After years as C-suite executives, Joe and Dawn Hewitt decided to leave their COO positions and dive deeper into Charlotte's entrepreneurial pool.
"When those jobs came to an end in 2015 and 2016, we were sitting here asking ourselves what we wanted to do next," Joe Hewitt said. "I’ve been involved in a number of startups, and she has a very unique skillset."
Joe Hewitt, former chief operating officer at AdvantaClean in Huntersville, and Dawn Hewitt, former chief operating officer at Huesby Inc. in Charlotte, founded startup Groupeasy in 2017. The web-based scheduling platform is a place that gives groups of all types the ability to address a host of challenges in one platform.
Dawn Hewitt said they chose to create this type of platform because as parents who were involved in many church, school and athletics-related clubs over the years, they knew a need was there.
"We spent a good deal of time doing research. This whole idea of modeling how do groups behave — doing that nerdish type work before we said, 'Ok, let's get serious about the requirements,'" Dawn Hewitt said. "We’d done a lot of prep work throughout our lives. We've been part of PTA and booster clubs. I was the wrestling mom for Southlake Christian Academy for 14 years."
The platform, which launched to the public in July, has a variety of customizable features including a news board, messaging function, document center, calendar, to-do lists and sign ups, surveys, photo gallery and member directory.
"Imagine you’re taking over as president of your child’s booster club. You discover membership is managed with a spreadsheet that’s coded in unclear ways. You come to understand that communication is done through email, but the email list and spreadsheet are not in sync," she said. "(With Groupeasy), it’s all about artifact management — 'Where's your stuff?'"
Hewitt added, "We’ve taken what we believe to be the essential components of these types of tools, bundled them into an easy-to-use, intuitive framework and made them available to community organizations, nonprofits, churches, schools and clubs."
Dawn Hewitt said the platform was created to be easy-to-use and give groups the ability to use as few or as many of the features as they need.
"You have the ability to see all of your activity for multiple groups right on one calendar and the ability to see all of your documents at one fell swoop," she said. "That integration took some time ... We wanted the workflows structured in a way that works for small groups just getting started and the more robust groups that have been active for years."
Groupeasy is subscription based. The first 30 days are free, which the couple said is to give group leaders time to onboard members. After that, the platform starts at $15 per month, depending on the number of members. Groups with seven or fewer members are always free.
Currently, the platform has about 400 individual users in 20 different locally based groups.
"Over the past year and a half we’ve been paying close attention to our beta users," Joe Hewitt said. "They’ve been providing us with tips on usability, and what to change to make things easier and cleaner. Based on their feedback we believe we’re ready to go."
He said the goal is to onboard at least 1,000 individual users by the end of the year and retain all current groups.
