Episode 91 – Scheduling Software with Gavin Zuchlinski

Gavin: Hey, I'm Gavin. I'm Founder of Acuity Scheduling. Acuity Scheduling is an online software to help small businesses just offer and manage appointments online. I originally created it for my mom. She's a massage therapist and in 2007 I was talking with her and we were going over what some of her frustrations were and she was spending an incredible amount of time just going back and forth with clients' chit-chat back and forth, hearing their whole life story about how aunt Martha just had her kidney stone [inaudible] and everything else.

Brian: Oh, boy.

Gavin: I thought that there was a little bit better way to do this, so that's sort of how Acuity Scheduling was born. Then over the years, it has grown from just being my mom to having tens and thousands of small businesses of all types that I've never even imagined would be using that online with it now.

Brian: That's good.

Gavin: And then before this I've worked at a couple of other startups, but now with Acuity Schedule, here is my life.

Brian: Cool. When you say you worked at startups, what kind of stuff were you doing? Were you a programmer? Were you marketing? What kind of things did you do?

Gavin: Yes. Before this, I worked in the Washington DC area in the government space. I worked with a couple of startups there as the developer and CTO of another one called Berico Tailored Systems and then did a little stint as a government person, too, with some agencies there and then Acuity just started growing and growing large enough that I wanted to make it the best that it could be and the only way to do that is by leaving those things behind and focusing on that.

Brian: Cool.

Let's talk about what a scheduling software is because I'm not sure – this is just put something in your calendar and things like that. This is a fairly integrated system that does a lot of things and let's talk about some other platforms because you mentioned your mom and I know a lot of people in the massage and chiropractic business and stuff like that, and they use something like Mindbody which is huge, but it's very complicated where I've seen very, very simple systems where just somebody can go on and schedule to your system which has all this integration. So, let's talk a little bit about scheduling software and what it is.

Gavin: Yes. When I look at the landscape of them, to me in my mind, I see three separate tiers. There are the ones that are sort of basic meeting scheduling software. Something like Schedule Once is a great one where I see that as people who are trying to organize meetings in between themselves, not necessarily taking payment, not necessarily rendering any specific services and the need of the people using that one are they need less customization, less specific and granular availability. There's the other extreme end of that which are people who use something like Mindbody or Booker is another great one where they just do everything under the sun for managing your business that you could ever imagine from inventory, to payroll and I think even credit card processing with a lot of them. They offer ton and although I don't have any hands-on experience with them, from what I've heard from our customers like you mentioned, they're a little bit larger and more cumbersome probably just due to the nature of doing so much more.

Where Acuity sits is in between those where our target are businesses who are focused on appointments as their day-to-day. They're usually accepting payment through there and their customers sort of rely on appointment scheduling where if something goes wrong with it, they're losing business, so it's really key to them. But at the same time, they don't need a lot of the bells and whistles that a lot of the larger places like Mindbody use and they need something that's just more streamlined and fits into their day-to-day sort of business and integrates with everything without being too heavyweight and over the top like some of the other ones.

Brian: I understand how I'm using it in my business and we'll touch on that a little later, but when people are using your system – and even some of the other systems – what are the things that they're using it for? You said, booking appointments and things like that is one thing, but there are so many more integrations that you have like for example, Aweber, and PayPal and things of that nature. How do you see people utilizing this that make you go, “Wow, that was cool!”

Gavin: I'm totally surprised all the time by how people do it. Like I said, I made it for my mom who's a massage therapist and she in my mind is the target user – somebody who's solo and accepts payment and their day-to-day involves appointment, but it has been used for so much more than that. One of our long-time users is a fly fishing instructor and how to use it for the longest time which is very similar to that massage case where it's something very regular, but then we get people who manage their bowling alleys with it so people can reserve bowling lanes and manage birthday parties where you need to say, “I have a birthday party with X number of people, so I'll need four bowling lanes and all of these bowling lanes have to be next to each other. Only show me the times that are available when something like that is…” all the way to crazy stuff where we get techy escort services who are using Acuity to personal chefs, little league baseball. So it really runs the gamut.

