PeoplePerHour is a purpose-driven business… everything we do comes back to our purpose, which is to help people start and build their own businesses and live their dream of being independent. More than the what we do, and what we make, what defines us is the impact it has, why it matters to the world and how it makes a difference. Thats what gets us out of bed every day. And much like those people whose dreams we make reality, our deep sense of purpose is rooted in our origins and the journey we followed to get here. “In 2003 – a fresh graduate from university, and refusing to follow the paths of my colleagues into Banking and management consulting, I got what I thought was a ‘real job’ in a big Engineering firm to do one of those 18-month management trainee programmes. Six months in, and to the dismay of my parents, I quit. I realised that I would never make a difference in a big company, and that the bureaucracy, slow-pace, the red tape and lack of passion would kill my drive and hunger to mark my own little dent in the universe. I decided to start my own business. The idea: an outsourcing service to allow the time-starved to get their stuff done efficiently and quickly and only pay for the time they use, per-hour. It was a simple service, much needed and some simple math showed me that with 70% utilisation of every hire I’d make a profit. Three years in, struggling to scale the business up as fast as I’d liked, I started thinking how I could use the internet to do that. So I started an experiment: I put a simple one-pager on the url ‘pa-per-hour.com’ asking Buyers to submit their request online. Mean time Sellers could sign up as service providers with a short brief of their skills which got dumped in an excel-like data base. The early beginnings of a marketplace was born. Every Buyer request came to my inbox and I would frantically make calls and send emails to create a ‘match’, taking a 10% cut on jobs that I would manually invoice on a spreadshee