What do panel beating and payroll have in common?

Kia ora, I'm Brendon Joy, founder and Chief Executive Officer of JOYTECH.

I didn't take the usual route into finance. I left school at 16 and spent ten years as a panel beater in Auckland before putting myself through a Bachelor of Business at AUT, working full-time in the shop the whole way through.

Since then I've built a career in finance — I'm a CPA-qualified management accountant for a group of New Zealand venues, including the country's biggest indoor arena, and I've worked in finance roles in the UK for the likes of WME, The Office Group and Grosvenor Group.

What that path taught me is that precision matters everywhere, even in jobs that look nothing alike. A shift costed at the wrong rate doesn't pay right, the same way a panel out by a couple of millimetres doesn't sit right. It's rarely dramatic, but it adds up — and most of the tools people use for payroll just aren't built for that level of detail.

StaffOPs came out of fixing that: hours that had to be checked and corrected after the fact, when they should've been right the first time. Building it meant sitting down with the people doing the rostering and actually answering the annoying questions — like what happens to a 2am meal break inside a time-and-a-half window, or whether a shift that starts at 22:00 really starts at 22:04.

I've spent my working life around systems that were nearly right. StaffOPs is JOYTECH's first crack at closing that gap — it won't be the last.