I'd say our core are people who are very similar to my mom and accepting appointments. Like you mentioned, a lot of it depends on how you fit it into your business and we have a pretty robust API and I know that there are quite others who do and I think the real goal of scheduling software is to save you time. There is always back and forth and I see it as our role is to try to automate as much of your business as possible because if we're sitting as the customer's first interaction with you up until the point of appointment, we want to make everything in between there seamless as possible. So that means where we sit is making the appointment paying for it online so you can pay in advanced, collect deposit, collect the remainder of their [due tip] and everything else.

But at the same time, you can also start to send them automated reminder emails and text messages beforehand so that now that you made the sale, you actually make sure that the person shows up on time which is a huge one, connecting it to your MailChimp, Aweber, so you can do marketing emails or whatever other types of software that you have. We have quite a few people who integrate it into their custom systems. So they'll do things where there's a site user and they have an affiliate program. They have it set up where any of their affiliates can refer them people and then they have that go back to Acuity once somebody books an appointment, it does the usual thing of adding them to their mailing list and making sure that there are reminder for their appointment and then it will also automatically connect that referral back to the appointment so they can credit their affiliate the proper amount.

So we see people using it for all sorts from the scheduling, to the marketing, to connecting it back to all of their analytics.

Brian: It's one of the things when I was doing my research and looking around at things, there were handful of things that really sparked me. Number one was I worked with GoToMeeting a lot because that's how I do a lot of my webinars and I also do coaching, one-on-one coaching for social media marketing with clients. I've got a lot of coaching clients and the coolest thing about it was this allows me to say, “Okay, they booked this particular appointment,” then they're going to get an email with X amount of data that first and foremost it goes into GoToMeeting, and sets up the meeting, and then it captures that, and then sends them an email with the data in there. So, I don't even have to go in and set up the GoToMeeting which is a huge time saver. Like you said, it integrates – I use Aweber, MailChimp or whatever – but I use Aweber and it automatically adds them to the list and the amount of time that it saved me, it's been incredible. Then you guys integrate with a whole bunch of different platforms like Facebook, and WordPress, Squarespace, and GoDaddy, and on and on, and on.

So you've got all kinds of different integrations and that to me is a huge time saver. How are other people using this? Even the payment thing that you can take a PayPal payment right on the line, or there's another. I can't remember the name. It begins with an S. It's…

Gavin: Stripe?

Brian: Stripe. Thank you. You can do Stripe, you can do PayPal, so you can have people book things, pay for it and make all that happen and the other thing too, is you can set up as many reminder emails as you want, you could set up how people can or cannot cancel appointments, which I think is huge because a lot of the other software I've used is people can cancel and appointment at any time. This makes people pay up for it. That's all good.

How did you come up with all this integration? To me that's really the key because that's what makes it a lot more robust for business.

Gavin: Yes. Well, the long term vision of it is that somebody can book an appointment of you and all that you really have to do is show up and bring your expertise. You don't have to do any of those other crap with integrating with your marketing or anything else. So all of the other integrations that go along with that are to support that where the only thing you're doing eventually is showing up for the call, and hopefully that call is scheduled through something like Acuity. So all of those, we're constantly adding more and more. It's really all based off of where our users are asking for and a lot of them are doing the exact same thing as you. GoToMeeting is a pretty great software and they provide a great way for developers to integrate with it, so we just took advantage of that and the same way that we're offering an API so that other folks can integrate with us, too.

For example, there's a form builder company who's using the APIs so that's sort of doing the reverse where they have a lot of people who are filling out forms through their websites, so then one of their form elements is now Scheduler where Acuity can pop into their form and somebody can book an appointment and at the time that they're filling out everything else – which is sort of the inverse of where Acuity is where you're starting out booking an appointment and then you can go and fill out all of your custom intake forms and everything else.

But we have quite a few integrations and are adding more and more over time. Some of the ones like Stripe are really great. I'd much prefer Stripe over PayPal. I really got to get you to switch, too. You can do some really cool things with that like capture the person's credit card just to verify it, but don't actually charge it and then later on you can accept payment however you like or if a no-show, you're able to charge them your no-show fee, too. It provides that safety net for businesses.

