Perth IT consultancy Dulili overcame the challenges of breaking into state government panels and a shortage of Western Australia-based IT consultants to earn its CRN Fast50 debut last year.
The payroll, human resources and workforce management solutions consultancy grew from four staff to almost 40 in less than three years, making a name for itself in Western Australia and South Australia for its expertise in Cerdian’s human resources solution Dayforce.
In the 2023 financial year, Dulili’s top sectors were health, government, mining and construction. The company more than double its sales to $3.5 million.
We spoke with Dulili’s director Craig Pilkington about the firm’s growth.
"Something that happened in that 12-month period is that we were able to get onto the WA government panel, which enabled us to be a supplier of government,” he said.
“We also [got on to] the New South Wales government panel; these opportunities enable us to be able to deal with government and obviously government has a great magnitude of opportunities.”
Breaking into government has been challenging.
“The government is tricky. Government looks after their own,” said Pilkington.
“I was speaking with somebody who is part of the big four…accounting firms that offer IT services and do some of the things that we do…and he said something to me that was quite interesting.”
“He said, ‘I will never get sacked if I recommend this product,’ and I said, ‘why don't you recommend Dayforce? He said, ‘Well, I'm never going to get sacked if I recommend these other products, whereas you're asking us to take a risk.’”
“It might be a better product, and it might be better for the organisation, but the difficulty with government is they try to stay with what's safe…but it's not always the best, and that’s the hard part.”
Pilkington hoped to see Dulili's government work lead to work with more government clients.
Another challenge has been finding local human resources solutions consultants.
“In WA, the opportunities to be a consultant or to have a career in this field is narrow, because a lot of organisations set up their headquarters over east, and that's where they supply their professional services teams from,” Pilkington said.
“…to give people that may have really wanted an opportunity to have a career in that field in WA, we've created those opportunities.”
“It's probably cost us a little bit because we have to invest in their growth and their abilities, and we do invest a lot of time and effort into giving them an opportunity, but it's not like we can go and walk out and get five consultants that have got a lot of experience locally.”
“We see that our growth is exponential; we see that we can…double again in the near future by continuing to focus on finding those people that want those opportunities.”
In the 2023 financial year, Dulili expanded and diversified its referral network by adding support for Employment Hero and CHRIS21.
It also gained the ability to demonstrate and sell Dayforce solutions by onboarding a dedicated solution adviser, while working with Dayforce on a targeted marketing strategy.
“When we started Dayforce in the WA market, it was kind of like ‘Ceridian, who's that? Dayforce, who's that?’” Pilkington said.
“Dayforce is young in Australia, it's a truly SaaS-based product, but it's a product that does everything under the one roof.”
“Where our competitors might do HCM (Human Capital Management), they then need to partner with a payroll product or they need to partner with a workforce management product at the enterprise level.”
“Whereas Dayforce offers the ability for an organisation to have their ERP and they have one system that does all of their people management, from workforce management, payroll and also the HCM or the HR areas.”
“Ceridian gets a lot more leads now…when people go out to tender, they're like ‘we want these three vendors to tender for this.’ So Dayforce is getting a lot more looks at those opportunities.”
“The reality is the market has probably woken up to say, ‘well actually, the integration costs sometimes can be more than the actual software parts that that you're trying to put together.’”
“That's where the good sell for Dayforce is, that it's one product, it's not a case of you're trying to transfer information from one system to another, you're doing it in the same system."
“So it's effectively giving you a lot more out of one license; one vendor can give you everything that you could possibly want.”
“...with our efforts in the market, now there's a lot more opportunities that come because of the investment; the breakfast briefings that we've had…and the partnership that we've had with one of the sales executives at Ceridian.”
Pilkington said he expects the 2024 financial year to be one of consolidation, before growing again.
“It's funny because when I was sitting at the [2023 CRN Fast50] event, I didn't really think much of the growth percentage that we had,” he said.
“Then it dawned on me how difficult it actually is to get into the Fast50, and whilst it would be a huge opportunity and a huge benefit for us to make the Fast50 this financial year, it's probably going to be a little bit more challenging.”
“But definitely...our plan and our trajectory is that once we've done [a] period of pause and solidifying, is that the growth in the next financial year after that, it should be similar to [the 2023 financial year].”
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