Bob Fitzjohn

Chairman at RSVP (Media Response) Ltd

[Bob Fitzjohn @fitz99]

After nearly 40 years as Founder & Chairman of RSVP (Media Response) Ltd, I think it’s finally time I came out from behind the sofa and joined the real world.

I’m currently finalising a succession plan that will give my extraordinary team the freedom to shape their own future with the business we've built together.

Over the years I’ve been called a serial entrepreneur, but if you only knew me through RSVP, you might not see that side. Truth is, I’ve started many ventures-but always quietly, behind the scenes.

Then 2023 changed everything.

In just six months I faced pneumonia, sepsis, double pneumonia, Covid, a terminal cancer diagnosis, septic shock, cardiac arrest-and Covid again. I lost over 30 lbs, broke five ribs, have a collapsed vertebra, lost 95% of my bone marrow and 45% of my hip. My skeleton now looks like Swiss cheese.

But here’s the bad news:

I'm still here.

In August, I was officially declared in remission. And while I’m more aware than ever that others face far tougher journeys, I’ve come out of this with an even deeper sense of purpose. Since I can’t be quite so hands-on these days,

I’ve returned to my roots: building something from scratch. This time, it’s a SaaS venture-a time and attendance app to support service-based businesses. And I’m proud to say…
We launched it this week.

New chapter. Same drive.

[Bob Fitzjohn @fitz99]

Building Team-Trak meant going back through a long list of moments I'd mostly tried to move past.

The Friday evenings that ran into Saturday mornings because the time records didn't add up.

The arguments over hours where both sides were certain they were right and neither had anything to prove it.

The client who called to say the job hadn't been done, and the employee who was equally certain it had.

Every one of those situations had the same thing in common:

No record settled it.

At the time, I dealt with each one as a one-off and moved on.

Looking back, they were all the same problem in different forms: a gap between what happened and what anyone could prove happened.

I built Team-Trak to close that gap.

[Bob Fitzjohn @fitz99]

A service business's reputation can take years to build and about one phone call to damage.

The call usually goes like this: a client rings to say the person you sent didn't show up, or left before the job was finished.

You have no record that contradicts it.

So you're managing a reputation problem with nothing to go on but your instinct about which version of events is more likely.

A proper check-in record removes that situation almost entirely.

If someone was there, the record shows it.

If there's a dispute, the data becomes the starting point rather than 2 people's conflicting accounts of what happened.

[Bob Fitzjohn @fitz99]

Every time-keeping system that came before Team-Trak had the same vulnerability built into it.

The record wasn't tied to the individual.

Punch cards could be passed to a colleague.

Paper timesheets could be filled in by someone else, or from memory, or optimistically.

Hand scanners required physical presence but were shared devices in a shared location, and when they broke down, the whole system broke down with them.

Even the phone-call check-in, someone rings to say they're on site, is only as reliable as the person making the call.

The mobile phone changes that in a way none of those systems could.

Your phone is registered to you, carried by you, and the GPS record it creates is tied to your physical location at a specific moment. The QR code can be placed on the property and if necessary photos can be added to the record at the same time. 

You can't check in for a colleague through their GPS.

You can't fill in a location record from memory after the fact.

The record is created at the moment it happens, by the person it belongs to, from the place they actually were.

It doesn't eliminate every possible way to game a system. 

Nothing does.

But it removes most of the obvious ones without adding any friction for the people who weren't trying to game it in the first place.

After completing the work the same system can be used to record time of completion.

[Bob Fitzjohn @fitz99]

3 questions every service business owner with a mobile team should be able to answer immediately.

- Is everyone on site right now who's supposed to be?
- Did anyone check in late or from the wrong location this week?
- What did last week's labour actually cost, broken down by job?

Most owners I've spoken to can't answer any of these without making a call, pulling up a spreadsheet, or spending half an hour going back through records.

The data exists somewhere.

It just isn't being captured in a way that makes it easy to find.

[Bob Fitzjohn @fitz99]

Workforce management for a 10-person service business is a straightforward problem.

Are your people where they're supposed to be?

Did they arrive on time?

Did the job get done?

Those 3 questions cover most of what a small service business owner actually needs to know about their mobile team on any given day.

The software that answers them doesn't need to be complicated.

It needs to answer those questions reliably, without creating more admin than it removes, and without requiring the manager to become a software administrator on top of everything else they're already doing. Only anomalies need confirmation everything else is logged automatically. 

That's the version of workforce management most small service businesses have been waiting for.

[Bob Fitzjohn @fitz99]

To Learn More:
https://t.co/DJadaKzShy

[Bob Fitzjohn @fitz99]

Workforce tracking isn't a modern problem dressed up in new technology.

The question of whether your people are where they're supposed to be, when they're supposed to be there, is as old as employment itself.