And like you mentioned for integrating them to websites, one of my pep peeves with a lot of services is when they show their brand over yours. I see our role is to sit back and let you as the business really show off what you're made of. I got the [inaudible] through this scheduled appointment for this call through Acuity and I love seeing how you have customized your email to look like the rest of your email, too where you have the contact information at the bottom and it really showed off your brand. That, too, when you're able to integrate the scheduler into your website, you can take all your branding and your colors, so it's not just saving you time and everything, but it's also helping you look a lot more professional and to just really be like a part of your site.

Speaking of just saving the time there, a while back we survey where we talk to a few thousand of our users just to see what they were spending time on and what we could help with, and then just based off that scheduling alone, we found that over 90% of clients preferred scheduling their appointments online and a good almost 35%, almost 40% of them were booking their appointments when the business itself was closed, too. Just the fact that you have something that's available 24/7 and answering people's request basically for appointments is a huge, huge time saver even without any of the other integrations and people were saving enough time to basically have two and-a-half weeks extra time off per year so that you can focus on doing everything else with your business, too.

Brian: Yes, and some of your other integrations include like FreshBooks, QuickBooks, Zapier and then you have the ability, and I think this is huge for coaches, is to create your online intake forms, which I think whether it's a coach, or a masseuse, or whatever it is, I think that's totally cool because none of that stuff was available before in the last when I was using. And the other thing about the other one is that it didn't send out reminder emails which this one does. That was pretty incredible.

Gavin: Yes. Forms for us are really like a first-daughter element where if you're accepting appointments, one of the first things that most people do especially healthcare providers and everything else is collect a little background. We're HIPAA-compliant and I know a lot of other alternatives are HIPAA compliant too for healthcare providers. So you can have all of your information in one place, so when it does come time for your appointment, you can have a glance and see what's all there and have it connect back to everything else. If you're a modeling agency and somebody uploads the headshot, you can see that headshot in their appointment right before they arrive; or if you go out and do photography for real estate, you can have somebody enter their address online, have that pull up a Google Map and then if you're on your phone, have that give you directions to your house.

Brian: Yes. With all of these integration and stuff, it might be mind-numbing to some people because they haven't gotten their arms around, “Okay, going to schedule things online.” How does that integrate like in the case of mine, the last one I use integrated directly into my iCal. This took a little bit of jostling because I had to go into my Google Calendar and get all that stuff in there and Google wasn't playing nice with my iCal. I finally got it all to work, but that's okay, that's technology, I'm used to it.

But the key thing that I think people need to know is what opportunities are people missing? Because I look at this as a way that's going to increase my business and grow my business because it makes people more accessible to my calendar and they can book me for specific things and especially when they can pay for it upfront and I see, “Cha-ching! There's money in my account. That's awesome!” So how are people missing opportunities with all of this? With online scheduling?

Gavin: Yes, I think one of the biggest mistakes that I see is they'll go plan out for an account and then keep using whatever daytime or appointment book, or something paper and then just have the scheduler online like another way for people to book. I think when people do that, they're not saving as much time as they could, they're not getting things like reminders for all of the other people; and the worst part is, they're not developing the habits in people to schedule online. Since people like you and me are a little more techy-focused, I know I have a hard time actually booking a restaurant or something if they don't go online reservations, but a lot of people just aren't used to this concept and especially if you're an existing business who has been talking to clients and doing it the old way through paper calendar or something, sometimes it takes a little work where you have to just let your clients know that booking online is an option and that when they book online, they get all these extra benefits just for them where they can log on and see a history of their appointments and pay online in advanced.

And then for you, once you know that you have a 100% of your appointments going through there whether it's clients booking themselves – which hopefully is your end goal – or you're just manually scheduling them, then all of your information finally is in one place and things where you just need to look up somebody's history. It becomes really simple because you know that there's one online digital place to go through, you know for all your integrations that everybody who has scheduled an appointment is 100% on your Aweber mailing list for instance, and you know that all the other pieces of software that you have things connected to, are all used and synched going together. That's one of the biggest mistakes that I see.

I think the second one is what you are leaving too, which is Acuity is really one part of everything. Our focus is online appointment scheduling and we do that really well. We don't do online marketing really well, so somebody like MailChimp or Aweber is your go-to first on email blast. You should really be connecting Acuity with that. Same with if you wanted to kick it up a notch, I see a lot of people not really having insight of where their customers are coming from, so they can't optimize those different channels. So being able to have conversion tracking like Google Analytics or just for your Facebook Ad where Facebook, AdWords or anything else, that's like the next place that I usually recommend people to go to also.

