The GlobalWorkshop Story

Growing up I was enamoured with cars, and in particular engineering of them. Group B era, Turbo F1 cars and more. My hero was Senna, the 98T, yes! I had books on car engineering and really wanted to be a motorsport engineer.

In parallel I was also lucky enough to have a computer from age 5, had learned BASIC programming which setup a natural path for the future. For me - computers being more accessible, the path was laid out before me and so began the 1's and 0's....

After living in Canada for 8 years, I wanted to come home to NZ, and that naturally lead to commissioning a Fraser Clubman getting built. At the initial build stage I saw that there wasn't (surprisingly) any great software out there to manage 'build timelines'. Naturally with about 15 years dev background at that stage I set about building a first prototype

What do you do when you're building a startup? well, you go find the best in the business and ask them for feedback. I found a video from Patrick Morgan of DT Performance Ltd. The meticulous attention to detail really piqued my interest. To cut a long story short - from that first phone call, in 1 month we had clients on the platform

Mobile phones were evolving, but the sensors were terrible. Everyone was still using digital cameras - however Samsung released this Galaxy NX, the combination of a mirrorless digital camera and Android. We naturally got our app working on it, but not enough market demand and Samsung didn't support it for more than a few years! Such a shame as it really did solve a lot of problems for us for getting our product in shops

176 updates on the platform 'eating my own dog food' as they say in tech circles. I'd gotten the client experience from beginning to end, and being ultra friendly with Fraser Cars, feedback on what to improve. Acheiving my personal goal of having my car build fully documented was one thing, seeing it blossom into a product of it's own right something else

Using the reports feature built into the platform, Fraser cars printed a hard cover book embossed with their logo, and handed it to me with the car. Crazy to see a concept come around full circle.

Simon Lord of Redux selected us to be their partner for managing build timelines for clients. We were a bit chuffed with this - not only having Restoration clients but now Restomods!

In another 'pinch me' moment, I was referred to Katana Ltd. Meeting Trevor Crisp and seeing some Group C Porsches up close will go down as one of those 'well that's cool'.

One thing we'd learnt was mobile phone adoption was going to be key, and to do it bootstrapped without VC funding was going to need a lot of my (our) own money and time. So made the decision was put GW in hibernation until such point as when phones would really be universally accepted & phone cameras a lot better. Servers were kept alive, patched, and in good faith we didn't charge clients - we just kept things ticking over to see what would happen.

I went off to concentrate on my corporate career - culminating in being Co-CEO of Window & Door Software company (just over 100 staff). I managed the product & tech side of the business. In 2020 we were acquired and became part of a 1000+ staff member team, and then 2000+!

Learning an incredible amount about managing larger software companies, around the end of 2021 I'd decided to step down from that chapter.

Contemplating the future, I made a number of phone calls to old clients 'yes please, keep it going' was the resounding thumbs up. So we set up a new company for GW, and development began in earnest to update things to 2022 standards.

You can't do everything yourself so one of the first things was to get a mobile team underway - in early 2022 we had our first Android app out into the Google Play store. Camera/picture control and background uploads had come along way since the very sketchy first versions of the app in 2013-14

Callum at Retropower decided we needed to do inventory tracking, and twisted our arm to do so. This proved to be quite a fortuitous step as it expanded GlobalWorkshop beyond the build timeline tracking into workshop management, and oh what a slippery slope that has become !

Our iPhone app was accepted into the App store, marking another significant event for GlobalWorkshop, as we'd been using Testflight (the beta service) up till then.

In (yet another) pinch me moment - we publicly could say we had a warbird restoration shop on the platform. Pioneer Aero, NZ based, world renowned in P40 restorations had been using the platform.

One of our clients set a record (yet to be beaten) of 8901 media items uploaded in a single day, via our Import Robot

Gregg Kelly, whom invented the Fastmount clip system joined GlobalWorkshop as a Director, with deep marine knowledge, passion for all things fast a natural fit to be an advisor and connections with the marine industry

It appeared as if one of our clients could double as software technical trainers! Callum at Retropower dropped a 19min video on how they used GlobalWorkshop, to put it mildly, we were blown away! And then the phones started ringing....

We did a whirlwind trip of the UK, visiting new clients and prospects along with having our minds blown visiting GoodWood Revival, Southampton Boatshow, and Retrorides gathering.

Certainly a big step for us we got to see first hand a lot of shops, practises, and how we could help the industry. That and of course we got to see some very awesome machinery!

On our travels to the UK we'd met Caroline, who became our UK Agent, to help us grow and be a point of contact for key clients in the UK. What a milestone! To have our first multi-national presence and have someone who's obviously into cars.

Further in our expansion of workshop management tooling, our first clients had gone live with using our timesheeting tool. A major innovation was our QR code based system to make it super quick to track time.

Eagle whom we'd met on our UK shop tour, after being live for a number of months, graciously provided a case study talking about how they use the platform. A wee bit chuffed we are with that - having one of the premier Restmod companies worldwide using GlobalWorkshop

MST renowned for their MK i Restomod and a huge motorsport pedigree names us official partner. We're absolutely humbled and thrilled we're helping MST keep their clients informed. Seeing our logo alongside motorsport giants caused us more than the odd goosebump.

We struggled what to 'call' GlobalWorkshop, is it a CRM? Is it a Project system? Is it an ERP? with the advent of bringing our new BOM capabilities out for preview we realised we should be calling our platform a 'Vehicle Build Management' system - while slightly wordy, that's exactly what it does. Short of OEM companies we're still convinced we're the only system on the planet designed for the bespoke industry

A testimonial by Racelab after a year of use showing how easy it was for them to integrate GW into their shop. It was time to up our marketing game so this is our first professionally produced video and we were wowed by the results.

Did we go to Le Mans Classic? Yes we did ! And it was absolutely mega. Seeing clients and talking to them while the Group C monsters were warming up in the pits, how cool is that? This kicked off our Europe & UK tour. 22 shops in 8 days, 32 clients and about-to-be clients we talked to, oogled at cars and loved every moment

Our first case study from one of our largest clients in the US. We've immensely enjoyed working with Vintage Underground - our first large shop, first US shop, first EV conversion shop

Well this made our day, we were talked about by one of our clients Tolman Motorsport on the Car Chat podcast

I'm looking forward to GlobalWorkshop helping to bring many more people along the build & restoration journey's of beautiful machines.