Jeremy Balius: Welcome to Go to Market Playmakers, where we bring you winning go-to market strategies from the industry’s best. Each episode, we sit down with B2B Tech and SaaS founders, executives and industry playmakers who’ve mastered the art of taking products and services to market. Whether you’re scaling a startup, refining your go-to market motion, or driving revenue growth through a channel program or partner ecosystem, this is where you’ll learn the plays that work.

I’m your host, Jeremy Balius. Today’s theme is New Market Entry Strategy. I’m very excited because I’m joined by Josh Ryder from Surge capacity. Josh has 20 years of experience in strategic leadership, account management, business development across technology and telecommunications. He’s a director at search capacity where they deliver telecom and IT spend management solutions that enhance processes, automation and profitability, while driving operational efficiencies.

They’ve got 15 years of experience in the US and six in Australia, and he’s leading national sales, marketing, and operations. This is a really interesting conversation in the way that the search capacity team was looking to enter Australia as a technology expense management software platform. In this conversation, we go deep on what sets them apart and particularly the challenges that they had, finding that technology expense management, didn’t exist or doesn’t exist in Australia in the way that they had experienced in the States, so it was really great to hear the strategy that the surge capacity team undertook to really land and educate the market on the benefits and the need , for TEM itself, and then beyond that also sell in surge capacity as well. Hope you get as much value from this conversation as I did. Let’s get straight into it.

hey Josh. It is so awesome to have you on the episode today. Thanks for joining us.

Josh Ryder: Yeah, thanks for having me. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation as well.

Jeremy Balius: I have been too. This is gonna be a really fun one. We’re here talking new market entry, bringing a SaaS company into Australia and the a NZ market. Before we get into all of that, I want to start with your origin story. Tell me a little bit about how you got to where you are today.

Josh Ryder: Yeah, look man, it was a wild journey. Um. You know, my brother was in the military for Australia. He got posted to Fairchild, which was in, uh, Spokane, Washington, uh, in, in the United States. Uh, so me being a younger brother, I kind of pivoted and thought, wow, what an opportunity. I was about to go to university here in Australia.

Uh, changed plans, got into Eastern Washington University in the same city that he was going to be posted to. So, uh, moved over there and went, started going to university. Um. It kind of fell into the tech space. It was quite odd. I used to run a functions department for a major hotel out here. It was my first job out of school and, and, uh, we used to look after the down under games, which is American organization that would come over and compete against Australian kids.

Long story short, I’m, uh, I’m working in the States and ran into one of the organizers of the down under games who was working for a company called Verizon Wireless, which is now one of the largest technology companies in the world. And so kind of a sliding doors moment. He was like, what are you doing here?

How are we meeting up with each other? This is unbelievable.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah.

Josh Ryder: He’s like, what are you doing? I said, oh, I, I manage a retail, a retail store while I’m going to university at the moment, university of Eastern Washington. And he’s like, how much do you make? I said, I make this. He goes, I’ve got a commission only job for you selling cell phones, you know.

Outta the mall and I was like, okay, I don’t even know how to use a cell phone, but I can give it a go. Right? Yeah. I moved my, my charm and wit and smile and yeah, all that, all that kind of stuff, um, to, to try and do that. But, um, mate, that really kind of catapulted me in. I no background in technology. It wasn’t, I was going to university to be a college professor, uh, in history, which, um, subsequently went away over my career because I got really excited about technology.

So I, I kind of started there. Mate, within seven years, I’d, I’d gone through the appropriate channels of account management, B2B, small business major, account management, business sales manager, director. I, uh, moved myself, my family down to Los Angeles, was the director of B2B and marketing for all of Los Angeles for them.

And then I was fortunate enough to be on a strategy group where I became a sales overlay. So I got to fly around with Nike, Sony, and Toshiba. And my whole goal was to actually. Act as if I was working for Nike. So really understanding the problem set back house and looking at ways we could help alleviate some of those gaps and make them more productive and efficient.

