Patrick Collins updates us on the rapid growth of his Tech Startup 'Timely PA'

by Startacus Admin

We first spoke to Patrick Collins, founder of Timely PA, nine months ago when he told us about his company and vision for the future. Since then the business has grown rapidly so we decided to catch up with him to hear all about the exciting developments.

Thanks for speaking to us again Patrick – we hear that things are going well for TimelyPA, so tell us how your business has grown since the last time we spoke to you?

Hi Alistair, great to be speaking to Startacus again and yes, a lot has changed over the past 6 months. After an initial 3 month period of testing products and services, we launched our new site with a set of 6 core services all to help a startup company or its founder grow and manage the pressure of building the business. All these services are laid out on the site as the journey that a startup will take, from initially finding accommodation and offices, through to testing a product, building traction, social media management and customer service. We have also recently been accepted as an offical podio.com partner which means we are skilled in helping startups set up their CRMs, intranets and virtual workspaces which they can collaborate with all their team, developers and investors. The team has now grown to 6 people and we will have a team of 12 by the end of the year. It has been a very exciting past 6 months and a great opportunity to work with some fantastic new startups throughout the world.

What has been the toughest obstacle you have overcome in growing the business over the past few months?

With any successful business, the strength of your staff and systems is the strength of your growth. I have a very talented business adviser who is a non executive director for TimelyPA and the priority every month is to make sure we have a set procedure for everything that we do, be it social media management, responding to emails, updating the client or data research, we have a process that all our staff adhere to, to make sure that our standards are kept to the highest levels at all times. However creating systems is not easy and so taking the time out from day to day operations to create these systems and train staff can be both frustrating and time consuming.

What has been the general feedback from your customers to date?

The companies that we have been working with have been incredibly surprised and relieved by how much TimelyPA can help them. 90% of our business simply comes from startups referring other startups and this is testament to how happy they have been. So many startups have a great idea or product, but have very little time or sometimes knowledge of how to create the process to sell their products or to stay organised. We aim to instantly make the startup more efficient in the way they run their business, how they communicate, how they share ideas, how they look after their customers and how they continue to build traction. Being able to offer all of these services under one company has been a great benefit to the startups and something that has helped to achieve great results.

TimelyPA offers a wide range of services – which has been the most successful so far and why do you think it is?

The most popular services at the moment are social media management and setting CRMs and sales processes for startups. Every startup always wants to be active and engaging within their social media accounts, but have very little time to focus on them. We offer a service where we create content and build followers to get to the first 1000 facebook likes / 10,000 twitter followers, and then pass the management back over to a startup who by that time can employ someone in house. However the most popular service is setting up workspaces for the startup on Podio.com. We create anything from sales CRMs , company Intranents, individual virtual workspaces for developers, sales team, marketers and dashboards with key KPI's that the startups can easily track progress and easily feedback to investors.

Where do you see the company/business in the next few years? Or even better, what's your 5 year vision!

So much can change over 5 years and so I always make very detailed targets and goals for year by year. This year we are aiming to have a team of 12, be working with major accelerator programmes throughout the world but concentrating on North East UK, London, Singapore and New York. The vision will be to offer a one stop package where accelerator programmes can buy a block of hours for the duration of the programme and then the startups have access to all our resources to help them get set up and to prepare for their journey ahead.

Thanks for the chat Patrick, looking forward to seeing what the next 6 months will bring for you!

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Published on: 25th April 2014