If your retail business wants to keep up with growing presence of online, you can’t just put anyone in your store to sell, you need the right person representing your brand and your product in person. The only question is, where do you start to look for someone like this; the answer is AllWork. The on-demand freelancer staffing for the retail industry pairs up the most fitting talent to your company so that staffing retail is no longer a pain point. The startup that counts a number of Fortune 500 companies as clients is changing the in-store experience by engage customers with the right talent, at the right time.
AlleyWatch chatted with CEO Glenn Laumeister about the up and coming Startup and how their platform is saving companies.
Tell us about the product or service.
To win at retail today, smart brands and retailers are creating in-store experiences that customers can’t get online. This requires putting the right person in the right store at the right time. Our platform helps our clients accomplish that goal.
The AllWork platform provides an end-to-end solution for brands and retailers to efficiently source, manage and pay the in-store freelancer talent they rely on to drive sales at retail. Think sales associates, brand ambassadors, product merchandisers, trainers, and related sales functions. Imagine a brand being able to fill an open position anywhere in the US with the same efficiency of calling an Uber. The implications for the retail industry are enormous and extremely timely.
How is it different?
There are several key components to our platform that work in synergy to change the game: We build our talent pool through not just great jobs but also career advice and relevant content.
Our advanced job-matching system transforms current sourcing methods saving time and money. Both talent and brands can find one another with ease.
Software to transform the key functions of talent management including timesheets, scheduling, training, education, ROI reporting and more.
Our HR platform offloads the legal and administrative burden associated with managing large remote teams of freelancers and ensures compliance with all federal, state, and local labor laws.
What market are you attacking and how big is it?
Over $800B in wages are paid out every year in the US retail industry.
As more and more of the US workforce becoming more on-demand, a huge portion of that spend will be for freelancers.
What is the business model?
We’re a B2B model and we charge a fee for companies to use our platform and services. This fee is added to the wages we pay out to the freelancer talent that is deployed through our platform.
What inspired the business?
AllWork cofounder, Scott Gurfein, was spending over $300K per month on in-store talent to drive sales for his consumer brand, and he had no way to measure ROI to guide his spend. There was no scheduling, timesheet or management systems that would allow him to efficiently oversee a large remote field workforce. Also, there are a complex web of labor laws on the state and even local level.
Fast forward to today, AllWork has now built out an end-to-end solution to solve all of these problems.
How do you plan to compete with already launched on-demand staffing platforms?
AllWork is the only one to provide a complete retail focused end-to-end solution for the management of recruiting, scheduling, training, communications, payments, reporting, and HR administration. Allwork is very different from gig platforms like Task Rabbit because our clients have long-term continuous needs for freelancers.
What are the milestones that you plan to achieve within six months?
The first goal is to launch our mobile app so brands, retailers, and talent can all connect seamlessly on-the-go and we can truly deliver an on-demand staffing system.
We continue to sign new clients and accelerate the growth of our talent community.
What is the one piece of startup advice that you never got?
The advice I would give to any aspiring entrepreneurs would be to take cost accounting! It’s so important to understand how businesses actually make money before setting of to start your own.
If you could be put in touch with anyone in the New York community who would it be and why?
Mayor Bloomberg. Under his leadership, New York was able to build a tech campus with Cornell to rival the one in California with Stanford.
Why did you launch in New York?
Because it’s the greatest city in the world! You can’t find the people and the connections anywhere else.
What’s your favorite restaurant in the city?
Barbounia on Park Avenue South