For most of the 20th century, the answer was the punch card.

A physical clock, a physical card, a timestamp you could file and refer back to.

It worked reasonably well until someone realised that if Dave got in early, he could punch in for the whole crew.

The punch card became the hand scanner.

A biometric system, harder to game, used in offices and call centres across the world, until the power went out, or the scanner broke, or the queue at 8am made everyone late on paper when they weren't late in reality.

Every solution has eventually produced a new version of the same problem.

Team-Trak is the current answer, and it works differently because the record is tied to the individual rather than a shared device.

Your phone is yours in a way that a punch card or a hand scanner never was.

That makes the record harder to hand off, harder to game, and considerably easier to trust.

[Bob Fitzjohn @fitz99]

Making software simpler has nothing to do with removing features.

Simplicity is about reducing the number of decisions a user has to make, not the number of things the software can do.

With Team-Trak, the vast majority of check-ins require nothing from the manager at all.

The employee checks in within the right location and the right time window, the system logs it, and moves on.

The manager never has to see it, approve it, or think about it.

The only time the system asks for a decision is when something is genuinely outside the norm: a late arrival, a location that doesn't match, or something that actually warrants a look.

Keeping normal things invisible and unusual things obvious is a design choice.

It's also the only way a tool like this gets used consistently over the long run.

[Bob Fitzjohn @fitz99]

To Learn More:
https://t.co/DJadaKzShy

[Bob Fitzjohn @fitz99]

One of our first clients stuck a two-foot QR code on the wall of their depot.

I thought that was overkill because Team Track has GPS geolocation built in. When a truck driver checked in, the system captured their location, timestamped it, and maps exactly where they were at that moment. The technology does the work. You don't need a physical marker on a wall for it to function.

But the depot manager wanted the QR code. His drivers scan it on the way in, and that's their check-in. Not an automatic GPS prompt, not a geofence trigger. A physical thing on a physical wall that they deliberately scan with their phone.

I spent some time thinking about why.

The GPS version is cleaner and more automated. Less friction, nothing to mount, nothing to maintain. But what the QR code does is make the action deliberate. The driver drives by, sees the code, and scans it. There's no question about whether it registered. No ambiguity about whether the geofence was set correctly or whether the phone's GPS was being temperamental that morning. It's simple and certain, and for a manager running a fleet of drivers, simple and certain are worth a two-foot piece of laminate on the wall.

What I took from that is something I probably should have understood earlier in building this: the technology that solves the problem and the technology the user trusts are not always the same thing. GPS is more sophisticated. The QR code is more believable. And when you're asking someone to change how they manage their workforce, believable tends to win.

I'd been thinking about QR codes as a fallback for situations where GPS wasn't reliable enough. That depot changed my thinking. It's not a fallback. For some people, it's the whole point. It might be a QR code inside an office for a cleaner or maybe at the back of a home for the gardener. 

We still offer both. But that QR code on the depot wall comes to mind every time we talk about how Team Track should work in practice. Features earn trust in the field, not in the pitch.

[Bob Fitzjohn @fitz99]

Most small business owners are running on trust and they know it, even if they've never said it out loud.

They give a key to an employee who opens the shop when they're not there.

They send a cleaner to a client's house and assume she arrives when she's supposed to.

They have a driver start a route before dawn and find out how it went at the end of the day.

None of that is negligence. It's the practical reality of running a business where you can't be in two places at once. You hire people you believe in and you let them work.

The gap shows up when that trust gets tested. Not always because someone is dishonest. Sometimes just because there's no record. 

Someone disputes their hours. A client says the work wasn't done. A manager tries to sort out payroll on Friday afternoon with nothing but memory and a stack of unread texts to work from.

Trust is a reasonable way to run a small business. It's also a fragile one. Both of those things are true at the same time, and most owners find out which one matters more only after something goes wrong.

[Bob Fitzjohn @fitz99]

To Learn More:
https://t.co/DJadaKzShy

[Bob Fitzjohn @fitz99]

I'm in the process of running my call centres while building Team-Trak, and there's an odd tension in running those two things in parallel.

One needs you to tie things off and let go. The other needs you to stay curious and keep making decisions about something that doesn't fully exist yet.

The funny thing is, my call centres would actually benefit from Team-Trak.

I've got an HR department converting hundreds of hand scanner records into spreadsheets for payroll.

I know what the fix looks like because I built it. But that's not where my attention belongs right now.

Team-Trak isn't for where I've been… it's for the businesses that are where I was ten years ago, managing a mobile workforce with systems that haven't changed in a generation.

Paper timesheets. Phone calls. A clipboard in someone's truck.

The tools exist now to replace all of that with something that takes ten seconds and produces a verifiable record. Most of those businesses just haven't been shown it yet.