Maybe kind of change the mindset of some of the, the older school ways of doing business. Um, which, which was really exciting, right? You, you basically. Pulling back the, you know, the layers of an onion to see what’s kind of in the middle of it. And hopefully there’s a, you know, a, a pearl or something like that.

Onion was probably the wrong, you know, um, analogy there to find the pearl. But, um, but yeah, so mate, I, I spent seven years, um, thankfully flying around with like, Nike, Sony and Toshiba. They’re all manufacturing companies, so a lot of what I was advising on and really getting into with them was the IOT space.

Smart metering, smart cities. Um, different solutions that were really outside of the scope of commodity type services. And I really saw the value of what that that provided. But to, to leap forward into where we are now, uh, very prevalently and early on, I started with, uh, Verizon in, in a capacity around 2004, 2005.

Um, you had wireless watchdogs. These people were doing technology expense management for companies because they couldn’t understand their billing, right. Billing’s quite complex, even though it shouldn’t be. Back then it was a commodity service. So it should have been, you know, one phone, one bill. But you know, back in the day, you have one phone and you receive a th 3000 page bill with all of this detail, and you’re like, well, I don’t understand this.

So,

Jeremy Balius: yeah.

Josh Ryder: Um, it, it, it leapt forward. And it wasn’t until I started working with the Nikes and the Sonys and the Toshibas, you actually see. Te at a hyper scale. And you see the value that it’s bringing these large, kind of more enterprise complex organizations and they’re, they’re very, um, what’s, what’s the word?

They’re very, uh, decentralized in their decision making process. So sometimes there’s leakage coming out of departments, but they wouldn’t otherwise know because it goes under the radar, because the decision making’s in so many different places. So the value of 10, bringing everything into a single pane of glass, you can see what you’re paying for.

You can actually, you know, you know, it’s bringing in the contract as well to make sure that you’re getting all the discounts that they promised, you know, in those early, you know, um, stages of the contract negotiation. Um, and so for me, I was like, man, this takes all of the processing of your accounts team and having to try and go through it.

Uh, invoices and billing to see if that’s actually accurate because everybody’s received a carrier bill. I don’t wanna, you know, say names, but we’ve got kind of the big two carriers here and or big three now, uh, carriers here in Australia. You know, the billing can sometimes be up here and down here. It never seems to stay at this constant, you know, plane.

And as an organization and as account team, I. You don’t have the time in your, in your day to be able to actually go in and audit the billing. And if you were to decide, okay, this is a big enough number, we need to go in and audit this. You’re looking for a needle in a haystack. You’ve got a 3000 page bill.

You’re looking for 12,000 to $50,000 in overage through that bill. These can be things like gt uh, GST anomalies, like GST might be off a few cents, and it’s just a, it’s an error in the processing. Of that bill, but there’s no way you’re gonna find, you know, a line item, say, oh, 800 of our 4,000 services got charged an additional fee in GST.

A human wouldn’t be able to go through an Excel spreadsheet with however many lines of services, and that’s actually how it’s being done in Australia today. If a company wants to audit their invoice, they literally have to take the invoice. Pivot it out into an Excel spreadsheet and then spot check it because there’s no way for them to go line item by line item to be able to re review the billing.

So the value that that service showed me, it customers wanted it and needed it. And also for the carrier side, it removed the peaks and valleys. So it actually, for me, working with the carrier or the iot company, it stopped any of the, you know, um. Tenseness between the billing, like if I’m sending the customer a bill and it’s higher and they’ve gotta go and find it, what’s the relationship like?

It starts to, you know, kind of cut some lines in between the relationship. What TEM does, it keeps everything, it removes all the peaks and Valley, so the customer’s actually happy because they’re getting consistent. Bill, we’re happy because we don’t have to manage that for the customer and have awkward conversations around why their bill was higher or lower.

TE’s actually making sure that it’s in complete alignment with what, uh, they’re buying and procuring. And, you know, the bill might’ve gone up, you know, for a valid reason. Like they might’ve had a project. TE’s going to identify that and say, Hey guys, this isn’t one to worry about. This isn’t an overage or anything like that.

