One platform to run your whole business

About the company

mybizopz is an all-in-one business management platform for UK small businesses. It brings together the things most owners currently juggle across half a dozen separate apps — HR and payroll, invoicing and accounting, VAT and Making Tax Digital, a sales CRM, stock and operations, and project and task management — into a single workspace, with one login and one source of truth.

Why we built it. Small businesses are buried under tools, admin and overhead that have nothing to do with why they started. The average small business runs on six or more disconnected systems, each with its own subscription, its own login, and its own island of data. The real cost isn’t the £100–200 a month — it’s the hours lost re-entering the same information, reconciling numbers that should already agree, and never quite seeing the full picture. Our job is to hand that time back. Or, as we put it on day one: stop juggling six different tools, and run your whole business in one.

Built for the UK. PAYE, National Insurance, VAT, Making Tax Digital, pension auto-enrolment and UK employment law aren’t bolt-on extras — they’re core to how the software works. Every calculation follows current UK legislation, so you never have to wonder whether it’s right for your jurisdiction.

Enterprise capability, at a small-business price. mybizopz gives you the kind of joined-up system a large company would build an entire IT function around — starting free for up to five employees, with no credit card required. Building something this broad with a small team is only possible because of modern AI: it compresses the grind of software delivery, and we pass that saving back to customers as value rather than price.

A career spent close to small businesses

Rob was born in Chertsey, Surrey, and grew up in Virginia Water. One of his first jobs was behind the counter of a fish-and-chip shop on the edge of the Wentworth estate, handing battered cod across the till to the occasional famous face from the golf set. As a teenager he also helped run the books for his family’s landscaping business — quoting jobs, chasing invoices, juggling schedules. It was his first close-up of how much administrative weight a small business carries, and how little of it has anything to do with the craft the owner actually set out to practise.

His career began at ADP (Automatic Data Processing), one of the largest payroll companies in the world. Over roughly seven years he climbed from customer-service roles into IT and then product leadership, working largely on the small-business product. Payroll is unforgiving — deadlines that cannot slip and numbers that must be exactly right — and it sharpened the empathy the landscaping yard had first sparked. That respect for getting the details correct is now built into how mybizopz handles PAYE, National Insurance, and VAT.

Twelve years at SEEK — and a venture of his own

Over more than twelve years at SEEK (ASX:SEK), Rob moved from product manager into senior product and commercial leadership. Around 2015 a small, cross-functional team he was part of ran a design sprint at a market the core product served poorly: the casual, high-turnover hiring of hospitality and retail — the job down the road, posted by a café owner who would never write a formal spec. That sprint became the seed of Jora Local, a SEEK venture aimed squarely at small businesses and the people who work for them.

Rob co-founded Jora Local and ran it as acting general manager, building out its commercial, marketing and operational teams as it grew into a market-leading local-jobs marketplace. The point was never recruitment for its own sake — it was handing small-business owners back their time, so an owner could post, shortlist and hire between shifts and get back to running the place. It was the same lesson the landscaping books first taught him, now made operational at scale.

Why mybizopz is the natural destination

Trace the thread — the landscaping yard, the ADP small-business product, the years inside Jora Local — and mybizopz looks less like a side project than a place this whole career was always heading. Each step taught Rob that small businesses deserve tools every bit as good as the ones big companies take for granted, at a price they can actually afford.

mybizopz is his answer: an all-in-one, enterprise-grade business management platform — built in the UK, for UK small businesses — that brings finance, HR, payroll, CRM, inventory and projects into a single application. Building something this broad with a small team is only possible now because of modern AI, the very shift Rob speaks about professionally: it compresses the grind of delivery so a small team can ship the breadth of an enterprise suite, and pass the saving back to customers as value rather than price.

A recognised product & thought leader

Rob is also an established voice in the product community, speaking on building for customers and on product leadership in the age of AI — at Agile Australia, The Outlook’s Product Leadership summit, and an NAB Innovation Hub product-leadership panel. His argument is an unfashionably plain one: the best teams aren’t the fastest, they’re the ones that decide best. You can read more of his thinking on his blog, connect with him on LinkedIn, learn more at robertalford.com, or read his Leaders Loop profile.