If you’re an executive assistant, employ one or simply know someone who is an executive assistant, you probably need to know about Base.
Base is a new executive assistant software platform that consolidates the duties of a professional assistant into one place. Base can manage calendar items, files and emails, securely store travel and contact information, create data visualizations and more, making life much easier for both executive assistants and executives, themselves.
The platform is the brainchild of Base’s co-founder and CEO, Paige McPheely. A few years back, McPheely was running a company called 33Vincent, a remote executive assistant agency that recruited top talent and employed over 50 contract executive assistants who served busy executives across the country.
- The Base platform is available at https://basehq.com/
- McPheely says Base is working on an exciting new feature that will debut within the next few weeks. “Imagine a mix between Calendly and Doodle (appointment scheduling apps),” she says. “We’re blending that, and having customizable ways to offer and share availability, which is something that we have been dreaming about and planning with assistants for the better part of a decade now.”
Executive Assistant Software Platform
McPheely noticed that the skills required to be an effective assistant were so broad there was no real centralized way for them to work, especially remotely.
“It was frustrating,” she says. “There’s no real good universal definition of what it means to be an assistant and the work of being an assistant is all over the map. People are actually having to recreate the wheel in every role that they’re in, so we were trying to find the software to help us do it, and we got a really good idea of what that software could look like and frankly, we got tired of waiting for someone else to build it.”
Once McPheely had the concept, she had to raise the seed money to create it, stepping away from 33Vincent in 2018 to concentrate on raising capital. And as good as the idea of Base sounds, it wasn’t an easy task.
“Trying to find venture capital dollars was really, really hard,” says McPheely. “But we got connected to a group out of Indianapolis, a start-up studio called High Alpha. We set up out of their studios at the very end of 2018, and they’ve got a unique model. Because of their studio setup, we had four full-time engineers on day one, we had back office support, HR and recruiting.”
Base was launched in 2019. The next year, the pandemic made remote assistants a bigger group than ever, making Base even more vital than it already was.
“We had a hunch that remote work was going to be here to stay,” she says, “and that it was going to continue to expand. So we kind of got lucky there when all of a sudden, the whole world was remote.”
McPheely says her ultimate goal with Base was to make assistants feel just as supported as the executives who employ them because that feeling pays dividends.
“I really believe if we could all be a little bit more deeply-supported and seen in the work that we do,” she says, “we’d be unlocking a ton of latent potential in today’s workforce all across the world. And when we are better supported and seen in our work, we’re probably just going to enjoy our work more. Which might seem like a little thing, but I like to imagine what that would do for the world.”