Brian: Gavin, some great advice. I really appreciate the way you talk about the whole integration thing and the whole point of doing this is to help model your business in a way that's going to make it easier for you, easier for your clients – I love the integration and all the other stuff. But when we talk about integration, there's going to be some technical challenges. Like I mentioned, just trying to get Google Calendar to play nice with iCal so I could block out stuff. What are some of the technical challenges that people have to be aware of and also what kind of things are you working on to help make it easier?

Gavin: Yes. You hit on one of the big technical challenges, is just how many different calendar programs are out there. iCal is a nice one, but then once you get into that, you have things like iCloud which don't handle calendar subscriptions right, and then once you get into the world of Outlook, every version of Outlook is like a totally new program. We'll try to make it as clear as possible online. If you're using something like Google, luckily they're one of the easiest and then we're working on having new direct integrations with all these different programs just to make it plain and quite easy like it is with Google.

One of the other ones that we saw for a while, like I mentioned before, I think that business should really show off their brand instead of a scheduler. One of the things that we've offered for the longest time is being able to embed the scheduler directly into your website, so it looks like it's a part of your website; and we saw people not taking advantage of that just because you need to do a little bit with HTML code. We used to provide it, but they'd still be a little intimidated by it. So one of the things that we do now is there is a little button on the site where you can request one of our developers to log in and add the scheduler to your website directly. That used to be a challenge and then we're able to add it usually in five minutes or it would take somebody else maybe half an hour to learn how to do it. Sometimes a little manual work can go a long way to saving you time, too.

Besides that, I think one of the only other challenges like I mentioned before is if you're going to go for it, you get the best returns. If you go all in and have all of your appointments in there and then that helps prevent things like if you talk to Jane at 1:00 am in the morning and make a note in your paper appointment book that her appointment is and then you wait until 5:00 pm to add it in, somebody else might have booked in that same time. So I definitely recommend ditching your old paper appointment book and going straight to the online schedule to prevent any other weird race conditions like that from becoming a little snafu.

Brian: What about things like WordPress plugins for scheduling stuff like that? I didn't see one, but is that something you guys have? Or something you're working on?

Gavin: Yes, exactly. We do have a WordPress plugin. In fact pretty much all website builders – Wix, WordPress, Squarespace, Joomla, you name it – we can embed into and with all of those, it's done in a pretty standard way so that you add it to your website once and then you can just pretty much set it and forget it. It all goes back to the same back end and all of the changes that you made in there if you want to offer a new service and your pricing are instantly reflected on your website. That's one of the things where because we did see people getting a little bit of confusion with that, sometimes just figuring out where to go like with WordPress, figuring out how to install a plugin and then add a short code to your site to embed the scheduler within there, now you can just ask us to do it and we're happy to go into your site and add it wherever you'd like to.

Brian: That's pretty cool. That's excellent customer service that you're willing to take away the barrier from people. I really love that.

The next question I want to ask you is you obviously got thousands of clients and can you give me some examples of outcomes where people have you scheduling and they've seen a boost in business, or some kind of outcome where it's very positive for them?

Gavin: Oh, yes. I think one of the ones that touched me the most was a middle school that is low on funds and then they ended up signing up for Acuity and thanks to that for managing their guidance counselor and everything else, they were able to save enough money and time rather thru Acuity that they don't need to hire a separate receptionist. We also have a few other ones where you get a huge influx of people scheduling appointments all at once. For example, NORAD Tracks Santa uses Acuity scheduling to manage all of their volunteers. Around that time, they have thousands of volunteers who schedule all at once and they're scheduling for basically 24 hours worth of appointment slots and whenever they open that up, they get everybody and they want to be able to make sure that they have enough volunteers for each time so that they're properly staffed, that they'll not go over-staff at any time and especially not under-staff, too. So whenever NORAD opens up their volunteer registration, they give everybody the Acuity scheduling link and they make sure that they're never over-booked and that everything is evenly distributed. Since they started doing that, they absolutely loved using it and it has simplified their registration during that time when they get flooded with request. We're the floodgates for a lot of those things, too, which is great to see.

Brian: Wow! So you are the official scheduling software of Santa? That is outstanding.

