The "glue" between ERP and workflow tools: How Work Perfect scored its first Fast50 placing

Less than four years old, Work Perfect has built a name for itself ironing out workflow bottlenecks for some of Australia’s most well-known brands.

The Sydney-based firm has expanded its portfolio to more than 175 customers including McDonald’s Australia, Hilton, Bunnings, Channel 9, Tyro, HBF Insurance and 7-Eleven.

Crowned Monday.com partner of the year last year, in 2023 the Sydney-based firm took home a CRN Impact Award for its digital transformation work with McDonald's after helping the fast-food giant achieve more than half a million dollars' worth of annual efficiencies.

This and other projects, especially in the retail, manufacturing and government sectors, resulted in Work Perfect’s FY23 revenue growing by 126 per cent to $4.3 million – a feat that earned it sixth place at the 2023 CRN Fast50.

CRN Australia spoke with Work Perfect’s head of customer success Steve Derviniotis about the firm’s growth.

“I think the main reason we've managed to get quite a significant growth is probably two sides,” he said.

“You have a lot of mid-market and enterprise customers asking for more efficient solutions and understanding their internal processes.”

“The bulk of the market that we have been exposed to has either got some old legacy tech stacks, like the Oracles, the SAPs etc, and then some new, more workflow tools, and we work for only with Monday.com, so that lends itself to be the glue in-between.”

“The second part of the equation is that we specialise in actually finding efficiencies.”

“When we're working with a client, they typically have that pain point where they've got disjointed tech stacks and disjointed teams, and…we try and optimise those processes and get rid of bottlenecks.”

“You could argue that we've met the market where it was experiencing a pain point, and we just increased our capability.”

In the 2023 financial year, Work Perfect worked on around 50 large-scale projects for clients locally and abroad.

This included work for French global professional services firm Eskar, which involved harmonising its Monday.com processes across six regional offices.

Work Perfect make a point of being on-site as much as possible.

“…We still obviously take briefs [from the client], but [our] human design-centred approach means that we're often observing clients in their natural environment, going in-person to their offices, understanding how they do things, and we're watching them work in their day-to-day,” he said.

“That allows us to get an insight to how they work, as opposed to them telling us how they work, and it's a significant dimensional change in our understanding.”

“I think we often paraphrase Henry Ford when he said, ‘if I ask people what they want, they would have said faster horses.’”  

“We've taken that approach; observing a client in play at work gives us a huge amount of insight, and therefore we can design systems that are very bespoke to that client and therefore there is a very quick return on investment. That was a big change in our process.”

Competing with bigger businesses for people has been challenging.

“Really high-quality people are often lured by the big logos of the Accentures or Ernst and Youngs, so attracting really good talent is sometimes difficult,” Derviniotis said.

“We do pay above the market rate, but getting people to come and consider working for a small scale-up or small startup business is difficult…the challenge is finding people that are willing to be generalists and roll up their sleeves and just get the work done.”

Strengthening its capabilities and global expansion are key agenda items as Work Perfect continues to grow.

“We’re only a young firm, less than four years old, so we have kind of a saying internally; ‘we are always often refuelling mid-flight.’ We’re reinventing and improving processes all the time.”

“Within Australia, [we are looking to achieve] continued growth with both organic clients and more exotic solutions; Monday.com is our main vendor choice, so we're finding more enterprise solutions around things like strategic planning, HR solutions, services desk solutions and more capability out of the platform.”

“Regionally, we recently expanded to Singapore, so we're developing that office and we are looking at other regions.”

“We have a resource that's currently placed in Europe on a temporary secondment, and we're looking at whether there's any other regions we should expand into.”