It was a project that was run here was the cost and it was associated to this invoice and this project. So you guys have peace of mind that when you’re paying your bill, it’s completely. Audited, validated, reconciled prior to going out to the customer, and the best part is the accounting team don’t actually ever have to touch an IT invoice.

It comes directly into our software. We audit it, optimize it, send it back to the ERP system so the accounting team can process it. They, they literally don’t touch it. They never have to look at an Excel spreadsheet ever again, because we’ve utilized software to be able to achieve that. So,

Jeremy Balius: yeah. Awesome.

So when you were in the States and you’re starting to, get a lot of exposure on, on your client’s side, and you’re starting to see, in those early days what they’re experiencing, what kind of w. What kind of wastage was it? What are, are we talking in orders of magnitude of wasted funds going out the door?

Josh Ryder: I could scare you with the numbers.

Jeremy Balius: Scare me.

Josh Ryder: Yeah, so look, we, we’ve, we’ve had a number of customers and, and you’ve gotta think, right? We, we started out in the US right? So completely saturated technology, expense management. Market, right? Every company in America, over 50 seats, is using 10 every single business.

So in America it’s very different. You are having to come in and actually show the value of your software and what it can do because all software isn’t created equal. Some software doesn’t get as granular as it, it needs to. Mm. But that’s why we’ve, you know, for us. We bought the expense of having in-house dev people that actually reside in our business.

So we can continually evolve our software to be able to get granular to find additional savings that other 10 software and companies won’t be able to do. But yeah, look, I, I could tell you some more stories. I won’t name the names of the company on here to companies on here today, but I can tell you major manufacturing company that I’ve probably mentioned earlier today.

Um, we found $1.75 million of savings within the first five months that we were actually able to put back in their bank account.

Jeremy Balius: Wow. We’re talking

Josh Ryder: five months, $1.75 million, and they already had a 10 company in there looking at their business.

Jeremy Balius: Wow.

Josh Ryder: We worked with very early days with a, a, you know, an ev, car man manufacturer in the United States.

Um, that obviously grew very rapidly. We’ve had them as a customer since kind of day one. I think at this point, uh, I think they’re up to $2.2 million of savings per year just using our TAM software. So those numbers can, can kind of scare you. What scares me in the Australian market, because Tim doesn’t exist here, we’re working with like MSP organizations over here.

And MSPs might not seem like a large enterprise style organization. Mm-hmm. But their tech spend is that, or the equivalent of an enterprise organization in the us.

Jeremy Balius: Right.

Josh Ryder: We did one recently where we did a free proof of concept for one of their vendors. It was their biggest vendor and it was an ISP company.

We found $1.6 million of annual leakage from that one vendor. Keep in mind this MSP has 121 vendors that they’re trying to bill process for. The accounts payable team is trying to manage these invoices to be able to get them out. They get them out quickly. A lot of the times customers would complain and they do a great job of customer service to help fix the invoices as quick as they can.

But they were seeing a lot of invoices that were going out incorrectly. And the other piece, the problem set for this organization and talking to them and. In great depth was they’d feel like their sales organization would have a great month, right? High fives all around, everybody’s happy. Mm-hmm. And then the COGS report would come out and there’d be an additional, like, we’re not talking, you know, your bill’s gone up $10,000 at this point, you know, we’re, we’re talking, you know, $400,000 of cogs that have fallen outta the sky.

We now need to pay, or we need to audit this billing, which means we won’t be able to pay the bills on time. So if they are accurate, accurate, now we’ve got, you know, overage charges that we’ve gotta, you know, gotta pay so it’s up. Mm-hmm. Yin and yang risk, you’ve gotta kind of take, but yeah, you’re great.

Sales month all of a sudden isn’t so great because you’ve gotta take $400,000 off. You know what sales just brought in just to pay your cogs, and they co, they, they couldn’t even validate that those charges were accurate, so potentially they should have been holding onto their $400,000 of additional cogs that they just had to pay out to vendors.

But there’s no manual way to get into a granular level to audit your invoicing. It’s just not possible.

