In Freelo, the fruit wine e-shop manages the complete operation from shipping to marketing to accounting. What's not in Freelo doesn't happen in the company.
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Petr Čerňanský answers for Rybízák.cz
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Rybizak.cz handles all operations around the e-shop in Freelo. The owner of the e-shop Petr Cernansky admits that before it was literally cyberpunk, shares his experience with process management tools and shows what kind of agenda his team has in Freelo.
We tried topics numbering and questions in Slack. It was crazy and inefficient. Then we tried Trello, but somehow we didn't get along with it. And then we discovered Freelo at the conference. Within a week the whole company was running on it and efficiency went up.
Petr Cernansky founded the rybizak.cz e-shop in 2017 and by mid-2018 he already had a team of seven people. Today, over 25 people work for Rybizak. How did they deal with the organization of work and how did they choose a tool to manage the agenda around the e-shop?
In that year 2017, my girlfriend and I suddenly decided to fly to South-East Asia. We ended up spending six months straight there. Managing a team of people remotely was hell. Plus, the time difference was always around 6 hours, so we never met during working hours. We handled everything via Slack, numbering topics and questions and communicating like crazy. It was inefficient.
Then we tried Trello. But somehow we didn't come to terms with it and never started using it effectively. Then, at an eCommerce conference in 2018, we came across a Freelo Booth with Karel Dytrych, who treated us to fine rum. He briefly introduced Freelo (although to be honest, we didn't really care much, we only went there for the rum 🙂), but we we're extremely excited about it. From the following Monday we started to deploy Freelo in the company and within a week everyone was working in it.
Witch Burning Day was the most successful event in the history of Rybizak until this year's March, and we came up with the idea 18 hours before it was launched. And we did it.
Then when we went to the USA and Mexico for 2 months, where the time shift was 6 hours the other way, the work was many times easier and more efficient. We finally started delegating. In Freelo, we have all the freelancers, the office staff, the wine bar girls, the warehouse managers, and the dispatchers. That is, everyone except a few people in production (but even there is one computer available and the whole production has one universal Freelo account).
Freelo is cheap as hell. Karel is a philanthropist, I can't explain it any other way. It makes sense to implement is even if you're alone in the company. Freelo was made for freelancers, hence the name. It can serve as a task manager, a personal time management organizer, and gradually you get to delegate to a team of people in such an efficient and clear way that I can't imagine anything better.
E-mails, Excel, Slack. At least the Slack :) We used to forget a lot of things, people weren't doing what they were supposed to and we had no way to control them. It was literally cyberpunk.
It was pretty wild and sometimes it's still like that with us (laughs). All of a sudden, somebody came up with the fact that Father's Day is in a week. So we quickly started working on illustrations, labels, preview photos, banners and shot it up for sale. There were many times when we put a wine on sale that wasn't finished. But somehow we always got it done.
All Freelo features are perfect. Nothing is missing and there is nothing extra. I have never seen such a perfectly tuned software.
We are trying to plan now, because especially for freelancers, it's hard for us. For example, we had Valentine's Day ready in November. But for example, last year's ”prize burning" on Witch Burning Day was the most successful event for us in Rybizak's history until this March, and yet we came up with it about 18 hours before launch. And we did it. This year the prize burning will be the second Black Friday (we cancelled that one in 2020 because we couldn't handle the stock).
💖První máj, lásky čas...💖 Naše speciální vína jsou tu zas.💖 Ukaž, že nemáš 🤖srdce z plechu🤖 a vyjádři se ze svých citů věru originálně.💝 Naše limitovaná Prvomájová kolekce je pro to jako stvořená.🥰
Zveřejnil(a) Rybízák.cz dne Čtvrtek 15. dubna 2021
No. Everybody was excited.
Now we have a rule in the company that if someone doesn't have a task in Freelo, it's as if they don't have it. The most common verbal response we get is " ”throw it in my Freelo".
Possibility to store filters. In the company we are divided into 3 teams. I lead one. For example, I have a filter ”Team Peter", where I can see the tasks of everyone in the team who is due today (or who is overdue).
We're also excited about the new smart subtasks with deadlines.
The templates are great too. When we create a new edition (e.g. for May 1), it is a complex work of the whole team. We just use the task template, tweak a few things and everyone has their tasks handed out and nothing is forgotten.
Personally, I was very pleased with dark mode. But all Freelo features are perfect. Nothing is missing and there is nothing extra. I have never seen such a perfectly tuned software before.
We use Freelo for absolutely everything. What's not in Freelo, doesn't happen in the company.
Here we solve operational things by means of repeated tasks (e.g. the assistant has a repeated task every week that she has to check the pressure in the boiler or every six months that someone has to have the tyres changed, etc.). We are now completing the summer menu at the wine bar in Freelo. The accountant in the task ”Missing Documents" is throwing out subtasks to everyone with what they have to deliver to her. The buyer here prepares the news for the farmer's market section and in turn we throw her tips for interesting products and she processes them.
The dispatch manager assigns tasks to customer support (e.g. call the customer, we don't have this and this), while customer support assigns tasks to dispatch or production (add this and this to that order).
We use Freelo for complete communication with external freelancers. And most importantly, we prepare special events - you could see how the May 1st edition is created in the pictures from our Freelo in the article. It's a bunch of tasks that are done by a bunch of people. But nothing is forgotten and everything runs like clockwork thanks to Freelo.
