My name is Frederick Dyste. I am the founder of BizWatt LLC and creator of Qfactor for Surveyors™, an application that helps manage process and data flow through your business, removing work and information bottlenecks.
The Start: Solving a Real Business Problem
While consulting with a regional fiber optic construction company and a national commercial solar company I was tasked with profitability reporting. This required pulling data from Quickbooks, other applications and the dreaded spreadsheets. (I love them until I don’t). There was lots of data to download, normalize, and analyze. Two weeks later I had profitability reports for the two weeks prior. Having built web applications in my past I knew I could build one following the same manual process I was getting paid for, but in real time, with no downloading.
From old code I created a working demonstration of my idea and pitched it to the solar company. They loved it but declined footing the bill for development as they’d been bought by Duke Energy and were going to implement Oracle JD Edwards for several millions. The fact they liked it motivated me to keep refining and pitching the idea.
The Pitch: Seed Capital – at Starbucks
I pitched my product/service idea to investors I did due diligence for. This is one of those stories where I got the seed funding and lead investor at a Starbucks. Qfactor was born on July 5th, 2016.
Serendipity: Uncovering the Need and More
Qfactor was not meant for land surveyors until I had lunch with a friend of mine, over 8-years ago, who happened to be the CFO of a 35-year old, 25-person survey company. When I told her about the software we created and its intended use, she reached across the table and said, “Fred, you have to meet our CEO. He spends five hours a day in a spreadsheet and we still aren’t sure where projects are at.”
Within a half hour of lunch I was sitting in front of the CEO. He told me his troubles, I told him how I could help and he hired me on the spot to do a soup-to-nuts analysis of his business operations from ‘incoming call requesting service’ to ‘paid and archived.’ I have a deep background in business processes and standard operating procedures (SOPs)
When I realized his team was tech-savvy enough to put together software tools to help manage projects I asked if there were any software packages that does this for them. ‘No, not that work for us.’
The Pivot: Client Needs Plus My Capabilities. Kismet!
I sensed an opportunity to meet the needs of the underserved surveying industry. We pivoted our development to create Qfactor for Surveyors based on our ‘soup-to-nuts’ analysis. We continually add more features and functionality based on feedback from beloved clients. (Check out our Tasklist feature built to order with a high volume surveying client in Texas)
At BizWatt we have developed tools and features specific to the surveying industry. We’re crossing over into civil engineering and title & mortgage companies that do business with land surveyors.
