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Leeds Company Set Out to Transform Team Work

Calls9 is a company on a mission to transform the way teams work together. The company’s flagship software product, Calls9 Knowledge Plus, is fast becoming the product of choice for businesses looking to improve their internal communications.

The company was founded five and half years ago after the two founders, Pete Mills and Adam Roney, left behind careers in law to pursue their dream of building a software company. It was during their time at Eversheds Sutherland, an international law firm, that the two began working together on an internal innovation competition which eventually saw Pete and Adam win first prize for ‘Client Console,’ an online portal for all of the firm’s online legal services. Client Console was nominated for a Financial Times Innovation award and is still used by the firm today.

After leaving Eversheds Sutherland, they spent two years working as digital consultants, a time that was crucial to the development of Calls9, as Pete comments:

“Working initially as consultants was a hugely valuable experience for us. The key observation was that when a businesses faced internal communications challenges we continually found that the software was expensive and hard to use. The solution was an obvious one to us which sparked the development of our own product, Calls9 Knowledge Plus.

“We started with a bold vision. We wanted people to be empowered with the ability to share and manage knowledge more effectively, and communicate with each other without being bogged down by endless emails.”

Project by project, Calls9 followed the path of becoming a true software company. Every project that was taken on during the following three years had to meet one key objective - it had to enrich the core mission, help the customer achieve their goals, and drive real measurable results.

It has been this approach that has brought the company to where they are today, ready to challenge and take on the big players currently dominating the market. With strong customer usage already, Calls9 Knowledge Plus has established itself not with the deep pockets of Silicon Valley VCs, but by two Leeds based entrepreneurs funding product development and listening carefully to each and every customer.

This is evidenced by some excellent customer testimonials. When global automotive data company cap-hpi needed a solution to solve the challenges it faced, the marketing team reviewed a number of intranet and internal communication platforms before turning to calls9. David Collings, Head of Marketing for cap-hpi comments, “Speed of deployment was a key consideration with the company undergoing rapid global expansion. Many of the platforms we considered were expensive, inflexible and required significant lead times to bring them into the business and develop them quickly.”

The founders are excited about the outlook for the company. Pete comments “If you look at the market presently you have the established providers such as Microsoft Sharepoint. Some of our customers have called us a viable Sharepoint alternative, which is a huge compliment. As highly complimentary as that is, the overall benchmark for our success and future growth is continuing to listen carefully to our customers feedback and acting on it.

“The Calls9 mission is to transform the way that teams work together. The only way to achieve that is to free people from bad systems and processes and provide them with great software that they can actually use.”

Find out how we can transform internal communications.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Calls9 .