EXP | The Origin Story

Who We Are 

Here at EXP, we're united behind one common passion—to empower everyone to achieve their ideal employee experience! As small business owners, our founders personally struggled with managing HR tasks when they started out. These experiences and frustrations inspired our founders to build a product that addresses the issues they've experienced firsthand. EXP was born out of a dream to improve our HR process and employee experience, but what truly excites us is empowering other small businesses to have the same access to software that can truly transform the employee experience.  

Let's meet our three founders... Noorez Khamis (Rez), Simran Chaudhry (Sim), and Eric Overfield.  

Rez 

Chief Technology Officer 

A Microsoft MVP with four years of experience running Creospark as a small business owner and more than 20 years of experience building systems to help organizations thrive. 

Sim  

Chief Engagement Officer 

An outgoing leader with an entrepreneurial itch and extensive experience in sales and marketing, Sim has been actively ensuring his teams' employee experience excellence for decades. 

Eric

Chief Product Officer 

Microsoft MVP and Regional Director  

With over 20 years of experience running PixelMil—the small business he founded back in 1998—Eric has delivered more than 200 digital workspaces that enhance the employee experience for organizations big and small across the globe.

The Inspiration for EXP 

EXP (Employee Experience Platform) was born from our own struggles as SMB owners. Founding a business is a considerable undertaking and building a culture that supports your team keeps many founders up at night. 

“We had to learn how to do things on our own as an SMB with two people. We had to figure out how to support others when we started hiring people, it was really stressful because it was not just us anymore, but we are responsible for more than ourselves.” 

-Simran Chaudhry, Chief Engagement Officer 

There's no rulebook for keeping track of expenses, time off, and employee information, and there are few affordable options to help manage this.   

 "There's always more to learn, and not having the HR expertise or a cost-friendly tool was a challenge." 

-Eric Overfield, Chief Product Officer 

The tools our founders were looking for were not affordable or suitable for their growing companies. The idea of EXP was validated when our clients began asking for the same tool. 

“We saw there were other people out there like us, so the idea of EXP had legs.” 

-Noorez Khamis, Chief Technology Officer 

Our HR Journey 

 Like our customers, our founders continue navigating HR as small business owners. Juggling all things HR can be overwhelming—trust us, we've been there too. 

"Unless you're willing to pay a lot of money to have a service do things for you or hire an HR department, it can feel daunting. It's easy to feel alone when founding a company. If we can help one small business owner feel less alone, empowered to chase their dreams, and feel confident that they can provide their team a world-class employee experience, I'll have won."   

- Eric Overfield, Chief Product Officer 

Our founders have faced the following obstacles along the way:  

1. Employee information maintenance: Storing and keeping track of employees’ personal information and other relevant documents was a significant issue. It took forever to find necessary resources and important data often got lost.  
2. Paid Time Off (PTO) Management: Our founders struggled to process and log their employees’ PTO requests when there wasn’t a record of how many hours each employee had available.  
3. Expense Management: Tracking expense reimbursements was tedious and time-consuming.  
4. Hiring: It’s difficult to select the right people for your team. This process is even more difficult when you don’t have a hiring system in place.  
5. One system can’t do everything: In order to complete common practices like payroll, recruitment, PTO management, and others, our founders needed to install multiple systems to do so. This drove their costs up exponentially every time they had to outsource a new task.  

“As a small business, you need to find separate services for expenses, leave management, and more. Different systems have different fees that add up. It gets overwhelming and challenging to find how much everything costs since you have 5 or 10 services across multiple ecosystems. It’s a mess!”  

- Eric Overfield, Chief Product Officer   

For each of our founders, these common experiences have shaped their journeys with HR management. Rez, Sim, and Eric all have unique perspectives on HR as small business owners, which they brought to their search for a solution. When they couldn’t find any system out there that had everything they needed, they decided to build their own. This would solve their problems and help other SMB owners facing the same struggles at the same time. 

Introducing EXP 

Enter EXP. The Employee Experience Platform (EXP) makes HR easier for small businesses. It’s a people-operations and HRIS platform built to energize the employee experience from right where we work- in Microsoft Teams. EXP’s foundational apps are Profile, Leave, and Expense. Storing employee information, PTO management, and Expense management are key HR areas that our founders struggled with when they started out. So, these issues were the inspiration behind the first three apps. Our founders’ first-hand experience as small business owners will always shape EXP's purpose, development, and design.   

Chief Product Officer, Eric Overfield, put it best:  

 "We're not here to nickel and dime or try to get funding from investors. We're building a product that we want to use ourselves to help us with the issues we've experienced first-hand." 

Our Purpose in a Nutshell 

EXP is just as transformative for us as it is for you. If you’re looking for a tool built by a team who understands first-hand what HR management as a small business is like, look no further than EXP.