SOFTWARE company TrackerRMS has found a silver lining amid the gloom of Covid after recording its best ever year of sales.
The company, based at Heywood House, near Westbury, designs software for the recruitment sector and, after a quiet start to the year, found inquiries were coming in thick and fast as customers took advantage of the slow late spring and summer to revisit their technology.
“We’ve had a pretty busy summer primarily because, with Covid and lockdown, the businesses have got quieter and businesses have had time to focus on implementing systems and processes. Clients have used the downtime to prepare for the comeback,” said co-founder Andy Jones.
“April and May was a complete whitewash, I think it was for most people but come June, everybody realised it wasn’t going to be permanent and if they were going to come back competitively they needed to sort stuff out. July, August and September were really busy and we’ve probably had the best year we’ve ever had.”
He launched the company 12 years ago with partner David Alonso and set up originally in Marlborough. His partner though moved to San Diego in 2013 and set up an office there. Andy moved to Heywood three years ago. “We needed a bigger office so that we could expand, and we needed some meeting space. We really wanted a better working environment with more room,” he said.
“I was driving my son back from a rugby training camp in Warminster and drove past Heywood House and saw the sign for office space to let. We popped down and saw a couple of places and when we saw the Coach House we were sold.”
The TrackerRMS software is aimed primarily at recruitment agencies and has been successful on both sides of the Atlantic. Andy said, “If you are looking to manage the relationships that you have with all your clients and all of your candidates and automatically match candidates to jobs or search job boards for people that can do jobs and then try to fill those jobs essentially we manage all of that through software.”
His team of six at Heywood House have remained in the office as much as possible through the lockdown, except when it has been mandatory to work at home.
He added, “The guys at Heywood have been really good because they’ve put up signs and tape on the floor and there are hand sanitisers everywhere, so we feel secure. Being in the middle of nowhere we feel like are in a really safe haven.”
“We spend pretty much all of our day three feet from the screen so we aren’t moving around a lot. We have big desks and everyone is spaced well apart. We have a one-way system and people sanitise their hands as they come into the office but other than that ,it is pretty straightforward.”
Despite the restrictions, the wide open spaces at Heywood have even allowed the company to welcome customers in for video conference meetings with David Alonso and the US team in San Diego, Cincinnati, Arizona and Florida. The conference room at their offices alongside the Jacobean mansion even has a mural the downtown San Diego on the wall to bring a touch of California to the Wiltshire countryside.
“We’ve had some local clients coming in here every one or two weeks,” said Andy. “Our meeting room is big enough for social distancing and being such a nice place, a lot of our clients like to come down again and again.
To find out more about the company go to tracker-rms.com. For more details about office space at Heywood House go to heywoodhouse.com.
