Real Stories
Written by Allison Minutillo, President & Owner of Rebel Interactive Group
Leaf Me Alone
As our business started to boom, we hired new employees. But with each employee came endless HR tasks — one of them was tracking paid time off requests. Our VP of Human Resources was taking five minutes here, five minutes there to calculate every employee’s remaining balance across spreadsheets, email folders, Slack messages…you name it. That time started to add up and we thought, there has to be a better way.
It was silly — she is one of the most important leaders at our organization and yet she was spending all this time calculating days off when in reality, software could do the trick. So we started doing some research and found a bunch of tools out there that did this very thing. The problem was, they came with bells, whistles, extra features and overpriced nuances that we would never use. All we needed it to do was one thing: manage our paid time off process.
Since we tackle client problems every day as a digital marketing agency, we decided to tackle this one too.
Don’t Stop Beleafin’
We gathered some rebellious minds and a whiteboard marker, and got to brainstorming. What if we built our own PTO tracker? It would be exactly what we needed, nothing we didn’t.
It started as “PTO Tracker” — snooze fest. Until one day, our Rebel Realm Creative Director said, “wouldya just leaf me alone?? Let me leaf on vacation already!” …and the rest is history. From that point on, Leaf was our baby. From there, the momentum was real. Our Senior Developer turned an idea into a reality, the interface came to life and we started to realize that we had something special here. Software that had no frills, no added features, and not overly engineered. Software that other businesses like us who consistently thought, “I’d rather just do it myself than pay this amount of money for such a simple task” could benefit from. Software that made us happy when we used it, and added a little delight to our days. And because a bunch of Rebel Interactive Group leaders and employees birthed this idea, it was only fitting to call it RebelWare.
Oh, what a Releaf
I couldn’t believe the impact Leaf had on our organization. It was amazing to see the efficiency gained right before our eyes. Witnessing the sheer amount of request and approval activity gave us a greater appreciation for the amount of time this seemingly small task truly had on our VP of Human Resources. That transformation really opened our eyes to the other time-guzzling tasks and processes that we could now solve with software. We thought about streamlining our recruiting process which gave birth to Scout, then followed by Spark and endless other ideas. We could barely contain our excitement and had to share these amazing, rebellious simple tools with others like us.
Take it from me: time is precious. If you can get 5 minutes back in your day? Take it. 10, 20, 45? Please do. RebelWare exists because we needed it to — and now we’re incredibly passionate about helping other businesses like us not suffer through growth and repetitive tasks like we did. I promise you, it’s worth it.
