Tim Chatfield and
the price of an hour

Tim Chatfield grew up on Sydney’s northern beaches trying to arrange life around the surf. Before he had a staffing marketplace or an executive title, he already had a scheduling problem: how to make more room for the thing he wanted to do. Years later, the question would acquire payroll, customers and a rather unusual company name.

At ten, he found a small business in discarded pop magazines. He took out the band posters and sold them to other children for fifty cents to a dollar. The inventory cost nothing. The customers were close by. As introductions to commerce go, it had the considerable advantage of requiring no pitch deck.

He went on to supermarket work, call centers, recruitment, hospitality events and technology. By twenty-one, he recalled, he was managing two call centers and sixty staff. The tidy version of that career is a succession of jobs. A more interesting reading follows the recurring practical concern: getting people and demand to meet at the right moment.

“It’s about time.”

Jitjatjo’s company mantra, as described by Chatfield

A city with enough moving parts

Chatfield spent almost five years in Singapore as CEO of Viocorp before moving to New York with his family in mid-2016. Launching Jitjatjo meant starting again in a city where he lacked an established local support network. An international business career had brought him some distance; a new marketplace still needed its first relationships.

There was a commercial reason for choosing such an expensive place to begin. Chatfield saw New York’s hospitality market as a useful combination of density, demand, workers, culture and access to capital. For a staffing service, proximity matters. A willing bartender a continent away is of limited assistance at six o’clock.

He and co-founder Ron McCulloch brought different experience to the same problem. McCulloch knew hospitality’s recurring difficulty finding staff. Chatfield had worked across staffing and technology. Jitjatjo offered restaurants, venues and caterers a way to request temporary help from a phone. The public New York launch came in October 2016.

The appeal was easy to picture: a manager has a gap in the roster, enters a request and gets a suitable person. The company had to handle the less photogenic work around that request, including screening, paperwork, timekeeping and payroll. A simple screen could contain a surprisingly crowded back office.

The shift goes to a person

One of Chatfield’s objections to other staffing approaches was the race to claim a notification. Broadcasting a job to a group could reward the quickest response. Jitjatjo’s proposition was to use a worker’s suitability and availability to decide whom to invite. The fastest thumb had enjoyed a brief and questionable career as a recruitment credential.

The distinction shaped the worker’s experience as well as the manager’s. A worker could state when they were available and receive an invitation suited to their profile. The business could ask for someone equipped for the assignment. Jitjatjo described its workers as W-2 employees and took responsibility for the administrative processes around their employment.

Trust also changed what customers wanted. The early service allowed bookings only one to seven days ahead. As clients became comfortable, they wanted to use it for later dates. The window expanded to two months. Chatfield’s account makes a small calendar change unusually revealing: customers had begun treating the service as something they could plan with.

The person holding the other calendar

Chatfield’s public argument for flexibility has always had a human complication. Employers want dependable coverage. Workers want a degree of choice. A marketplace has to make both preferences work on the same afternoon. Putting the word “flexible” on a website does little to settle who gets Tuesday evening.

By 2017, he was talking about the difficulty of disconnecting when business and technology reach across time zones. He also argued that companies offering a culture supportive of life outside work could improve recruitment. The founder selling access to available workers understood that constant availability was hardly an uncomplicated personal benefit.

His own earlier wish for more surfing time gives that argument a recognizable scale. People have things they want to do with their hours. A working arrangement becomes attractive partly because of how well it accommodates those things. A roster may look like a table of names to a manager; to the people named, it is a week.

In 2022, Chatfield’s advice to employers extended beyond the schedule. He emphasized clear expectations, fair wages, a welcoming environment and opportunities to learn other roles. His examples were practical: let a worker shadow someone more experienced; make praise specific enough to show that someone noticed the actual work.

“When embracing a flexible-work model, you are giving up perceived control.”

Tim Chatfield, 2022

He tied loyalty to trust, communication and support. That places a burden on the employer as well as the worker. A person returning for another shift has to see a reason to return. The software may arrange the introduction, but the experience at the workplace will have something to say about the next invitation.

By January 2024, he described a change in priorities among workers who were placing more weight on their own schedules. He expected marketplaces to help companies deploy internal employees as well as find external help. He also anticipated people moving between staff jobs and freelance work. In his account, working lives were becoming less neatly boxed.

A company survey released in February 2024 gave that argument a number: 63 percent of respondents said setting their own schedule made gig work more attractive than a traditional office job. It was Jitjatjo’s research, a snapshot of the people surveyed at that time. It helps explain what Chatfield was trying to sell to employers: access to people whose willingness to work depended partly on having a say in when.

The distinction matters for understanding his career. Recruitment can begin with an employer’s vacancy and treat everyone else as a candidate to fit into it. His public argument increasingly began with a worker’s available hours, then asked how a business could organize around them. Making those hours legible to both sides was a commercial opportunity. Delivering the promised choice remained an operating responsibility.

Three audiences, one working day

As Jitjatjo expanded, Chatfield had to explain a business serving several audiences. During its Houston launch in 2022, he described separate offerings for small and medium businesses, workers, and larger organizations needing technology under their own branding. The restaurant booking a server and the enterprise managing a workforce were arriving with different shopping lists.

The Houston explanation showed the scale of the operating task. Applicants needed prior experience and went through interviews, reference checks and screening. For small businesses, the pitch included access without signup or subscription fees. Whatever the convenience of the app, the service depended on a local community of people able and willing to work.

Growth brought more people into the room. In his year-end account of 2023, Chatfield highlighted a partnership with Maof to power its GetJob flexible labor marketplace, new commercial leadership appointments and a headquarters move in New York. He presented expansion as a combination of partners, team members and products.

That December, Jitjatjo announced a $30 million Series B led by Morningside Technology Ventures. Funding could support the next stage of the business. It was also another reminder that a founder’s public milestones are often company events: the money belongs in the account of what the company could attempt, rather than as a shortcut to the founder’s personal fortune.

The title changes; the question travels

By February 2025, Chatfield was announcing a new role as Solutions Partner at Wizeline. The company said he would be based in New York and work with its commercial team. His stated ambition was to put AI and other technology to work for people while producing useful business results.

The move brought an earlier part of his career back into view. Video had been a substantial professional chapter: the Marketing Institute of Singapore listed him as Viocorp’s CEO Asia and Global Head of Partnerships for a 2014 talk about online video. Media technology was familiar territory before Jitjatjo made staffing his best-known subject.

At NAB 2025, he sat down with AWS’s Christopher Bell for a conversation about media and entertainment. The subjects included profitability, personalized content, AI-assisted workflows and computer vision for social content. Wizeline later listed him among its IBC 2025 team. The vocabulary had moved from shifts to content, while the interest in making complicated work easier remained recognizable.

Jitjatjo’s company story continued separately. In September 2025, Dayforce announced it had acquired parent JJJ International, which operated Jitjatjo and Network. Its announcement described temporary staffing and vendor management becoming part of Dayforce Flex Work. This was a later chapter for the business Chatfield had helped establish; his own announced role was already elsewhere.

A later legal development also belongs on the calendar. A federal civil action filed in August 2026, Violante v. JTEC Holdings Inc. et al., named Chatfield among the defendants in a Fair Labor Standards Act case. The filing records a dispute, and does not establish liability. The reviewed docket listing was updated on October 9, 2026.

For Chatfield, the recurring subject across these different settings is how people spend working time. The young surfer wanted more of his own. The staffing founder sought to reconcile a manager’s vacancy with someone else’s availability. The enterprise adviser now discusses workflows and business results. Each setting asks the technology to earn its place in a day that was already full.