Business Passport
SportsGrid takes the wrestling out of admin for more than 19,000 sporting clubs. Meeting communities around Australia to understand their challenges has been instrumental to the business’s growth.
Let your business fly “Our Qantas Business Rewards Account makes it easy to access flight savings, get to places we need to go, see everyone’s bookings in one central place and keep track of expenses.” Alex Mednis, SportsGrid
When Alex Mednis wrote custom software to streamline the organisation of competitions for his local water polo association, a business idea was born. “Relieving that burden on volunteers was at the heart of it,” says Mednis, a computer science and law graduate. “Using technology to structure the competition, it takes 20 to 30 seconds to do what might take 15 hours to do manually on paper.”
Since the first employee came onboard in 2017, SportsGrid has doubled in staff, revenue and clients every year. The business now has 35 employees and about 19,500 Australian sporting clubs use its software, revolutioniseSPORT.
“As we expanded nationally and added professional development and consulting to our business, it became clear we needed to meet with sporting communities in person to learn how to best evolve our services across a multitude of sports. Even as a digital business, travel has been essential to our growth from day one.”
SYDNEY> PERTH “It’s crucial that we maximise the value of our spend on travel”
“We made our first trip to Perth in 2019 and it shaped our business trajectory, giving us a solid foundation nationally. Western Australia is now the secondlargest market for revolutioniseSPORT. We joined Qantas Business Rewards in 2014, the same year I left my corporate job to focus on growing SportsGrid. I brought my partner, Teresa Simonetti, into the business. She was a doctor with a passion for web design and she’s now our chief engineer. The two of us travelled a lot when we started but we drove everywhere – even to Adelaide and Melbourne. It became clear that to scale we had to fly and Qantas Business
Rewards helped us be smarter about it. We get savings on flights when we book through our Business Account; we earn Qantas Points on our business expenses with our American Express® Qantas Business Rewards Card; and we redeem our points on flights.”
SYDNEY > MELBOURNE, ADELAIDE, PERTH “Our team can fly for essential events without blowing the budget”
“Planning this multi-city circuit for the SportsGrid exec team would have been an organisational nightmare without our Qantas Business Rewards Account. The first stop was for the Pride in Sport awards in Melbourne then on to the inaugural Festival of Sport in Adelaide and finally Perth for the Australian Sailing Club conference series. Our Qantas Business Rewards Account centralises all our travel itineraries, including flights, hotels and car hire. Our EA is the main travel booker and with all of our travellers’ information already stored in the Business Account, booking is easy and ensures everyone gets their individual Qantas Points as Frequent Flyers, plus the Flyer Bonus, in addition to the points we earn for the business. We’re a small business so for a big trip like this for several people, leveraging the flight discounts we receive and using points helped us stay within budget. We saved at least a couple of thousand dollars.”
SYDNEY > DARWIN “Flying for face-to-face training has redefined our level of service”
“Last year we had a major roll-out of revolutioniseSPORT through our partnership with Squash Northern Territory. Clubs from across the far reaches of northern Australia converged for an in-person demonstration of our platform. Face-to-face support from our experts provided a personal touch that our clients still praise us for to this day. It’s now become the model for rollouts, which means more travel for our team. The new Qantas Business Rewards travel policy feature lets us set parameters to ensure our team book flights, hotels or car hire within our budget and flexibility limits. This will become even more important as SportsGrid expands into New Zealand and Singapore in 2024.”
My first job was at 14 in a department store called OK Bazaars in South Africa. It was overwhelming. I didn’t last very long because I was this shy, introverted child and it was sales. I had to be brave because it wasn’t going to help anyone being a little mouse. That’s an interesting thing I’ve learnt since – the subliminal stuff that we learn and give off is so powerful.
My first wake-up call was at an event where I found myself with thousands of kilos of food – people just didn’t eat. I had a boutique event management company and I threw away food every day. I took the food to the Matthew Talbot Hostel in Sydney at midnight and they accepted it with open arms. I had no idea it was a $36-billion problem and that 3.7 million people need food every day in Australia. It didn’t take long for me to realise that this was my path. My first mentor, Sam Weiss, gave me the capacity to believe in myself. I didn’t even realise I was an entrepreneur, not to mention a social entrepreneur.
My first lesson in resilience was dealing with the board. There was this huge conflict around how to run OzHarvest and whether I was the right person. I was a square peg in a round hole because I’d never dealt with a board and was unconventional. I was doing things from my heart and from my soul but I was dealing with business leaders. My resilience was saying, “I’m actually doing this and we might have to do this my way.”
The first time I asked anyone for money, I didn’t have a clue. I had some serious lessons in being knocked back so I went to a three-day funding boot camp in New York. It taught me that all I have to do is share what it is we do and why and how we do it. I’m a storyteller and every single day I have more stories to tell and they are authentic and they are real.
My first uncomfortable conversations were just shocking. I didn’t know how to be honest because I’m a people-pleaser. I realised very quickly that for the good of my organisation there are times you have to have challenging conversations. It’s a very difficult thing to do but you can learn the skills required: listening, thoughtfulness, knowing the facts, knowing what outcome you want and being firm in those conversations.
The first time I thought about stepping back was when I realised the stuff I love is the visionary stuff. The business needs day-to-day management and the truth is that’s not where my skills lie right now. I’m stepping aside into a new role, Visionary-in-Residence, and I’ll continue to inspire, grow and guide OzHarvest.