Jeremy Balius: So, so the TE is the software that’s auditing reams and reams of invoicing at high pace and is what’s able to enable the business to scale up to get better insight into what they’re actually being billed for.

What’s your view on why was that so commonplace in the States first, where you mentioned it was already a saturated market and you’re needing to compete on, the details of the software already or the tech specs, you’ve brought it to Australia and a NZ more broadly. Why do you think it was more commonplace in the States and why is it lagged to date here regionally?

Josh Ryder: Um, look, I, there’s, there’s a, a few reasons, right? Okay. The US market, they are less risk adverse. They’re early adopters of technology that provide them a, a, a real hard dollar value return on. Oh, interesting.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah. Okay.

Josh Ryder: So in, in the US when you’re negotiating and you can actually show that hard dollar amount of savings or where leakage is gone or what you can actually do for them in that regard, typically there’s no risk aversion to that.

They’re not going, Hey, can we speak to 20 of your customers? Can we. You know, get into the back of house of your organization and how it works. There’s none of those types of conversations. It’s like, okay, we’re gonna sign this contract and hold you accountable to what you, you’ve told us that you’re going to do for us.

Which is great, right? Because that’s why we have contracts in the first place that holds you accountable to what you’ve said you are going to do for that customer, right? That’s enough in the us. The other reason I think that you see it as a saturated market today is because there’s predominantly. A lot more larger enterprises with decentralized decision making in the United States, right?

They’ve got out here, we’ve got large companies, really large enterprise companies, but in the US you’ve got a, a broader range of large enterprise companies, right? So they had a problem set earlier on than what we probably had here in a, in, in, in Australia. And. You know, a problem set. That small, medium business over there wasn’t really looking at either.

It was, we just pay what we pay. But when the, when the large enterprise organizations started to do adopt the technology, ’cause they needed something to be able to do bill processing because now you’re talking hundreds of invoices coming in, unless you want to have say 20 to 50 people in your organization doing accounting and uh, bills payable.

Then, and, and you’ve gotta think of the expense of that too, right? Like you’re, you’re paying each of those, say, you know, 20 to 50 employees a salary, you’re paying them, you know, um, uh, your retirement, your 401k or your super. Um, they’ve gotta have, you know, holidays and things like that. There’s costs associated with doing that, whereas you can bring in a software platform that actually is guaranteed to save you more money than you’d ever spend on it.

You really, you’re automating the process and taking all the headache off that account’s payable team, we’re essentially just ingesting the invoice from, from the point of contact. So the accounts team doesn’t need to touch it, we’ll run it through our software. Our analysts on the backend validate, so we don’t just rely on software.

We have analysts, which, you know, in our business that was really important for us. ’cause a lot of tes will just rely on the software and that’s a big differentiator for us because our analysts actually. Go into the software once it’s done, its audit and really poke around in there and ma and get really aggressive with it.

And that’s how we’re able to kind of get more cost savings. Anytime we come in and there’s another 10 in the states, we’re very confident that we’re gonna showcase, you know, a lot more savings than what that TE organization’s actually doing. So, um, so there was early adoption there, right. So, and as you’d be aware organically, a lot of people go from large enterprise.

Into like a startup business because they’ve got experience, they know how to grow the business to make it an enterprise organization,

Jeremy Balius: right? So they’ve

Josh Ryder: taken that knowledge down into that smaller, medium piece and it just spread like wildfire. I think for me, this will surprise you. Tim has actually been around since 1996, right?

So almost 30 years Tim has been around. It really exploded into the market, I would say, because of the advancements of software. In around 2010 where it just went, you could not really go into a customer, even a 50 seat organization that wasn’t using TE software. Mm-hmm. And then, so in Australia, I, I think it’s more of an education piece.

We’re bringing this to organizations for the first time. They’ve never heard about it before. So is that real kind of like, we’ve gotta, we’ve gotta start the conversation back here because they, in the Australian market, it looks and feels and touches like. A software or a platform that’s never been used before because it hasn’t been broadly used in Australia.