The call centres don’t rely on GPS or QR codes. That's been the pattern for forty years. I've just never built two things at the same time before.

[Bob Fitzjohn @fitz99]

https://t.co/o80TGgcPKW

[Bob Fitzjohn @fitz99]

3 things Team-Trak handles automatically that most small business owners are still doing by hand:

1 - Location-verified check-ins. 

Not a phone call, not a text, not an assumption. A GPS-confirmed record of where each person was at the moment they clocked in. Every shift is logged without anyone having to chase it.

2 - Timesheet generation. 

At the end of the week, the timesheet is already built. No Friday afternoon reconstruction, no going through texts trying to remember who was late on Tuesday, no spreadsheet assembled from memory. It builds itself as the week happens.

3 - Anomaly flagging. 

When something is off, it surfaces automatically. Late arrivals, wrong location, gaps that don't add up. The manager doesn't have to go looking for problems. The system brings the problems to them.

The first two give back time. The third one occasionally saves something harder to recover once it's gone.

Learn more about Team-Trak below:

[Bob Fitzjohn @fitz99]

To Learn More:
https://t.co/DJadaKzShy

[Bob Fitzjohn @fitz99]

One of the features we almost didn't build turns out to be one of the most useful things Team-Trak does.

When someone checks in or out, they can take a photo. A picture at arrival, a picture at checkout, a picture of an issue, attached to the record automatically. I'd been thinking about it as a verification tool.

A way to confirm the worker was physically there rather than just within GPS range. That's part of it, but the people using it have found something more useful than that.

For cleaning businesses, a photo on the way out is a record of work completed. If a client calls a week later saying something wasn't right, there's a timestamped image of the premises at checkout. The business owner isn't defending themselves on memory. Neither is the worker.

Most disputes between employers, workers, and clients aren't really about dishonesty. They're about the absence of information that everyone assumed someone else was keeping. Nobody wrote it down because nobody thought they'd need it. And then they needed it.

The businesses getting the most out of this feature aren't using it to police anyone. They're using it to remove the ambiguity that causes problems after the fact. Remove the ambiguity and you remove most of the arguments.

[Bob Fitzjohn @fitz99]

I've owned https://t.co/bo1nI2oScU for years without really knowing what to do with it.

A guy I knew at the time had a theory that domains were going to be worth something.

He was registering them by the hundred, and he got to mine before I thought to.

Ended up buying it back from him eventually. It sat there for a long time, just a domain I paid to renew every year and didn't use.

I'm not someone who grew up wanting to be a public figure.

But I'm building something that needs people to find it, and at some point you accept that the product and the person behind it aren't as separate as you'd like them to be. 

People make decisions about whether to trust something based partly on who's behind it. That's not new. It's just more visible now.

The website is a start. I'm still working out what I'm comfortable putting out there. But the domain isn't sitting empty anymore.

[Bob Fitzjohn @fitz99]

The best version of Team-Trak is one where the manager barely has to open it.

That wasn't the obvious design direction. Most software in this space generates reports, sends notifications, keeps you informed. The logic is that more visibility means better management.

What we found is that the visibility managers actually want isn't more data. It's confirmation that nothing has gone wrong. The owner of a cleaning business with twelve people out in the field doesn't need to know that eleven of them checked in on time. She already expects that. 

What she needs to know about is the one who didn't.

So that's what Team-Trak is built around. If someone checks in within the right timeframe and within the right location, the system logs it and moves on. No alert, nothing to action, nothing to read. The daily noise disappears.

The only time it surfaces anything is when something genuinely needs attention: someone is late, someone is checking in from the wrong location, or an anomaly that the manager actually needs to make a decision on. Everything else runs quietly in the background.

The measure of whether it's working isn't how often people use it. It's how rarely they feel they need to.

[Bob Fitzjohn @fitz99]

To Learn More:
https://t.co/DJadaKzShy

[Bob Fitzjohn @fitz99]

3 ways I've watched workers’ game time-keeping systems over 50 years in business:

1) The buddy punch

Someone arrives early and clocks in for the whole crew. I saw this constantly when I worked in the electricity industry.

The guys had every trick going, and this was the most popular one.

2) The phone call or text

Workers ring in to confirm they're on site. Completely unverifiable, fully manual. It feels fine until Friday afternoon, when you're trying to reconstruct a week of arrivals from memory before you can run payroll.

I've seen this in cleaning businesses, transport companies, small trades outfits. It's basically everywhere. 

3) The paper timesheet

Handed out Monday, submitted Friday. What time did you get here Tuesday? Roughly 8:45, give or take. Nobody lied outright. Nobody was accurate, either.

All three put the record in the hands of the person being recorded. The manager just had to trust it.

The technology has changed. The instinct to cut corners hasn't.