A boat is an excellent place to discover that having everybody’s telephone number does not mean anybody knows what is happening. Kevin Hutchinson knew the irritation firsthand. Arranging a repair meant moving between companies, repeating information, and chasing records. For a software entrepreneur who liked getting things moving, the experience offered more than an inconvenient interruption to boating. It suggested a business problem worth working on.
The answer became MyTaskit, a company he founded to help service businesses coordinate the people and information surrounding a job. Boats were its starting point. The ambition extended to other places where somebody assigns work, somebody performs it, and somebody eventually asks where the invoice is. Hutchinson had chosen a subject with little glamour and considerable staying power: the work required to keep track of work.
A summer rerouted
His own route began in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma, and continued at the University of Oklahoma. In a later account of his college years, Hutchinson credited professor Leon Price with steering him toward an IBM internship when he preferred a summer lifeguarding job. Price came from the same hometown and had played football with Hutchinson’s father. This was career guidance with unusually local intelligence.
Another mentor, university supervisor Ezra Rachal, supplied a practical education in standards. Hutchinson recalled a student crew having to repaint a whole shed after missing spots. He eventually earned his BBA. The contrast between an attractive summer plan and an office internship makes a tidy origin story, but its point is personal: he believed two people had taken his future seriously before he fully did.
IBM gave him a business education as well as a job. He later described spending ten years there, appreciating the training while finding the pace of decisions difficult. His preference was to get moving. That restlessness would find plenty of occupation in the businesses he went on to build.
A business hiding in the service yard
Hutchinson’s boating experience gave MyTaskit a familiar place to begin. Marine service involves mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and carpentry work. A service yard therefore concentrates several trades, several kinds of records, and several opportunities for a message to go astray. A boat may be one customer’s possession, but keeping it running is a group project.
MyTaskit was designed to put a task’s description, discussions, pictures, videos, and labor records together. A technician could add information while doing the job; a supervisor could follow its progress. The point was to reduce the gap between the field and the office, where someone needed an accurate account of what had been completed.
One marine customer’s experience gave that proposition a concrete shape. A reported independent return-on-investment study found a 50 percent reduction in unauthorized overtime and a 44 percent reduction in billing time. Those figures describe one customer’s result. They illustrate the kind of benefit Hutchinson was pursuing: a business with a clearer view of its jobs and fewer delays in turning completed work into a bill.
The day somebody actually uses it
In November 2017, Hutchinson called MyTaskit his fourth startup. Asked about an early milestone, he pointed to people buying and using the product. That answer has the advantage of being difficult to decorate. A service business can admire an idea indefinitely; a technician opening the system during a working day is a more consequential event.
He also described the obstacle. Companies worried that changing workflows would take time and interrupt their business. That fear deserves respect. A service manager introducing software is asking colleagues to learn something while the existing jobs keep arriving. The boat waiting for a repair has not agreed to pause its demands while everybody studies the new screen.
Hutchinson’s approach was to fit the coordination platform into processes businesses already used. Persistence, he said, mattered. His advice came from the experience of running several startups, including the stretches when patience was difficult and a result was far from assured. The practical test remained whether people would make the product part of their routine.
“In order to be successful, you need to be persistent.”
Kevin Hutchinson, 2017
By June 2017, MyTaskit Pro had passed 1,000 users, three times its level a year earlier. The consumer application had more than 50,000 registered boat owners. These were different measures: users of the commercial product and registrations on the consumer side. Keeping the distinction matters, particularly for a product intended to connect people across a service transaction.
June 2017
June 2017
The expansion had identifiable customers behind it. SkipperBud’s, Gage Marine, and Walstrom Marine joined during the move into the Great Lakes region. Suntex Marinas selected the platform for boat management and service coordination, and Prime Marina Group signed up for multiple properties. The pattern was a product moving through actual service locations, where its promises could be tested against the working week.
For Hutchinson, customer reports of better processes and revenue were reasons for the team to be pleased. The numbers helped tell the story, but the adoption involved people changing what they did when a job arrived. That is the quieter event inside a software growth announcement.
The name customers kept
Company building also includes discoveries that are less suitable for a victory speech. In 2017, MyTaskit entered a partnership with Montreal-based Valsoft over DockMaster. The established marine software brand had been presented as the Operations module of MyTaskit Pro since 2015. The new arrangement would bring the DockMaster name back.
Hutchinson was candid about the earlier rebranding. “To be honest, that hasn’t gone so well,” he said. Customers still called it DockMaster, and people inside the company did the same. A familiar name had proved more durable than the plan to replace it. Software users, apparently, had other things to remember.
Valsoft obtained the rights to the DockMaster brand and intellectual property, along with its product and service operations. Cam Collins continued as DockMaster’s president, and Hutchinson joined Valsoft’s board of advisors. The coordination and operations products would remain connected. It was a business adjustment that accepted what customers were already saying, with an executive willing to acknowledge the mismatch in public.
More people at the table
MyTaskit’s growth depended on capital and other people’s experience. In June 2016, the company reported $11.8 million raised to date. That financing had supported operations and two acquisitions. Charles Horn joined the board alongside investor and Akamai chairman George Conrades and Hutchinson himself.
The relationship with Horn’s 5Lights also brought support for marketing, strategic planning, acquisitions, and operations. These are the tasks around the task-management business: deciding how to grow, finding the money, and ensuring the organization can carry the next stage. Hutchinson was seeking help with those questions while extending the product beyond its original setting.
By May 2018, MyTaskit had formed an additional advisory board aimed at construction, property management, and marine markets. Its members included George Bell, Frank Blake Jr., Jim Bronstien, and Sandi Finn. Their experience ranged from internet businesses to construction, marine operations, and home services. Bronstien had been president of Rybovich; Blake had worked at Home Depot before leading a construction business.
The selection made sense for the markets MyTaskit wanted to enter. Expanding a coordination product requires understanding how customers organize work in each setting. A marina and a construction business both assign tasks, but their buying decisions and daily habits deserve individual attention. Hutchinson was adding people who knew those worlds firsthand.
The work behind the award
Partnerships offered another way into the market. In December 2017, Brunswick Dealer Advantage arranged discounts on DockMaster and MyTaskit for its marine dealers in the United States and Canada. The products combined back-office management with tools for assigning tasks, entering labor hours and notes by phone, and sharing job status. Access through an established dealer network put the software in front of businesses that already had service work to manage.
Recognition followed the product through those years. MyTaskit received Boating Industry Top Product awards in 2015, 2016, and 2018. Between the second and third awards, the company added scheduling, time-reporting, and notification improvements. A video training library helped people learn the system. The detail is apt: even software intended to save effort needs someone to explain how to use it.
Hutchinson received a CEO Today USA Award in 2017 and directed credit toward the team. He identified another milestone in technicians moving from paper work orders and time sheets to tablets and phones. It was a visible change in the place where the product mattered. At the time, he was pursuing expansion into construction, industrial equipment, and property management.
Today, Arsenal Capital Partners lists Hutchinson as a Senior Advisor. His business record includes more than $120 million in private capital raised, leadership in seven acquisitions, and four company sales totaling nearly $1 billion. Those are measures of company building, rather than estimates of personal wealth.
The MyTaskit years put a human scale beside that financial record. Hutchinson was concerned with an assigned job, a working technician, a customer waiting for news, and an office trying to keep accurate accounts. He had spent enough time around boats to appreciate how many people a repair could involve. His business was an attempt to help them get through the job together, with less information lost along the way.