In 2014, I joined two friends to start a company called HazardScout. HazardScout is a safety management system that offers safety reporting, training tracking, online learning, equipment management, safety alerts, and more.
Back in 2011, Deren Boyd and Dagen Boyd (the other co-founders) contacted me in regards to developing a Behavior Based Safety Reporting web application and app. At the time, I had committed to another side-project, so I had to pass up a great opportunity. A few years later, they reached back out and we started an exciting journey.
Deren was the safety director at an oil-field service company and had spent years looking for a turn-key software product that could digitize their reporting, manage their training, etc. At the time, standard safety processes were paper-based and included fax machines, excel spreadsheets, calendar reminders, read receipts, etc. All of the software solutions at the time were 6-figure/year, required long-term contracts, and were built on 20-year old technology. Moreover, they only included a small, fixed number of logins – meaning that reporting would still be paper based, but the safety administrator would be able to re-enter the reports into the system.
It was immediately clear that there was an opportunity to build a system that was user-friendly, task based, and affordable with first-class support for mobile devices. A year later, the price of oil began to decline and oil field companies were cutting costs dramatically, yet we were fortunate to still find growth. We also discovered that safety reporting, training management, inspection tracking, etc weren’t just oil field needs, but also construction, manufacturing, etc – so we modified the software to support these other industries. Now it’s 3 years later… we’ve had a lot of fun, we’ve learned a lot, and we’ve refined the software over-and-over. We’ve made it a top-priority that the software allows safety administrators to modify nearly anything within their application without having to contact or hire our support team. We’re always happy to help with changes, but people prefer to “add a new question to their safety audit” without any assistance. That lets us focus on new development and let’s them refine their processes in seconds.
Checkout the website if you want to learn more:
https://www.hazardscout.com
