Interview with Callum Coombes, CEO of Safepoint

We caught up with Callum Coombes, CEO of Safepoint, to talk all things from the increasing need for businesses to ensure the safety of their lone working employees, to the importance of real-time emergency alerts ar work…
 

Tell us about Safepoint

 
Safepoint saves lives.

Imagine you’re an engineer, an estate agent, a social care worker, or even a farmer. Something goes wrong, you get attacked by a client, or trapped under machinery. No-one knows that something has happened.

Safepoint is an award-winning staff safety tool that solves this problem, allowing businesses to ensure the safety of their employees, whilst easily staying compliant with today’s health and safety regulations.

With our easy-to-use app, web portal and hardware devices, staff can quickly sync their daily tasks with their supervisors as well as with our 24/7 monitoring team. If a staff member runs into trouble or is unresponsive, an emergency alert is sent out, as well as their real-time location and safety data.

Our GuardianPlus monitoring service also makes it easier than ever to protect your staff, at any time of day, wherever they are. If one of your workers’ requests help or is unresponsive, our accredited team will handle the response, every step of the way.

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

 
The idea was born after speaking to a friend who had to use a lone working safety tool at work. My friend described the tool as clunky and cumbersome, following with the fact that he and his colleagues have opted not to use it as it’s taking valuable time out of their day. It seemed crazy to me that he and his colleagues had a tool that could potentially save their lives, but because it had a bad user-interface and was frustrating to use, it meant that they would rather take the risk. This was the real lightbulb moment for starting Safepoint as we knew we could do better and we knew we could make staff safety an easy, even enjoyable experience

After some initial research, we discovered the true story of an engineer called Rob. He worked in the west of England as an engineer, going out to service machinery alone. One afternoon he slipped, fell and sadly died. However, the scariest part of this story is that nobody even knew anything had happened for over 4-hours. Rob was dead or dying for over 4-hours and nobody had a clue. The only reason his colleagues found out was that his wife called up at the end of the workday asking why her husband hadn’t come home. This story solidified in our minds that building Safepoint was solving a real problem and by solving it we could ensure that we could prevent future staff, from engineers to social care workers, ending up in a similar position to Rob.

How has the business fared during COVID-19?

 
Due to the impact of COVID-19, we’ve found a marked increase in businesses re-evaluating how they can protect and care for their staff more proactively, this has allowed us to engage with a much wider audience. We also ran an offer throughout lockdown where companies could use Safepoint completely for free, especially during the transition from office to home working. We are happy to say that this offer was well received and was available to support any business that had any safety concerns during the move to remote working.

We also partnered with another great business to offer the Safepoint Distancing Assistant (SDA). This great little innovation helped businesses on the return to the office. Staff members wear it on a lanyard or clip it to a belt, and it simply vibrates or beeps when they are closer than 1 or 2 metres. The SDA has proven to be a highly successful training tool for businesses returning to a range of locations, from the standard office to warehouse environments.
 

What can we hope to see from Safepoint in the future?

 
Excitingly, we are ahead of schedule at Safepoint! Just this year we have launched our Alert Button to provide a physical and more accessible method of triggering a safety alarm (it also contains an automatic fall alarm!). We’ve also recently launched our 24/7/365 GuardianPlus monitoring service. This means that to protect your staff every second of every day, all you need to do is download the Safepoint app and sign up, which thanks to a smart sign up process only takes around 3 minutes.

As we move forward we are continuing our work to make complete staff safety easier than ever. From improved user interfaces to working with partners to offer our services as part of existing memberships, such as our recent partnership with the UK’s leading agricultural buying group. We are also expanding our technology partnerships to provide some fantastic integrations, such as our partnership with the brilliant What3words.

We’re proud to say that we’ve stuck to our mission of making protecting your staff an absolute no-brainer and we are looking forward to what the future brings.