Like the Nikes of the world are using it, they’re also using it for the Australian market. Right. That’s how we knew it would work because we were already doing the technology expense management on the Telstras, the Vodafones, the Optus, your TPGs. You know, we, we were integrated with everybody. 10 years ago because we had to, because we had these large multinationals, so we knew Tim worked out here in Australia, but the amount of organizations that we would go into, and you’ve got the CFO, doesn’t really know where the COGS additional cogs are coming from.

The IT manager, they’re getting pulled in a million different directions. And they don’t have clarity. There’s no single pane of glass that they can look into and see all of their IT infrastructure, all of their mobile devices, every asset that they’ve got out in the field, they might have multiple locations where they can actually just click on a map and go, okay, we’ve got assets here and here and here.

These are all coming up for contract, or these are end of life. So it almost, and then it lends into a whole compliance piece. You know, that’s. You know, it’s, it’s exciting to talk about, but, um, yeah, I, I, I think it, it just organically rolled down. The pricing got better, so small, medium businesses were able to take advantage of that.

And they typically don’t have large accounting teams, so this is a, this is basically just automating their billing for them, so they don’t need an accounting team in house to be able to do that for them.

Jeremy Balius: What I think is so interesting about what you guys are doing is, uh, with surge capacity, you obviously saw a gap in the US market and the way that you could be clearly differentiated and outperform.

We’re here. Today talking about new market entry because you’re bringing it to Australia as a SaaS company, but there is also a sense of category creation. You the, you’re bringing the concept of TE into Australia at the same time, and I’d love to hear about your experiences in you’re not just.

Selling the, the license or the consumption of search capacity. You’re selling the concept of te at the same time, and I I, I’d just be keen to hear more about what that’s been like for you.

Josh Ryder: Look, initially it was, um, we had some really great conversations like Australians and Australian Market. They’re happy to talk to you and, and it, and it is a, a decent amount of.

Happy kind of talk. I think for us, um, bringing it to the Australian market was challenging in that we were going in direct. Right? Which is what we do in the US it was, it’s a direct play. We just go straight in. What we kind of underestimated was the Australian market is a completely different platform than the the US market.

Jeremy Balius: Yes, right.

Josh Ryder: I think in the US they’re more focused on dollars and cents and the value that that brings to them. I think in the Australian market, not only have you gotta educate on te talk about surge capacity, but we needed a way to build trust quicker because the sale, it was really drawing out our sales cycle.

So we pivoted pretty early days, probably after the first quarter it was, and the first quarter was challenging. We had a lot of great conversations. But they didn’t really go anywhere. It was like we’re on page 12 of the problem set that that person kind of had. And because they, there was no trust built, we actually pivoted and changed to like a partnership model where we were going out and seeking, you know, trusted advisors in the market

Jeremy Balius: and

Josh Ryder: talking to them about our product.

So we, we actually stopped selling. We started going to people that potentially would see value in a partnership with a company like Surge capacity and the value that we would be bringing their end customer. And they’ve obviously had that trusted advisor role where they’re bringing value already to that customer.

So we pivoted focused on building trust with partners that were valued and and trusted advisors in the Australian market. And then kind of came in off the back of. Their introduction to us, so we had a lot more credibility straight away, and I think that that was the most important piece for us. The other challenge was that we didn’t have Australian use cases, right?

Mm-hmm. We, we, we didn’t have a beachhead in Australia, so when they’re looking at, and we’ve, we’ve got a long list of amazing names, which we do provide in those, those demos. It’s like, look, we’ve got testimonials, we’ve got case studies from these organizations, and they go. Okay, that’s great. But what about Australian companies?

Jeremy Balius: Yeah, it’s like,

Josh Ryder: I think you’re missing the concept. The, the value is actually understanding that we have the capability set to bring those types of names value. So therefore, if you were to take that, you know, at a street value, if we’re providing a high level of value to organizations with those names.

We, we we’re guaranteeing that we’re gonna bring that same value to your organization because we’ve, we’ve done this with some of the hardest companies globally to be able to achieve this with. So for us it was really about educating, getting in, getting that trust earlier through trusted advisors in the organization, in, in the Australian market, and then really kind of go in from there.

