The Essentialists

By lifting languishing companies to their highest potential, Fullsteam delivers success from the ground up

When we view our world at a distance, it looks like every company is using advanced technology to drive their success. Close up tells a very different story, especially when it comes to founder-led SMBs, the legacy mom-and-pop shops that communities rely on and trust. Surprisingly, paper-based businesses do eclipse the earnings of firms that use technologically advanced systems – but eventually there’s a cap on sustainability. Always.

When legacy SMBs find themselves in a modernize-or-die scenario, they often have the will to grow but lack the muscle to keep going. Enter Fullsteam, a holding company that provides resources, operational best practices, and payment processing solutions to drive growth in underserved niche vertical markets.

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For many of these companies, leased physical assets are vital to their survival. From rent-to-own bouncy house rentals, dumpster rentals, and event rentals, Fullsteam’s rentals vertical (Rentals) acquires and modernizes asset-heavy SMBs that predominantly serve local to regional markets.

Bradley Friemel

As Fullsteam’s Vertical CTO of Rentals, Bradley Friemel oversees technical strategies for multiple businesses and software IPs within that category, scaling systems, elevating engineering teams, and leading sustainable transformation. He acts as part coach, part architect and, of course, part firefighter. “I try to always build engineering teams at scale for the infrastructure and create calm from chaos,” he said. “I do it by earning trust, developing people, and putting in systems that endure the hard times.”

Leadership in tech isn’t just about tech for this leader grounded in servant and transformational leadership. “It’s more about building the people, having trust in your team, mentoring the next wave of engineers that are coming out, and making sure that they align with execution and purpose,” he said.

Friemel puts companies on the upgrade path, planning for contingencies and working with his team to modernize systems. “That’s what I do from the business side, but on the client side, they’re looking more for deeper insights to their data,” he noted, pointing to the current demands for real-time inventory tracking, scheduling, and granular financial reports. Fullsteam fills those needs at every level, as well as helping them run their online business and booking, and giving them a secure payment system.

Continuous innovation is quiet but essential in the rentals vertical. “We’re responding to the increasing demands for self-service. Everybody’s used to going to an app, buying it, and not having to really associate with anybody,” he asserted. With real-time booking and integrated communication, when a customer abandons a cart, Rentals can reach out and push a message to the customer to entice them to buy or rent. “We try to build with the future in mind, grounded in today’s customer profile, and train them to become more of an advanced operator.”

The top-level company culture at Fullsteam empowers autonomy and ownership, and that helps Friemel to build teams and strategies that align with great long-term outcomes. “I always take it upon myself to foster a learning and resilience culture. If it gets hard or something breaks, which is fairly common in software, we’ll break and fix fast and then learn why it broke and how we fixed it.”

The strength of relationships in Friemel’s remit helps ease tough M&As. Friemel tells of having to execute a hostile takeover, remove the existing CTO, and revamp the entire engineering organization. Immediately recognizing multiple issues, he went directly to the engineers and slowly started building their trust by fixing the things that they were complaining about.

“When we exited the legacy CTO, the team was on board already because they knew I was there to help them.” Together, we migrated the server, made sweeping process changes, and doubled the size of the client’s team to meet with scale. “Building great teams and having great leadership matters,” he added. “If you have a great team and bad leadership, it’s a bad team. But if you have a great leader, you can take a bad team and make them great.”

The same goes for vendor partnerships, such as their collaboration with digital transformation experts Team International, which Friemel has used at several companies over the years. “In my prior life, I was the architect of a fairly large, multi-national pricing system, and I had multiple teams that were part Team International and part FTEs and we did amazing work. We were able to innovate, keep going, and take care of our large customer base,” he recalled.

When he took the CTO role at Fullsteam, Friemel brought them along. “They’ve been able to help me take care of multiple businesses, launch innovative features, and revamp and restructure very sensitive parts of the system,” he said. Team International is also helping the other businesses in the vertical, as well as the marketing department.

“We wouldn’t be able to operate as efficiently without them. The partnership with them is just so pristine. They’re always open to feedback, always open to training their contractors, always open to changing their process to fit whatever you need better. And if somebody’s not working out, they’re always happy to cycle somebody out and get better talent in. At the end of the day, they want our business to be as successful as theirs. I couldn’t ask for a better partner than that.”

When Busy Bee Jumpers approached Rentals about franchising in the Bounce House Rentals Vertical, Friemel’s prior experience in the sector enabled his team to build the technology to support them. “They’re crushing it now,” he said, stressing that all franchisees are making profits within their first month. “The amount of success that they’ve seen just off of a key technology partner is incredible.”

Behind the scenes there’s the satisfaction of their real-world impact. Take the bounce house rental system that Friemel is currently working with. “It’s so fun because we actually get to bring smiles to children. That’s what we’re actually supporting and that’s what keeps us going through some of the harder things,” he concluded. “It’s the same with taking care of small businesses. All of that keeps us going as a team and as a company.”