't really that good at it to begin with. You shouldn't be, shouldn't really ever have been doing it. I know a lot of IT folks that, especially on the network side of things, they hated this part of the job, despise it. Like when new employees are, we're all excited, oh, we're onboarding 10 new employees and you could just see it in their faces like the dread of having to set up 10 new computers and go and don't just Getting people like that was just, like it was beneath. I say beneath, that's maybe a little harsh, but you could just see it wasn't the best use of their, their skills.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, and I it's. It's they want to work on the transformational stuff, right, it's that they know they bring all this value to the organization. And it's the frustration that they're spending their time on things that, yeah, they can do, but they could be doing so much more. And I think that's really the superpower we deliver, right, like, we know you guys can do this. Yeah, we know it's not that hard. We know it becomes like diametrically an exponentially difficult the more countries you're in. Yeah, it sucks if you're in one, but you can manage it much harder if you're in two. And if you're in three, give up, right, there's no way you're collecting women back from those places. But we're just gonna give you the time back, right, we're gonna let you work on the transformational projects for the business. And it's funny I see the other side is you've seen that draining out with their faces. I've seen like the color come back in their faces, where they're like wait, we don't have to do this anymore.
Speaker 2:No, no, there's a better way. There's a better that turns out. There's a better way. What are if someone, if you're doing with a lot of different types of buyers, but let's just say They've never done this before, so they've always ensourced it, even through the pandemic and otherwise They've always. Just, they've always done it with their own team, etc. Again, not well and not a great use of their time, but this is the first time that they're going to do, going to outsource this. One of the questions that they should be asking the. If you could script them and say you should be asking these questions of any provider but us in particular. What are those questions?
Speaker 3:The first one we generally get is like how long is this going to take us to get up and running? The integration part is integral, right? As you get into much bigger and bigger organizations, it's one thing to say we're going to take all this pain away. It's another thing if you say them, but we're going to replace it with you having to put in a bunch of manual data, right? So the first part is what should we integrate into? Should it be our HRIS system? Should it be our mobile device management system? It should be all of them and it should work with whatever they use understanding their tooling, understanding their process.
Speaker 3:Number two how does this change what we do on a day-to-day basis? How involved do we need to be? Where does first base end and where do we begin? And for that question, it's essentially we're going to take care of everything from the machine. You're going to handle the IT help desk. If someone forgets their password, they're going to come to you or your outsource team. If they drop the laptop and break it, they're going to come to us. And then I think, as you start to think longer term, there's a bunch of other opportunities as well, and that's, I think, a longer term thing for us around use cases to say what other problems have you got? What we also want to hear are not just the problems they have today, not just on this piece of core infrastructure. Also tell us all the other challenges and obstacles that you're facing as you become increasingly distributed. We'd like to hear about them. We might not fix them all today.
Speaker 2:But at least knowing about them knows that. Okay, if they have that problem, then maybe some of your other customers have that problem, Then maybe it is something you can fix, Maybe it is something you can address. But again, if you don't know that the problem exists, you can't address it. So the first thing first you got to know that they have a problem. What are you looking forward to in, say, the next year? So where do you see this going?
Speaker 3:I wrote a LinkedIn post today which was, in some ways, a reflection on the last three years. It's touched on some of the stuff we've spoken about today where it was like the most surprising thing to me has been the way our customers have used our product that we didn't expect. As a consequence of that hybrid working, in-office working, fully remote working we've closed more enterprise clients in the last three months than we did in the prior three years. So the thing that gets me excited is just the compounding that comes from progress. We're lucky enough to work with everyone from early stage startups that you would know to $20 billion plus publicly listed businesses, and I think that's what drives us.
Speaker 3:It's being in the weeds with our customers, being there to partner with them on their problems, and it feels like we're just getting to another inflection point where that's going to accelerate even further. There's obviously been a rise of remote. There's obviously been talk around like return to office. I think we're getting through both of that now, where there's this equilibrium and I think people are having this recognition of the fact that the world isn't the same and the same solutions to prior problems aren't going to cut it anymore and I think there's an openness to new things, jops.
Speaker 2:Mike walks off stage. Chris, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for carving out time for us and talking about First Base.
Speaker 3:I appreciate you having me, William. This was fun.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and thanks everybody for listening. Until next time.