Our company was founded with the intent to solve problems relating to multi-business management. Given our own experiences as distributors, retailers and multi-unit franchise owners we understand the challenges of running multiple operations and strive to provide solutions to alleviate related hardships through the use of technology.
Given our tactical growth model we have formed relationships with several trusted outsourced partners. Below is an overview of the history and experience of key members of both our internal and external teams.
...Meet The Team
Steve Woolsey - CEO
Founder of DevDesk LLC (US) and DevDesk Limited (UK)
Responsible for coordinating strategic vision, global operations, product development and team expansion.
History and experience in franchise development, business administration and entrepreneurial ventures have led to Steve's current career in software development of automated systems and processes for business management and retail expansion.
Steve worked for nearly 10 years in the franchise industry at Subway Northwest, Inc.: a local development office for Subway sandwiches. He helped grow the independently owned territory from under 100 locations to over 200 while taking part in all aspects of the business from territory planning franchisee procurement, acquiring properties, negotiating leases, organizing construction, renegotiations and renewals, and monitoring compliance and operations of opened stores.
His experience in the industry led to his involvement in the development of a private restaurant chain called Matt's Gourmet Hot Dogs where over the course of 5 years he was primarily involved in the investment, consultation, rebranding, store planning, leasing and construction of this chain of restaurants. In the later stages, he helped convert the operation to a "licensed outlet" model (as a Licensor) and subsequently relieved his interest in the company.
Given his experience in franchising, retail development and the technology fields Steve is now concentrating his efforts on the DevDesk brand and solving problems related to franchising, multi-business and multi-concept expansion.
Roy Woolsey - Non-Executive Director
Founding Member / Partner of DevDesk LLC (US) & DevDesk Ltd (UK)
Involved in investment and mentoring in addition to participating as a member of the board of directors
As a co-founder of Subway Northwest Inc., acting as a former Development Agent for an independently-contracted territory of Subway Sandwiches, and a current co-owner of over 25 franchises spanning multiple brands Roy brings to the board over 30 years of experience in the franchise industry as both a serial entrepreneur and angel investor, and over 40 years as a general business owner.
With a large portfolio of businesses including multiple restaurants, a van-oriented services franchise, and a home construction firm Roy offers a well-balanced view and broad knowledge of the challenges faced by multi-unit and multi-brand entrepreneurs ; a basis from which our company was founded with our intent to address unique issues faced by these types of complicated relationships.
As an early adopter, Roy opened what was only the 200th store in the Subway chain and the 1st in WA State (a franchise which now boasts close to 40,000 stores making it the largest in the world). Similarly Roy opened the first Mucho Burrito in the USA and has been involved at early stages with other successful businesses. The theme of early adoption and pushing boundaries is akin to the ethos of DevDesk.
...Strategic Collaborators
(Outsourced Team Members)
Jason Rampe - Design
Owner / Creative-Director of Creation- 1 LLC
Involved in the Ul design and technical flow of DevDesk Tabz | Client website graphic design work
Jason Rampe brought a fresh perspective to the creation of DevDesk Tabz. As the owner and founder of his own creative studio, Creation-1 LLC, Jason demonstrated a keen understanding of what we aimed to achieve and he was immediately able to transition our ideas into a clean and polished product. His skills surpass artistic mastery of graphic design alone as he was able to bring a higher level of functionality to the overall design.
The commercially-viable version of DevDesk Tabz contains many highly complex concepts and processes, and thus presented challenges of visually representing those complex themes into a simple and intuitive user interface. Jason was able to not only absorb the concepts and transition them into actionable outlines for our developers but he continually added his own ideas into the work which improved the usefulness and usability of our final product.
Jason has been an integral member of our team and has assisted us in other graphic design projects such as this site, sites of our clients and advertising & marketing materials. We look forward to continuing and evolving our strategic partnership with Jason Rampe and Creation-1 well into the future.
Amit Choudhary - Development
Owner / Chief Executive Officer of Innovaminds Web Consultancy Services Pvt. Ltd.
Involved in the coding and development of DevDesk Tabz v1-v3, alpha-beta | Client development work
Amit Choudhary has been working with DevDesk since the founding of our company. As specialists in Microsoft's MSSQL and ASP. NET, they were a formative partner in the development of our flagship Software-as-a-Services (SaaS) platform DevDesk Tabz. Over the course of several years, Amit provided us with a flexible development team at competitive rates. As a startup with a limited budget, our relationship with lnnovaminds enabled us to build a complex platform on limited resources.
Over the course of several years, our companies grew in parallel. Recognizing the benefits of managed outsourcing we built processes and procedures based on our own experiences to efficiently manage projects locally while outsourcing development to our project development partners overseas. By incorporating managed outsourcing into our development strategy, we are able to deliver a locally managed project at globally competitive rates thanks in part to trusted relationships we have built with strategic partners such as Amit and his team of talented individuals at Innovaminds.
Bobinson KB - SYSTEM ADMINISTRATION
Owner / Chief Executive Officer of Agileblaze Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
Involved in the cloud infrastructure development of DevDesk Tabz and beta platform restructuring analysis
Bobinson has been a trusted partner of DevDesk since the founding days of our company in 2009. Hs brands Agileblaze and Migrate2Cloud provide networking, security, integration and cloud computing services.
As early adopters of cloud computing and Amazon Web Services (AWS), Bobinson provided DevDesk with an unparalleled knowledge of the cloud environment when services such as Amazon's Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) were just being released. Knowing that our Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) DevDesk Tabz would require a highly scalable, global infrastructure capable of storing and computing vast arrays of information, cloud computing even in its infancy was the logical choice for our company moving forward.
Given the depth of involvement in growing this platform from scratch, we all gained a deeper knowledge of AWS and its capabilities. The team has consistently demonstrated the ability to understand the business challenges as we present them and deliver sophisticated infrastructure development services in the realm of cloud computing.
After building our relationship of system administration, security and infrastructure management we looked to grow our relationship with Agileblaze, asking them to take a more involved role in the development of our SaaS product. In 2012, in collaboration with lnnovaminds, Bobinson led our development teams in undertaking a comprehensive and deep analysis of our platform's core construction resulting in valuable insight and restructuring ideas that will heavily influence future improvements to the DevDesk Tabz platform.