Roy Banks, CEO of Weave HQ: Speaks to The Silicon Review: ‘Our Mission is to Bring Local Businesses and the People they Serve Together by Modernizing Business Interactions and Unifying Data Channels of Communication onto One Smart Platform’

“Weave was the first Utah-based company to join Y-Combinator. Now, Weave’s VoIP phone system and software is used in thousands of small and medium businesses (SMBs) across North America.”

Weave HQ provides hardware and software solutions to streamline day-to-day operations of running a small business. It offers products to modernize and streamline all customer communications ranging from answering phone systems, to appointment scheduling, to text reminders, and requesting client reviews.

The company was incorporated in 2011 and is headquartered in Lehi, Utah.

In Conversation with Roy Banks, CEO of Weave HQ

Q. What was the idea that led to the establishment of Weave? Tell us about your journey so far.

Weave initially offered a phone system for dentists integrated with dental practice management software to help streamline appointments and support office processes. Soon we realized this solution could be scaled to benefit other medical offices. We saw that many daily challenges of running a medical or dental cabinet were quite similar across other service-based businesses: from hair salons to vet clinics, to pet grooming, to yoga studios, to physical therapy groups, to auto repair shops, etc. The possibilities are enormous! And we've evolved to help these businesses as they expand to more than one location; Weave now supports multiple locations.

Weave was the first Utah-based company to join Y-Combinator. Now, years later and through a series of fund rounds, Weave's VoIP phone system and software is used in thousands of small and medium businesses (SMBs) across North America and continues to see rapid growth, revenue, and innovations with its product.

Q. How does an average office save 60-90 minutes per day by using Weave?

Weave helps small businesses attract, engage, and communicate with customers. We remove the distractions of running a day-to-day business to help companies focus on what they do best: providing excellent services and products while delivering fantastic customer experiences. From the first phone call to the final invoice, Weave's unique integration of hardware and software solutions helps streamline and simplify business growth, retention, and communication across the entire customer journey. From simplifying and centralizing the customer appointment process to automating and personalizing customer communications, collecting impactful customer reviews, and fast and easy payment collection, Weave modernizes many of the daily processes that consume a lot of time for small business owners. Weave lets you focus on growing your business instead of running your business.

What makes Weave the complete business toolbox?

Weave’s unified experience management platform allows SMBs to unify, modernize and personalize their customer’s experience. We do this by consolidating and unifying multi-vendor or point solutions technology all into a single platform. We modernize the operations of each small business with tech spec built with their needs in mind. Weave delivers the latest enterprise-level experience management solutions at an affordable SMB price.

We also offer Weave Payments, a full payment processing solution that offers multiple contactless payment options including text-to-pay. This allows customers to pay the way they want, when and where it’s most convenient for them, whether they’re in the office or miles away. One simple text to launch payment and the invoice is taken care of!

And, we just launched Weave Unify last month, a patient engagement platform specifically for multi-location businesses. Weave Unify empowers healthcare businesses with multiple locations to leverage each others' patient bases, schedules, and call-handling staff to streamline operations, improve communications, increase revenue, and provide a modernized and personalized patient experience across the entire practice.

Weave helps address three major problems small business face today:

• Most customer experience management processes or tools are manual or outdated, not allowing small businesses to operate efficiently or focus on serving their customers.
• Even when there are systems or tools available to help small businesses, they are often expensive, separate and disjointed point solutions that don’t interact or play nicely together and are difficult to use. They’re inefficient, lack interconnection and are expensive.
• Small businesses have difficulty delivering amazing customer experiences or increasing rev growth and profitability, the things that truly matter to help small businesses grow and succeed. Lost revenue leads to stagnant or dying business.

Q. Interacting with customers is very important for businesses in the digital age. How does Weave help businesses with this?

Weave enables businesses to engage and interact with their customers in the way they want to engage--wherever they are, when they want. This type of modern, flexible engagement allows businesses to save time and money that can then be used elsewhere in the business--say to do more marketing, or to create new products. Weave helps modernize and simplify all customer communications--from answering phone systems across multiple locations, to appointment scheduling, to sending text reminders for appointments or to collect payment via text, and even to request client reviews that are so essential to promoting small businesses.

Weave delivers the latest enterprise-level experience management solutions at an affordable SMB price, enabling small businesses to deliver consistent, world-class, and personalized customer experiences that are normally reserved for multi-million dollar enterprises.

Could you recount an instance where Weave HQ's expertise helped a customer in a big way? Tell us about your experience.

• In Oklahoma, a Weave customer increased their new patient flow by 324 percent by using Weave: Went from 17 new patients per month and 10 online reviews. It increased to 76 new patients per month and 200 online reviews after switching to Weave's platform.
• Overall, our system has been studied to save our customers on average 60-90 minutes a day! That time for a small business is meaningful not just to their business but their personal lives, too.
• One vet office is scheduling five extra appointments a day just by automatically sending a text to missed callers and having them text them back to set up an appointment.
• And a customer of ours is saving $200 a month from stamps and envelopes and printing while also collecting an additional $10,000 by switching to our text to pay features.

Q. What is the work culture all about at Weave?

Weave's motto is “people, not employees.” We firmly believe that treating our team like family and caring about them as people is crucial to creating a culture of respect, inclusion, and desire to learn and grow and compel us to perform our best for those around us.

Weave has won multiple awards for its distinctive culture:

• Fortune '100 Best Medium Workplaces 2019’
• 2019 ‘Forbes Cloud 100’
• 'Best Workplaces 2019’
• 5000 ‘2019 List of 'Fastest-Growing Private Companies in America'
• Glassdoor ‘2019 Best Places to Work in the US,' ranked 7th
• Glassdoor ‘2019 Best CEO in the Country,' ranked 4th
• Glassdoor ‘2019 Best Places To Work'

Q. How was your experience working through the COVID-19 pandemic?

Like all companies, we shifted our 700-person workforce to 100 percent remote work overnight due to the global COVID pandemic. We've been successful during this difficult time thanks to our robust culture, amazing team, and caring leadership. The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted many SMBs and has rendered 19 percent of small businesses in the U.S. currently non-operational. Weave can help many of these businesses adapt their operations and client flow so they can safely reopen to the public and start earning revenue again.

The Ardent Visionary Behind the Triumph of Weave HQ

Roy Banks serves as the Chief Executive Officer of Weave HQ.

Roy brings to Weave more than 20 years of experience in the high-tech software development, e-commerce, internet marketing, and payment processing industries. He most recently served as a CEO of Tritium Partners. Before that, he was president of the LoadPay Business Unit and a board member for Truckstop, where he helped the company's payment initiative grow into the leading payment solution for the transportation industry. Mr. Banks has also served as CEO of Network Merchants Inc. and Accelerated Payment Technologies and as president of Authorize.net. He has a distinguished and proven track record of successfully leading SMB and mid-market focused companies while accelerating growth and increasing enterprise value.

"Weave Unify, a patient engagement platform specifically for multi-location businesses, empowers healthcare businesses to streamline operations, improve communications, increase revenue, and provide a modernized and personalized patient experience."