Gavin: I guess you could say that. Yes.

Brian: Yes, you could. Now, if you could only get him to do a testimonial for you, that would be fantastic.

Last question for you is when people are using your software, any kind of scheduling software, I was looking for measurements of success. How can people see the success? I know the answer to the question because I know what it does for my business, but I really like you to talk about maybe somebody who's running a plumbing company, or somebody who is doing dog grooming or some small business. How do they measure the success of using something like this?

Gavin: I think that the biggest measure of success is the first time that you have somebody book an appointment with you, where you never talk to them in advance. I think that's a measure of success for your company as a whole online because that means that your website was good enough that you managed to sell them on what you are offering and you gave them enough tools that they could sign up and basically buy their service online in advance. I think that's a brilliant one.

But what we see a lot of people do is once you get everybody signing up for appointments online, you should be able to see within the reporting that people are signing up online, that people are paying online and each one of those steps that somebody takes is saving you a little bit of a time. So when you see people signing up, that means that's one less conversation that you had to have back and forth that's not a value-added conversation. Booking a time isn't really that valuable or something. You might be able to do whatever small talk in person, but going back and forth, I feel as just something a little extra. Same with paying [inaudible]. When you're doing money exchange in hands, the easiest way to do that is when you don't have to talk and they can just handle it themselves. You should be able to see all of those things within reporting somewhere.

Another great measure, too, it's a little bit harder to see is how many no-shows you've avoided. One of the nice things of scheduling software is that you're able to have automated reminders go out without you even needing to think about it. So one of the things that we heard from people is that once they start using online scheduling, their no-shows go down. Most of the time that's pretty transparent to use and you just stop somebody from forgetting about it, but other times you're able to see that in practice when somebody should get the reminder response to you and lets you know that, “Oh my god, I totally forgot that I'm not going to be able to make it.” At least then you can get a little heads up to be able to fill in your spot or anything else, but I think that's a great success and hopefully one that you'll start seeing.

Brian: And I thoroughly agree with you. With my last software which did not offer that, I can't even begin to tell you the number of no-shows where I'm blocking out time where I could be selling it to somebody else and they just don't show up, “I'm sorry. I forgot.” They input it in their calendar whatever they did.

The three things that I really, really like – integration, the fact that you integrate with so many different programs; the second one is those email reminders and the way you can customize the email; and then the third one is your reporting is rock-solid. You've got some really great stuff that shows you all of your appointments, it shows you the number of appointments you have scheduled, and if they're paid appointments, it will actually let you know how much money you've made on top of it, too and then you can integrate it with like I said, FreshBooks or QuickBooks and just have it go directly in there – all of that stuff is outstanding and that's one of the reasons I want to have you on, is just so that people understand the different levels of things that are available to people.

Now, if somebody wanted to get a hold of your system, tell me and tell them where to go and then also talk about your free trials and things like that so they understand and I'll have a link set up for everybody so if they want to get to it and do a free trial, they can get to it.

Gavin: Yes, absolutely. Acuityscheduling.com and I think that you'll have a link to it also. It's the best place to go. There's a completely free version that can do most of what you're looking for except for some of the integrations and accepting payments. And then we have three other plans – one for $10 a month if you're just a solo person; $19 per month, which lets you have several other calendars to manage different staff and locations and then also text message reminders and then text message notifications to you, too, if you want; and then a $34 a month plan for people like healthcare providers or larger businesses who need HIPAA compliance and need more than six staff or locations.

And then anybody listening, feel free to reach out to me directly to Gavin@Acuityscheduling.com. I'm happy to answer any questions. Our support team is fantastic. I love everybody who does that. We're around seven days a week, holidays and everything too, answering emails.

Brian: Yes, Gavin, this is fabulous. You gave me everything that we need and your contact info and all that stuff. I hope people will check it out. Man, if you haven't played with the free version, go play with the free version. I signed up for the test 14-day free trial so you could get access to all of the stuff so I could play around with it and just was blown away. I was also blown away at the fact that when I send in an email, you emailed me back. So yes, I loved to talk to you about it because you don't usually get that, that you're so open and willing to talk about the pluses and minuses. Man, this has been fabulous. I really appreciate you and your time and I hope people go check out the software.

Gavin: Thank you so much. It was great chatting with you.

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