Leadership: Mike White, founder and president
Headquarters: Milwaukee
What it does: Performance management software
Founded: 2021
Employees: Four full time, six contractors
Next Goals: Reach 2.5 million employees under management
Funding: Closed a $1 million friends and family round
Far too often, employees of small and mid-size companies are thrown into positions of leadership without any real guidance or training. That’s why Milwaukee-based software startup Secchi was founded: to simplify the process of performance management for HR professionals and operations managers.
Mike White, the company’s founder and president, spent 15 years as an HR professional at several companies including Master Lock, Caterpillar and Fairlife. He kept running into the same problem: There wasn’t a streamlined process to document performance issues with employees. This created more work as White found himself constantly teaching others how to record conversations or negative events.
“When you’re leading a lot of people, it’s hard emotionally and it’s hard tactically,” he said. “The emotional part of it is, when you do a write-up, you’ve lost sleep at night. You have this employee who’s being a problem, but you’re thinking, ‘I don’t want to do this.’ Then there’s also the tactics. I have a master’s degree in HR, but when I write people up, I still Google it. I want to make sure I do it right.”
With Secchi, which focuses on the blue-collar workforce within industries like manufacturing, logistics and health care, any employee event – positive or negative — can be logged in a matter of seconds and kept on that employee’s log for later review. Secchi’s platform gives users visual guidance on employee and team performance, engagement/turnover risks and positive employee behaviors. Secchi can also walk users through the steps of addressing performance issues.
White believes the software also helps relieve some of the emotional aspects of addressing employee performance since it provides indisputable data to back up the decision. There are also templates for how to interact with employees.
“Secchi gives professionals, in the palm of their hand, guidance on how to be a good leader,” said Ken DeBauche, co-founder and vice president of sales/marketing at Secchi. “That’s giving recognition, that’s addressing a performance conversation or talking about them showing up on time.”
While Secchi makes it easier to address employee performance issues, it can also help remind business leaders when they need to recognize their workers for a job well done. When a manager logs a positive employee interaction within the software, those moments are visually represented when it comes time for performance reviews.
White estimates the startup’s current customers save about 90% of the time spent using a traditional HR documenting process.
Secchi has closed a friends and family funding round worth $1 million. DeBauche said the funding will help the startup acquire new customers. Secchi currently has eight customers – ranging from a Fortune 500 logistics company to smaller, closely held firms – and that number will grow to 10 in the coming weeks.
The funding will also allow for further automation and gamification of the software. Eventually, Secchi will give users an instant performance review that’s AI enabled. There will also be a class ranking system that places employees in order of performance.
The long-term goal for Secchi is to have 2.5 million employees under management via the software.
