Ryan's Thoughts: UpKeep's 2020 Year in Review

Reflecting on 2020 for UpKeep and our Customers

Trying to reflect on such an unprecedented year.

Honestly, last year was quite the year. As many can attest for 2020, not much had gone according to plan. We had successes beyond our belief, but we also had failures along the way. Now that 2020 has come to a close, I always feel that it’s important to reflect back about how much good there was despite all of the challenges.

As I reflect back on 2020, I am incredibly grateful for two things…. 

1. The resilience of our UpKeep team

2. The amount of trust that our customers have placed in us during such a critical and important time in our lives.

With that said, I wanted to take some time to look back at everything that happened last year, the good, the bad, and everything in between or out the extremes! 

So, what exactly happened in 2020?

Looking back at the year, our team was really moving and shaking, literally! We started the year off with a rapidly growing team. As you can see below we were starting to outgrow our office.

So, at the beginning of the year, we had signed a new lease, moved into a new office and continued hiring and building! 

 Here’s us on the last day in the old office:

And the first day in our brand new office in January:

At the time, we were also finalizing our fundraising. In such a period of growth and expansion, so many cogs were turning, and we were off to the races in January and February!

When COVID was just starting to become a pandemic, we decided early on as a team to fully transition into a work-from-home operation. At that time, it felt like the entire world had frozen. It felt like everyone was holding their breath as people were trying to figure out what to do next, or if we could do anything at all. 

In tough situations like these, our team here at UpKeep will always fall back to one of our core values to guide our decisions. During this time, we reminded ourselves of this one: customers first. 

For some context, I’ve experienced first-hand (working in manufacturing before starting UpKeep) how much the CMMS space needed a customer centric service provider. I was a consumer first. Because of this, we knew putting customers first had to be one of our core values here at UpKeep.

So when COVID was just beginning, we knew this would especially impact our frontline heroes in the maintenance and reliability industry. 

Which eventually brought us to a question we find ourselves always asking, how can we best support our customers? Except this time, we had to think about how we could support them in the midst of a growing pandemic. 

Well, we started with a simple, immediate relief. We gave over $100,000 back in credits to our customers without anyone asking. We also gave them the option to “pay it forward” to support a cause they believe in. In doing this we got to support organizations like Direct Relief and A Child’s Place. (If you want to learn more, you can read about the initiative here).

Here were some of the responses we got from people when we did this:

Meanwhile, back in the UpKeep work-from-home spaces, we were in the middle of our own transitioning! We have home-office furniture funds for all of our employees and we had a ton of fun sharing our work spaces: 

Aside from working on our UpKeep product offerings, we were also creating a new job board tool, doing resume consultations for anyone who lost their job because of COVID-19, and further raising awareness on how everyone can support frontline workers!

One of my favorite events of 2020 was when we held our Innovation 4 Hope Hackathon, a 10-hour event for the UpKeep team to come together and create amazing new ideas to provide value to our customers during COVID-19 and its aftermath.

As the year went on we got really, and I mean really good at conference calls. Soon enough, we were on a work-from-home full throttle, unstoppable stride. Here are some highlights of what the UpKeep team has been able to accomplish during quarantine:

1. We released Kubernetes, changing the way we run, deploy changes to, and secure our products on Amazon Web Services!

2. We released UpKeep Analytics.

3. We rebranded and revamped our sensors into UpKeep Edge. 

4. We released a robust Preventative Maintenance module.

5. We launched “The Maintenance Community” on Slack

6. We launched UpKeep Connect.

7. We launched UpKeep Templates.

8. We overhauled our website!

9. We released Muli-site Module!

10. We released out-of-the-box SAP integration.

11. We achieved SOC-2 Compliance

12. We hosted our first Holiday Community Carnival!

This year many of us experienced such devastating blows. Looking back, I’m grateful for moments like these that, again, come from the resilience of our team members and the trust our customers place in us.

Resilience is one of the main themes of 2020.

Throughout COVID, me and the rest of our team were reminded about how resilient our customers are. The people we serve, our customers, they are the frontline essential workers. They are the ones out there everyday who make sure our infrastructure is maintained and that our essential needs, goods, and services are provided for.

Our customers are out there every day doing their best to help keep us up and running when, in many ways, so much of the world is shutting down. They are providing medical care, cultivating food,  and producing our goods and medicine.

During the pandemic, we’ve heard that in-office workforce density had almost got reduced to half. So many customers have told us that UpKeep gives them an intuitive way to effectively communicate with their teams, anywhere they were.

We realized that UpKeep was an incredibly essential digital technology that in many ways powered the way that essential employees work — the deskless workforce. Our customers trusted us and our product during some of the most difficult times. They trusted us with their employees, and their equipment. They trusted us that we could be the central tool for them to communicate what needed to be done and when.

Internally, me and the rest of our team was discovering just how resilient we were as well. We transitioned to remote. It was not an easy feat by any means. The bloops and blunders that we made from getting our team the equipment they needed to work from home to transitioning meetings and Zoom fatigue. Heck, we weren’t perfect by any means.

I am forever grateful for this team that enabled us to focus on our customer and the amount of resilience we had through 2020.

Some final thoughts...

As I reflect back, I look to the positives that COVID has brought. It’s enabled us to continue supporting our customers through this accelerated digital transformation. It’s enabled us to hire and be productive with our remote workforce wherever our team is. It’s helped showcase the importance of a very important group of workers that we call the deskless workforce and it’s highlighted how important the maintenance and reliability industry is.

Here’s to the end of the 2020 chapter and a look forward to 2021!