Boosting project managers
A Kiwi entrepreneur has spun a rapidlygrowing business out of an idea scribbled on a scrap of paper at a conference, writes Emma Rawson of Unlimited.
IF IT weren’t for Rod Drury and Sam Morgan, serial entrepreneur Jason Westland would be sunning himself in the south of France.
Instead, the 44-year-old Kiwi has put his retirement plans on hold to move to America’s new tech hotspot, Austin, Texas, where his administration software start-up ProjectManager.com is opening a new office.
ProjectManager.com was born from a business plan impulsively scribbled on a scrap of paper at the Morgo entrepreneurs’ conference in 2008. Westland was at the time considering hanging up his hat and selling his former software companies Method123.com and MGMM.com, but Drury and Morgan convinced him to pursue his new venture.
‘‘Within a week of Morgo the business was up and running and I had a team in place,’’ Westland said. ‘‘Morgo is really good for ideas generation. It’s helpful to ratify your plans with other people because not every idea is actually a good idea.’’
Westland’s company, which has its headquarters in Auckland, makes online planning tools to help companies organise projects. He used his own experiences as a project manager overseeing a $1 billion development for British Rail to create tools that will help people manage time efficiently.
‘‘I got tired of trying to work out if my team was on time with my projects I thought, ‘there must be a system that can do this’,’’ Westland said.
The SaaS product has 13,000 users, among them Nasa, the United Nations and World Vision.
Westland’s company has a 45 per cent profit margin and was ranked number 39 in the 2013 Deloitte’s Fast 50 with 195 per cent year-on-year growth. Although business might be going gangbusters now, Westland said the company got off to a shaky start in 2008. He slowed down the product’s release by developing it in the same way as traditional downloadable software.
‘‘The download market is about getting something out as quick as possible to test the market and then putting out another version to upgrade it. I tried to apply that model to a SaaS business,’’ he said.
‘‘This proved to be the wrong approach and the first version of our software was slow to use and buggy. It took a further 18 months of multiple iterations to finally nail it. A much better approach would have been to initially only develop a thin slice of the fully functioning system.’’ As there are other project management tools on the market such as Microsoft Project, ProjectManager.com is currently targeting organisations with complex operations.
FRHI Hotels & Resorts, the parent company of the Raffles, Fairmont and Swissoˆ tel chains, uses ProjectManager.com’s advanced planning tools such as Gantt charts to manage hotel construction.
‘‘With hundreds of colleagues working around the globe on hotel openings, effectively monitoring, tracking and managing a portfolio of projects is critical to success,’’ said Ilse Wittens, director of hotel openings and integration at FRHI Hotels & Resorts.
A recent $4 million capital injection from Andrew Clements’ Zeus Capital will be used towards expanding ProjectManager.com in the US where 65 per cent its customers are based. ‘‘The fastestgrowing industry for us has been in healthcare in the US, that’s largely because of the Obamacare changes,’’ Westland said.
Westland plans to employ 20 staff in the Austin office and establish a new marketing team. He will also expand his sales team in Silicon Valley and the New Zealand development crew.
Westland’s goal for ProjectManagement.com is to replicate the success of Customer Relations Management firm Salesforce. ‘‘Salesforce are a billion dollar company and they have about nine or so different editions that are priced from $5 – $240. ‘‘They support all different companies and they are a great company to model off.’’ Unlimited magazine, published by Fairfax Media, is New Zealand’s leading digital business magazine dedicated to entrepreneurs, start-ups, leaders and innovators. To subscribe, go to www.unlimitedmagazine.co.nz