And then we saw a lot quicker uptake. You know, the trust was already there. They saw the value in what we, we’d done, we’d gotten them into conversations with our, you know, our customer base. So they’d actually spoken to them. How long have you been with, you know, been with Josh and the team? Oh, I’ve been working with Josh and the team 15 years.

They’re amazing. This is what they’ve done for us over the time, so, yeah. Um, that’s, that’s been really kind of key to our success. And, and to your point, we, we, um, we always look for other ways we can provide value, right, Tim? Is a software that you could sell to a customer and have them run it, they wouldn’t see the value out of it.

So we actually sell it at a discounted rate as a managed service. So we actually fully manage the platform. Oh, interesting. So, and, and this was really interesting to some of our key value partners, people that, you know, in the market, they’re like, wow. Right. So it’s not a software platform where they’re actually going in and having to dig through the detail of the reporting.

It’s like, no, we manage that. They have it accessible to them. Like IT managers can jump in and see where staff are or assets are, or where the cost centers are allocated. They can disconnect services, do all their macd through our single sign-on portal, even do procurement right through our portal. They can do all of that.

Or they can call us and we will do all of that for them. We put all the reporting together for them. We bundle all the reporting every month to say, Hey, this is what we’ve saved you this month. Here’s where there was a few issues. You had nine people that went overseas. They would’ve received overages because they didn’t have a, you know.

A global roaming plan on there. We went in and added those global roaming plans ’cause we could see that they were pinging in other countries, right? So we can proactively actually mitigate more of their leakage by managing the invoicing. Whereas an IT manager doesn’t have the time to do that. To be able to jump in and actually identify, hang on a second.

We’ve had these alerts. We need to actually make some pricing plan changes and. Revert them back to the, the start of the billing cycle. These are the types of insights that our managed service actually brings for you outside of the fact that we’re just saving you money. We’re one, you know, one throat to choke.

You can call us and get complete visibility. Any report that you could possibly think of, we can provide. The other thing with our interface, our platform, we’ve got 550 customizable pieces to that. So we can actually design the platform, the, the single pane of glass for exactly how that user wants to visibly see it.

So you might have a CFO that wants to see this because it’s important for their board reporting, but the IT manager, he’s on a granular level, he wants to be able to see this. So we can really customize that out per customer, and it just brings immense amount of value. Obviously for our customers, the shiny toy is always the savings.

They, you know, they, they, they come in because they’re like, Hey, we just wanna do a pressure test and see if there is any savings out there. We think we do a pretty good job, you know, and it’s like, we try not to sell like that ’cause it’s just selling on savings doesn’t do, doesn’t really do what we do justice.

That the, the savings and what the, the software actually does, it’s automating and auditing. All of your invoicing, making sure that you’re paying exactly what you’re contracted to pay to that organization, making sure that there’s no anomalies in the billing whatsoever, and your accounting team never has to touch it.

Like, think about that for a second. The amount of invoices, potentially an MSP is processing a month is about 121 invoices, right? Mm-hmm. And then they’re also processing. Invoices to all of their 1600 to 6,000 customers.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah,

Josh Ryder: that’s a month’s worth of work. So if we can take half of that pain away, we’ve done the, we’ve done all the vendor invoicing for them, automated it to the point where they can just hit, approve and pay it out.

We’ll actually even go a step further once we have the trust and say, would you like us to pay that bill for you? So you don’t actually have any touch on that bill. So we’ll. Automate it, optimize it, audit it, and pay the bill for you if you like. So now we’ve taken away that whole headache, right, of the organization or the accounting team to have to process the invoices to then be able to send invoices out to their customer base.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah. Interesting. I, uh, having been involved in, um, a few SaaS platforms entering Australia, I’ve, I agree with you. It’s a hard sell when your key message is potential savings or, Hmm. Potential reduction of time cost. Yeah. It, it, it tends to be in a risk averse environment, it tends to not have enough weight to get somebody to make a decision.

Do you think that the managed component of the service is what may be elicited? Action or propelled a sales conversation further where, uh, it wouldn’t have had you been just a software platform.

