Former Cartridge-World Manager Sells TSheets Business For $340M

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Former Cartridge-World Manager Sells TSheets Business For $340M.​
Matt Rissell Sells TSheets To Intuit For $340 Million.
By Susan Adams

A dozen years ago, a cheating employee spurred Matt Rissell to start TSheets, which makes time sheet software designed for small businesses. Today, Rissell announced that he was selling the company, based in Eagle, Idaho, to financial software giant Intuit in a transaction valued at $340 million. Known for products like QuickBooks and TurboTax, Mountain View, CA-based Intuit is aiming to expand its offerings for small businesses and for self-employed people. The two companies already share 12,000 customers.

For Rissell, the deal offers a chance to pump up TSheets’ customer base, improve TSheets’ software and make it easier for customers to integrate it with QuickBooks. Since 2011, TSheets users have been able to download their TSheets data into a QuickBooks spreadsheet. That includes payroll and invoicing records and so-called job-costing, which helps companies track the costs associated with individual projects.

Once the deal closes, likely in the first quarter of 2018, Rissell will leave his job as TSheets’ CEO and become a vice president and segment leader on an Intuit team headed by Alex Chriss, Intuit’s chief product officer for small business. Intuit has acquired many such products, like Exactor, subscription software that tracks and files sales tax, which Intuit announced it was buying in October.

Rissell got the idea for TSheets back in 2005 when he was running three franchised Cartridge World stores that sold ink and toner cartridges for printers. He was going over time sheets for his 35 employees and found that one of his trusted staffers had put in for 15 minutes more time than she had worked. He searched for software that could manage his time sheets, but he couldn’t find a product geared for small businesses with more than one location. So he turned to his buddy Brandon Zehm, a software architect who proceeded to design a cloud-based program that could track Rissell’s staffers. It worked so well that Rissell sold his Cartridge World stores in 2007 and devoted himself to TSheets.

He made the product affordable, charging a base fee of just $16 and a monthly fee of $4 per employee. TSheets has not raised its prices since 2010. Keeping prices steady helped spur growth, says Rissell. TSheets has 35,000 customers in more than 60 countries.

Rissell won’t comment on revenue except to say that sales have doubled every year. When Forbes interviewed him in January 2016, he said TSheets had 20,000 customers and we estimated revenue at nearly $20 million, which means TSheets’ revenue is likely more than $40 million today. In October 2015, TSheets raised $15 million from Summit Partners, a private equity firm based in Boston, for an undisclosed valuation.

Under the terms of the Intuit deal, all 260 TSheets employees are receiving an offer letter to work for Intuit, says Rissell. The office will remain in Idaho, where the plan is to add 100 employees within the next year. Yesterday, when news of the deal was still a secret, TSheets and Intuit called an all-hands meeting for TSheets’ staff and explained how the transaction would unfold.

Rissell says he’s turned down numerous acquisition offers for TSheets and that until the Intuit deal came up, selling TSheets was not a goal. “People are asking me, is this what you’ve always dreamed of?” he says. “The truth is it really isn’t.” He won’t comment on what share of the company he owns. “This is one more milestone, a cool milestone, in a really long journey,” he adds.

Because TSheets’ products are designed to integrate with QuickBooks, the two companies have worked closely together for six years, including engineers, managers, marketers and people at the leadership level. “I consider Brad Smith a mentor,” says Rissell of Intuit’s CEO. The two had lunch twice a year. Intuit chief product officer Chriss instigated the deal with a call to Rissell early in the summer.

How does Rissell expect his day-to-day life to change? “I will still lead the business, with the charge of growing as fast as possible,” he says. The pace is likely to ramp up. For example, TSheets gives away its product for free to all of its 15,000 accountant customers, many of whom recommend TSheets to their clients. The number of accountants with free access to TSheets will immediately shoot to 600,000 once the Intuit deal is closed. TSheets’ goal has been to recruit 1 million business customers as quickly as possible, says Rissell. “The scale and speed of getting to our vision is going to accelerate.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2017/12/05/matt-rissell-sells-tsheets-a-time-sheet-tracker-for-small-businesses-to-intuit-for-340-million/#73f123a673bc

 

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December 7, 2017 at 1:00 PM