With the touch of a button, Mary Jane Mehlenbacher can transform her boat, her Gambier Island family cabin, or even a North Shore ski slope into her own virtual office.
Two years ago, the Lynn Valley resident founded Fiitfu CRM Solutions, a digital customer relationship management system that gives her access to client information wherever WiFi is available.
"I can take my business anywhere and that's the beauty of it," she says.
Fiitfu, an acronym for "fortune is in the followup," was designed with the solo entrepreneur - or "solopreneur" - in mind. Mehlenbacher says she hopes to help small business owners, who may not have the capital to establish their own client management systems, get digitally organized.
"People have these huge paper trails and they have sticky notes everywhere and they have notes on envelopes and notes here and notes there," Mehlenbacher says. "For me, it was about giving them something that was like their virtual office."
Fiitfu was also designed with women in mind. Mehlenbacher says about 85 per cent of users - which include event planners, photographers, network marketers, pressure washers and dog trainers - are female.
"Women are very different in the way that we look at things," she says. "For us, it's all about emotions, it's about feelings."
Through Fiitfu, users can access a client database to keep track of correspondence, sales and even personal information. Fiitfu also features personal invoicing, templated signatures and documents, a syncable calendar, printable client profiles, event tracking and a customizable followup system.
The idea for Fiitfu came to Mehlenbacher some time after she had her daughter Jaglin, who is now eight. She decided to leave her job in corporate management and start a network marketing business, which would allow her to spend more time at home. In this line of work, she met many other moms in her situation.
They wanted to be at home with their children, but also needed to earn an income.
"They didn't have a tool in place that they could use to keep them up to date on their clients and remember who they'd talked to," Mehlenbacher says.
Unlike other CRMs,Salesforce such as and Oracle which are designed for larger organizations, Fiitfu is built for the small and home-based business owner. New clients receive one-on-one coaching in their first 30 days and, as the name of the software suggests, it sends reminders to check up on existing clients.
"We prompt people to follow up with their clients because what happens in any business is if people aren't following up they're not going to make the sale," Mehlenbacher says, adding that people shouldn't be shy to maintain an open line of communication with their clients.
"Followup doesn't have to be a sales pitch. Followup is just keeping top of mind with what they are interested in and what their needs are," she says.
Since it was founded, Fiitfu has acquired users predominantly from the U.S. and Canada, but also as far as Mexico, Australia, Singapore and Denmark.
"My goal with Fiitfu is to really help people, and specifically women in business, to be more organized so that they can become more effective with their followup," Mehlenbacher says.
For more information, visit fiitfu.com
