Running a business is a complicated task. There are numerous functions working at the same time and each and every function is interdependent. Which means, delay in one aspect of a business will directly affect the pace at which another aspect is functioning. With the weight of such activities already put on its shoulders, it becomes very difficult for an enterprise to manage day to day tasks. Small and medium businesses are especially affected by this, as they don’t have the resources to implement heavy software to manage everything.
To meet the requirements of small and medium enterprises, Zebu came forward with its comprehensive services, resolving all the issues with its all-in-one approach.
With the vision to help create a world that’s full of vibrant, diverse and prosperous local businesses, Zebu, a start-up in Waterloo, Canada was created. It is focused on helping local businesses thrive by providing them with tools to improve team collaboration and productivity. Zebu exists to help small businesses succeed in their local communities. It builds tools that allow small business owners to spend less time managing their businesses, allowing them to get back to their passions. It offers a platform to help Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) manage their entire business, including an all-in-one solution for messaging, storage and scheduling – all of which are encrypted to protect their data.
The services offered by Zebu make running the company easier so that owners can focus on what they do best while growing their business. The company believes that many small businesses are under siege from large, global businesses using advanced technology to gain efficiencies. These technologies are often too complicated or too expensive for local businesses to embrace. For this purpose, Zebu built an all-in-one productivity suite geared specifically to local businesses, aimed at helping them improve collaboration and productivity across their team, so that business owners can focus on what they do best.
Visionary Child Prodigy
Jesse David Thé is the Founder and CEO of Zebu. He came up with the idea behind Zebu while in high school. He spent some time looking into ways to help local businesses get equipped with modern technology so that they could better operate and thrive. He found a glaring gap in the solutions offered. The ERP solutions to help manage businesses were incredibly complex, hard to use, and cumbersome to set up. There were single solution apps that could help manage a single aspect of the business, but this approach of covering all their needs quickly became too overwhelming to manage when so many apps were required to manage the business. What these SMEs needed was an all-in-one solution that was as easy to use as the single solution apps. That’s where the idea for Zebu came along.
Speaking about coming up with new ideas, Jesse believes that most of the owners of small or medium sized businesses spend the vast majority of their time just trying to make sure things are running. This takes away from the time they can spend coming up with new ideas to expand their business. He states, “If we can help reduce the amount of time owners need to spend managing everything, they can get back to focusing on growing their companies.”
Products that Compliment Efficiency
According to Zebu, many of the tools that local businesses use today are isolated from each other. Messaging is done at one place, while scheduling is done at another. This forces business owners to change the way they work in order to adapt to the technology. As an all-in-one platform, Zebu brings together the tools that local business owners rely on to keep their business running smoothly. One great example is that its security and encryption just happen automatically in the background, without any specific actions required by the user. Encrypting a file like a customer order or financial spreadsheet is as simple as dragging and dropping it into Zebu.
On that note Jesse asserts, “When it comes to your company’s communication, financials, intellectual property, human resources, and related activities, confidentiality is critical. Zebu gives them a transparent layer of security. Also, while most software companies that create business tools have built their business models around scanning and selling user information, Zebu uses encryption that means we have no way to read a customers’ messages or access their information.”
Zebu offers various other services including Secure Team Messaging, allowing clients to have instant communication and long form discussions from anywhere in the world; Cloud Storage for the entire team, providing all members access to a secure cloud storage system allowing them to pull the files they need from anywhere in the world. Every team member has access to a personal calendar that can be shared with others, making it easy to plan around people’s schedules. They can also set events as private to ensure that sensitive meetings and event information is kept with only certain individuals.
Comprehending Gradually
Zebu’s initial tool was a dispatch and service request system to help local taxi companies compete with Uber, and also help other delivery companies manage their fleet. Its transport app had the flexibility to be a a taxi hailing app and an “object” delivery system. While creating this tool, and working with these companies, Zebu perceived that one of the biggest issues they had was a lack of proper communication and scheduling tools. Hence the company decided to add those features to the initial platform in order to help the companies communicate and schedule orders and rides.
Once it became clear that the needs for these services was far greater and existing platforms could not deliver a compelling solution, Zebu shifted its focus entirely to those tools with the addition of cloud storage and file management. Zebu’s competition is composed of dozens of single, point-solution apps that only help with one thing. It integrates all business aspects into a single easy-to- use application, making single-function business apps irrelevant.
Additional Functionality
Zebu is continuously building up its Cloud platform that intelligently connects all aspects of business in a streamlined modular ERP system. Zebu provides small to medium sized enterprises across numerous goods and services industries access to the highest quality tools available to them. This enables them to thrive in the 21st century.
Zebu has ambitious plans for the future of its platform. It will re-shape the way local businesses around the world operate. It started with communication, storage, and scheduling, but will soon add additional functionality to support businesses across all their needs.
Cliental Assessment
“We were looking for an application that would do a better job than just messaging. We had issues with the previous message app, where we had to manually take care of simple task requests in the message. For example, messages would request meeting dates, and we would have to exchange dozens of text messages to define common availability. Zebu just automatically creates polls. We would receive dozens of files, which were hard to find later when we really needed them. Zebu has a clever organization of files, where we always find them. We also love the fact that everything is encrypted to guarantee our intellectual properties are protected.” – Eduardo Pereira, President, Redesa.
