Fast50 firm offering up an a la carte meal

A tough economy hasn’t dampened the spirits of Infoready managing director Tristan Sternson. The founder of the Melbourne pure-play business analytics and consulting firm – which hit No.11 on the CRN Fast50 list last year with annual growth of 64 percent – says business in the first half of the year was “satisfactory, but satisfactory isn’t what we set out to achieve”.

He expects revenue to grow at least 20 percent this year and top $20 million: “We’ve pretty much surpassed that now so we’re growing at a rapid rate.”

Sternson says the key thing for the consultancy is to turn its intellectual capital into an a la carte menu. “In the past, your inventory was your people but now it’s our solution offering, and because of our people we can do that.

“[Customers] want to hear more about how we can improve their subscriptions on their shopping carts and websites or how they can improve their call centre handling times.

“We’ve come up with our inventory and that might be based on a customer experience, customer voice or regulatory reporting. It’s a paradigm shift to say, here’s our catalogue and what you can buy.”

Sternson is spending more time working on the business instead of in the business, delivering speeches to high-powered business groups and ramping up content marketing through case studies and thought leadership.

Infoready is supporting Sternson’s ambassadorial duties with recent hires of key people including in digital marketing and Lean program delivery.

“We’ve let them talk at conferences,” he says. “Our digital marketing guy has 12 years’ experience at Telstra and they’re real thought leaders.”

Last March also saw the completion of Infoready’s first end-to-end, multimillion-dollar project, “on time and budget”, Sternson says. Although he can’t name the insurance client, Sternson says the $4 million project will see the insurer better able to process claims through faster ingestion and sense-making of required documents.

Although Infoready is true to its Big Blue heritage (Sternson is an ex-IBMer), the consultancy is looking further afield for point solutions, especially those related to shopping cart diagnostics and predictive analytics.

An area of big interest for e-tailers is catching prospective buyers while they’re “in the moment”, he says. This also includes knowing when to cross-sell and up-sell with offers and understanding why carts are abandoned before the checkout. “It has to be a targeted offer, not spam, something the consumer will want and will add value.”

Sternson’s IBM connections were also useful in scoring Tennis Australia as a client recently (the US vendor has been a global sponsor of Tennis Australia and the Australian Open Grand Slam event for 20 years).

Sternson, an experienced program manager, is also expanding the use of Agile precepts on customer projects and has hired a Lean specialist: “You can’t treat data projects as traditional IT projects.”