Ade Bullock
CEO and Founder
In 2006 I co-founded Contigo Software, an energy trading software company, with three friends. We grew the business and sold it in 2013 to a large European competitor. In 2020, I formed Workup; with the vision to build applications to enable businesses to be more productive using people-focussed management. Workup has been designed from my own experiences in managing project teams; it is the tool that I always wished I had.
When I managed teams, I used a complex mix of Excel, Email and other tools to try to manage people on my team, but ultimately they weren’t that effective and wasted a lot of time and energy. Other teams had different processes and tools to manage their own people and projects. Data was siloed and it was very hard for us to access the information we needed across the organization. Different applications would hold related data but rarely be properly integrated. People management was often an afterthought and the philosophy was that employees should just “get on with it”.
As a software developer myself I knew we could do better. Rather than just provide yet another HR platform, I wanted to build something that actually made people more efficient and productive. I wanted to help making employees feel valued and understood. In the well managed companies I saw, I could see the difference in performance, engagement, happiness and productivity in employees who felt they were valued and the company prioritised the people in their organization. I realized that this was the power of ‘people-focussed management’.
Workup has been developed by Mutable Software and will be launched in the autumn of 2022. Workup is based in Birmingham UK.
