Mike McDerment, from his parents basement to 500 employees in 6 countries, the leader of Freshbooks

Profiles in Leadership

• Mike McDerment is the Executive Chair & Co-Founder of FreshBooks, the #1 accounting software in the cloud, designed exclusively for freelancers and growing service based business owners. Built out of frustration after accidentally saving over an invoice, Mike spent 3.5 years growing FreshBooks from his parents’ basement. Since launching in 2003, over 24 million people have used FreshBooks to save time billing, and collect billions of dollars. A lover of the outdoors, Mike has been bitten so many times it’s rumoured he’s the first human to have developed immunity to mosquitoes.

In January 2003, Mike was running a four-person design agency and using Microsoft Word to create invoices. One day, he accidentally saved over an old invoice, and something in him snapped – he knew there had to be a better way. Over the next two weeks, he coded up a solution and eventually turned that side-project into what is now FreshBooks.

To keep the lights on, he moved into his parents’ basement for 3.5 years and completely revamped how he ran his design firm to the point where he only worked 19 days in one year — while generating over $200,000 to bootstrap the company that would become FreshBooks.

Today, Mike has grown FreshBooks to nearly 500 people serving more than 24 million users in 160+ countries. To help self-employed professionals set better rates, Mike also co-authored Breaking The Time Barrier, which has been downloaded more than 300,000 times.