HAUZ team
They co-founded HAUZ in March 2018 as a company that specialised in security hardware. But their multiple meetings with clients led to the pivot of the product, precisely a year later.
“When we spoke with our clients in the security industry, we realised that there is a major problem in managing the workforce effectively,” said Co-founder and CMO Shah Fariq Aizal Sha Ghazni.
“Currently, there are no solutions/products to address this problem. We realise that there is a gap in the market for businesses that operate multi-location and remote workforce manually. This prompted us to pivot in March 2019,” added Ghazni, who started the firm, along with Ho Di-Yan (CEO and Wayne Woo (Chief Business Development Officer).
In the current form, HAUZ is an online platform that helps organisations streamline their workforce management process. Its app also allows supervision and remote monitoring of employees.
The app also assists in the assigning and monitoring of work schedules, leave management, and checking on live updates of all sites in real-time.
“We help traditional industries and businesses to manage their large workforce attendance and operation reporting in multi-location around Malaysia and globally with zero proprietary assets. At the same time, we also offer a cloud-based platform with real-time updates that promises business continuity with zero downtime,” Ghazni explained.
The product also features payroll integration.
Primarily, HAUZ caters to companies, which deal with multi-location and sizeable remote workforce. Its clients come from across industries, including security, recruitments, facility management, construction, retail, cleaning services, F&B and education.
Clients pay a one-time fee of RM800, in addition to RM12 per user/month for a subscription.
Roller-coaster ride
The journey has never been easy, admits Ghazni. “It was never easy to build a team that shares the same values and vision for our clients. It has been a roller coaster ride to get everyone to be in sync with our company’s direction in the early stages. Active communication is key to building a strong team.”
It was not easy to convince and win clients either, as they were not familiar with the whole digitalisation and its benefits.
“However, we are grateful to see our clients took the leap of faith to jump onboard and benefited from it. Our solutions have helped them save up to 40 per cent operation cost, reducing processing time and improving productivity and efficiency,” claimed Ghazni.
Opportunities are massive — many companies in Malaysia are slowly expanding into neighbouring countries. For now, HAUZ targets Malaysian SMEs and associations by conducting workshops and seminars on how to kickstart their digital transformation journey.
“Once we seize a more significant market share in Malaysia, we will move to work with the right partners in expanding our product into other Southeast Asian markets,” he said.
“We are working on our numbers and securing better market share in Malaysia first before proceeding to expansion to other countries and going for future fundraising rounds,” he added.
Part of NEXEA’s 2019 startup programme, HAUZ has secured a small round of funding the angel network. With this investment, HAUZ was able to reach out to more clients in other industries locally and make improvements to the platform.
Key learnings
Before thinking of being an entrepreneur and coming up with a minimum viable product, Ghazni advises, aspiring founders should learn as much as they can about the industry pain points and be an expert about it. They should also look for a mentor who can answer your questions.
“Always focus on the customer experience using your products. At the end of the day, you want to see the customer transformation journey is a success and grow after subscribing to your product,” Ghazni concluded.
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