If your days are packed with back-to-back meetings, you might want to hear what Elkanah Reed is building to shape the future of work.
Those daily status meetings are just “fact finding missions,” Reed told Hypepotamus. With that in mind he started thinking about how to put all those facts at a leader’s fingertips and eliminated the need for more meetings.
Reed’s answer came in the form of Workopti, a task manager for leaders that serves as a single source of truth for business strategy.
The core of Workopti is something similar to a Kanban board, a tool commonly used in agile development. But through key integrations, leaders get a better sense of what is going on throughout the business. Workopti connects all the platforms currently used by teams — be it Salesforce, Google Drive, Asana, Wrike, or other sales or project mangement tools. Leaders can see the information living across these disparate platforms and then better align strategies around in-progress and upcoming tasks.
In its testing of larger corporations, Workopti said it has helped reduce work meetings by 25%. In a private beta with 100 organizations, Reed added that it increased leader productivity by 70%.
“Where we were before Workopti was that we were with systems of record. The way that system grows is by adding new users. Think about Slack, Salesfore, Asana, or monday.com. But Workopti is a single source of truth,” Reed told Hypepotamus. “We’re giving more visibility, accountability, and efficiency for leaders in tech.”
Reed admits that Workopti is a bit of a paradigm shift in the software world, since the goal isn’t to optimize the amount of time users spend on the platform. Rather, it is about giving time back to “time poor” executives without adding yet another platform that all employees have to use.
Reed believes now is the right time to launch such a platform for tech executives.
Many conversations in 2021 and 2022 centered around the “future of office space.” But the debate over remote versus in-person versus hybrid work is rather mute now, according to Reed. The nature of the office has inherently changed.
“It doesn’t matter what kind of organization structure [your company] adheres to. If you do business today and you have a partnership that is hybrid or remote, you are forced into a relationship with a decentralized information workflow,” he said. “Because leaders in this ‘always-on environment,’ leaders are forced to do more with less resources at a faster rate.”
That leads to information overload for leaders trying to get insight into what is happening across their organization.
Building In Atlanta
While a young team, Workopti has gained attention from some big corporations like Adidas, Amazon, Twitter and Comcast.
The startup was also recently selected for the Google Black Founders Exchange program and was part of the 9th cohort of ‘It Takes A Village’ pre-accelerator at Atlanta Tech Village.
Building this in Atlanta is strategic for Reed and the Workopti team given the city’s high concentration of Fortune 1000 companies and executive leadership.
Reed is also looking to build out a new category in the tech space.
“Marketing has martech, sales has salestech, finance has fintech, and enterprises have ERPS…but leaders are still forced to facilitate strategy for organization through a series of meetings, PowerPoints, and email chains,” he added. “What I’m creating is leadertech.”
Reed said he is hyper-focused on closing $1 million in contracts while building more partnerships and relationships with key companies as we round out 2022.
