Potential market = 60,000,000" We estimate that over 60 million...

Potential market = 60,000,000

" We estimate that over 60 million people (being 25% of the working population) in selected Western countries operate in the trades and services sectors.

GeoOp aims to be the international leader in mobile workforce job management for these sectors and make their businesses efficient."

-------------------------


Mark Weldon's new tradie secret

Mark Weldon, formerly chief executive of the New Zealand Stock Exchange and latterly winemaker of Bannockburn, has been tempted out of his country retreat to chair GeoOP, a software company expected to seek a compliance listing on the NZAX in the next couple of months.

....

So what is GeoOp?

And why does Weldon want to be involved?

GeoOP offers online software for job costing and scheduling accessible through mobile applications.

You could think of it as Xero for tradies, except that a lot of tradies probably already use Xero and they won't be replacing it with GeoOP. They may well find themselves using both.

Where Xero provides the accounting, GeoOP delivers job costing, quoting, scheduling and recording via imagery for the people out in the field, all linked back to a central hub for the people back in the office.


The company already boasts 4000 subscribers from all around the world and that's without any real marketing.

Xero and GeoOP both offer what is known as "software as a service".
(SaaS)

You don't install software locally onto your PC or Mac. Instead you pay a monthly fee to use it through a browser, or a through a mobile or tablet app.

In the case of GeoOP, mobility is paramount to provide ease of use for field service staff. It has been built from the mobile apps out, says chief executive Leanne Graham.

"It's mobile-led rather than cloud-led," she said.
The apps are not "tack-ons" to the cloud product, they are the core product with a cloud back-end.

GeoOP arguably has a clearer path into international markets than Xero.
The work of a plumber or carpenter or painter is the more or less the same wherever you go, in contrast to the kinds of international accounting and tax rule differences Xero has to manage.

That should make it easier for the company to scale and win customers wherever they may be.


..The capital raised will be used to build channels to market rather than for product development. That part of the job is largely done and only requires ongoing refinement.

"We're not a start-up raising money to build a product," Weldon said.

By channels, Graham points to a recent Australian alliance with Telstra, which is co-marketing GeoOP.

As well as telcos, potential new partnerships could be with accountants who are serious about delivering business advisory services as well as accounting to clients.


**Between 40 and 60 per cent of an accountant's clients provide services, Graham said. Referring customers to GeoOP enables such accountants to "have a great conversation" with such clients.

For telcos and accountants, recommending GeoOP can serve to make customers more "sticky".

It is that kind of story that led Weldon to accept the chairmanship after a three-hour meeting with Graham in July.

As head of the NZX, Weldon said, he saw many companies interested in listing talking obsessively about their product and technology. GeoOP talks about the value it can deliver to customers.


But another experience when building a new winery at his Terra Sancta vineyard near Bannockburn also came to mind. At one point there were over 20 separate contractors at work. Many seemed to be obsessively using their smartphones on smoko.

"These are quite complex logistics businesses without something to simplify that complexity," Weldon said. "Complexity is non-linear. This will help people get beyond the natural limits of growth."

Small businesses die through administration, Weldon said. For many, 80 per cent of time is taken up by administration.

Graham said business process software such as GeoOP is the kind of software that can make a material difference to productivity and profitability.


**"It's game-changing for small medium-sized businesses," she said. "There was a clear gap for job costing."

And it has really only just become possible to do it by virtue of the arrival of intuitive smartphones that tradies are already adopting in droves. For many, especially the older ones, the smartphone is their first experience of computing.

"These people are never going to bring laptops to work," Weldon said. "It's the first time a computer has been able to penetrate that workforce."


And every year there is a fresh inflow of apprentices who are already devoted to their technology and pushing to use it at work.

GeoOP aims to replace all the paper forms that field service personnel carry around and which require maintenance and often double entry to get the data back into other centralised systems. It does so by delivering real-time job sheets, scheduling, GPS tracking, signatures, time and parts tracking and charging, costing, quoting, invoicing and reporting, all generated from a mobile app.


Graham said 25 per cent of people in the western world are part of a mobile workforce, so the market opportunity is huge. There is also an opportunity to change the public's perception of the sector, to professionalise it, deliver better customer service and to make it more efficient.

*
GeoOP was global from the get-go. Weldon said that's vital with such a tiny domestic market.
"You can get big in New Zealand, and still remain tiny globally," he said.

(like Xero!)


**
Of GeoOP's 4000 users, only 15 per cent of current customers are from New Zealand.
56 per cent are from Australia
and
19 per cent from the US and Canada
- they have all simply found the company online and signed up.

Graham said the company's "weightless" distribution and channel model will allow the company to "sell the heck out of it" from New Zealand.

Graham said users can be up and running within an hour and at $20 per user per month, they need only save about 20 minutes a month in administration or other savings to be making a return on their investment.


**It's a simple equation and one that Graham said will provide transparency for investors:
user numbers equals growth.


But now it's time to "put fuel in the tank" in the shape of development capital, she said. There is no market leader in the space and it's a race.

"We intend to be the leader. We have the right skills and the right team," Graham said.

Weldon, who is also a director of board software company Diligent, said the listing will also flesh out the NZX as the
*first pure-play mobility company to be listed there - and one of the first anywhere.

It's a rapidly growing area, he said, driven by the sudden availability of affordable, fixed price, ubiquitous mobile data.


http://www.geoop.com/our-story

http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/small-business/9107221/Mark-Weldons-new-tradie-secret