Kiwi mobility services provider aims to double business, add personnel

If growth goes as planned, mobility solutions and services provider Mobile Mentor will look to add around 15 employees to its current work base and double the business year-on-year in the next 12 to 18 months.

"We have around 30 full-time employees in NZ, and a few more in Australia. We have consultants, as well as project or change management personnel, working with us and that could go from 10 to 20 people at any one time.

"We absolutely have plans to add to our employee strength. There is always a need for people who truly understand mobility. There is not a lot of them. That said we have had some huge success recently with some people who are couple of years out of university who are reinvigorating our organisation in terms of the ideas that they are bringing, the way they think," says Andrew Button, MD for NZ at Mobile Mentor.

The Auckland company, which has personnel in Sydney and Melbourne, is also looking for partners.

"It is a small team. We do partner and some of the organisations we partner with are much bigger than us. We have plans to continue to selectively add partners in Australia. We are having conversations with organisations in Australia and NZ, where they have complementary skills," says Button.

According to him, complementary skill sets that they would be looking for in partners include application development skills, as well as endpoint management. The company, which works around five offerings in the mobility space, is witnessing increasing growth in the strategy consulting space.

"Some parts of our business have been growing at 250 per cent, while others have been seeing around 60 per cent growth. Most of our revenue currently comes from managed mobility services and mobile device management. However, we are seeing exponential growth coming in terms of mobile strategy consulting and enterprise or B2B app development," says Button.

While Mobile Mentor focuses on B2B application development, it does partner and give advice to clients on customer-facing apps, according to Button.

Speaking about mobility trends in the country, Button says, "From a willingness, awareness and desire to adopt mobility, NZ is up there with everybody else. The amount of time we are spending with 20 per cent of the largest organisations in NZ has shown us that the thirst to adopt is substantial. There is a huge opportunity for NZ to find smart ways to use mobility, that could be adopted elsewhere.

"We are not working in closed environments. Whatever we adopt here that is highly successful can be transported elsewhere in the world. That is one of the things that we are looking to do in the future at Mobile Mentor. We are looking for opportunities in some of the things that we do today to take the learning, spread it to other parts of the planet and grow our business."

Nevertheless, the focus in the near future will remain on New Zealand and Australia for the firm.

"We are well recognised and respected in New Zealand. We have had some early and successful engagements in Australia, but we are quite small there still. We have a huge opportunity there. One of the things that we do want to be very careful with is not running away from those parts of the organisation which are delivering success today and are learning grounds for us. At the moment we are taking a very mature approach to leveraging the NZ success into Australia. And in time we will take that elsewhere. But we haven't identified any particular markets beyond the two countries at this time," he concludes.