Aconex
Smart50 rank: 12
Revenue: $42 million
Growth: 88.42%
Founders: Leigh Jasper, 34; Robert Phillpot, 35
Based: Victoria
Employees: 330
Industry: Construction
Website:
www.aconex.comAconex was founded in 2000 as a solution to controlling the large, complex flow of information on construction and engineering projects.
Traditionally, communication on a construction project is paper-based, with even a medium-sized project resulting in thousands of documents being created and exchanged; a time-consuming, expensive practice.
Leigh Jasper (pictured) and Robert Phillpot created a web-based system called Aconex (a name born of a combination of “Australian construction exchange”) for managing documentation and correspondence.
The system allows people working on a project (such as the project manager, contractor, architect and consultants) to view, track and share their data electronically in real-time, at any time, and from any location.
The result is that companies save time by having instant access to the information they need; reduce administrative costs such as printing, couriers and storage; and have more control over risks.
Aconex has doubled in size each year and revenue this year is $42 million, up from $25.3 million in 2006-07. The most challenging part of the start-up phase, Jasper says, was first getting people on the internet as uptake wasn’t very high, and second explaining the product. “The most common response was, ‘I don’t get it. Why would we use this?’”
For this same reason, raising capital was also a challenge as many didn’t see the potential to leverage the power of the internet to solve an industry-wide problem. “This meant a lot of energy had to be put into educating the market,” Jasper says. “From this experience we learnt that we needed to be completely customer focused. Rather than focusing primarily on the product and its features, we learnt that we needed to focus on making our system easy to use and providing an unlimited amount of training and support.”
Jasper also realised that the early adopters were absolutely key. “So we made sure that all our staff always went the extra mile to give them all the support they needed. Many of our early clients, who took a punt on us at the beginning, are still with us and have been invaluable advocates,” he says.
The company faced a near death experience when they opened the second capital raising the week before 11 September 2001. “Investor confidence was very low for sometime afterwards and we had to lay off staff and batten down the hatches until investor confidence returned,” Jasper says. “This situation may have helped us in the long term, as we were forced to very clearly prioritise the needs of the business and assess whether we had the right people in each position.”
The online strategy is very important with search engine optimisation programs ensuring the company ranks one on Google for “construction document management”. And Google search engine marketing results in about 25% of web leads.
Jasper says the website stands out due to its loud orange design. “This is to reflect that we’re vibrant, fun and people-focused rather than being techy and corporate. Unlike any of our competitors, the Aconex website features regionalised content for our visitors. The website detects where the visitor has come from, based on their IP address, and all related regionalised content is shown first,” he says.
Jasper says the construction industry is becoming more global, which means that there is more demand for collaboration tools such as Aconex. “Collaboration technology solutions, such as Aconex, are being used by approximately 20% of the Australian market and 50% of the UK and US markets. In the booming markets of the Gulf, China and India, collaboration technology is being used by less than 15% of the industry,” he says.
If, as expected, global uptake reaches the levels of Britain and the US, this amounts to an immense opportunity for Aconex, he says. There are also exciting opportunities in emerging markets such as North Africa, South America and Eastern Europe.