Josh Ryder: Yeah, absolutely. The management, the, the management of it is the key, right? The fact that we’re alleviating a ton of the workload on their side.

They never actually have to look at our software if they don’t want to. Right, right,

Jeremy Balius: right.

Josh Ryder: We’re managing it for them 100%. We just show them the value of the software. I think, and I, I think we’ll probably talk about this later, but one of the things that we’ve done out here in Australia is move to a free proof of concept where we’ll ingest, you know, three of your invoices from maybe your top three vendors that you have just to showcase.

And we actually put that into our software, like it would be if they were a customer of ours. So they can see it and touch it and feel, it gives you a complete report card of, you know, a margin analysis, zero usage devices, and at the end of that it pops out a nice little, Hey, we’ll save you X amount of dollars this month, save you X amount of dollars next month, and so on and and so forth.

So the free proof of concept has been really key for us because there’s no risk involved for the customer and for us. And then they go, well. How much re how many resources do you need of ours to actually do the proof of concept? ’cause that’s the other pain point. We don’t have time and we don’t have people.

And for us, because we’re only, we’re extracting invoices and contracts and marrying it up to the HR data, that’s already in your system. Right? So that to us is an Excel spreadsheet with. Name of employee contact number and email address. That’s all lined in. We’ve got all your cost centers, we’ve got the contracts, we’ve got the invoices.

It typically takes us half an hour to 45 minutes with a lower entry, lower entry level accounting person that can give us access to three invoices. So effectively it’s costing them 30 to 45 minutes of one of their employees. Time to do a free proof of concept that’s gonna give them a report card on.

Any leakage in the business and we say always, we hope it comes back at zero. We’ve never seen it come back at zero. We actually see it astronomically this way, especially in the Australian market because it’s not being done out here unless you’re a large multinational. So they dunno what they don’t know.

The leakage is there. They’re just used to paying, paying for it, and there’s no way to reconcile when you know, $400,000 of cogs comes outta nowhere. Uh, at the end of the month. So,

Jeremy Balius: yeah, that’s, that sounds really powerful, to prove it with live data, I, if we take a step back, I, in order to get to the point where you are.

Talking about that, and in the context of you bringing surge capacity to Australia. It makes a lot of sense to me, and I think it’s really wise, the way you guys pivoted and went down the, a partner strategy, let’s call it eliciting trust through trusted, partners.

Josh Ryder: Yep.

Jeremy Balius: Who. Who at the time, and it might still be the same, but who at the time was that ICP and buyer that the partner had access to and was able, and you were able to bank off their brand or their, um, their own personal brand, let’s say even, um, and open up the ability to reach the target ICPs

Josh Ryder: yeah. Look it, it just depends on the size I think, of the organization. Okay. If I’m understanding the question correctly, I think in kind of small medium market over here, I think really you’re talking to the CFO initially. Okay. And you’re getting access into that, that kind of.

That persona, CFO obviously cares about money, right? Yeah. Going in and out of going in and out of the business so you can get access to a CFO in a small, medium size organization, but that’s not necessarily the case. Probably in an enterprise organization where you’ve got a whole procurement team that’s based around bringing on technologies that save the company money, help you negotiate better contracts and, and drive overall pricing down.

While you know. So your cost to serve goes down, productivity, efficiency of the business goes up and you’re able to serve your customers a lot better now in the enterprise. Yeah, in the enterprise space. You’re talking to procurement people? Mm-hmm. Really? Mm-hmm. Mid-market, which is predominantly kind of where we’re at.

We’ve, we’ve got a couple now, as you’re aware, we kind of talked about it before. We’ve got a couple of large enterprise, um, businesses now here in Australia, um, which we’re dealing with the procurement and it. Director. Um, but typically it’s the C FFO and the IT manager, they’re gonna see the most value out of it because we’re saving the organization money.

The CFO’s team on the accounting side, they’re saving a ton of time. There’s no human error vol involved in it. It, it’s all being reconciled throughout our data set. Um, and then the IT manager just to have visibility and to be able to make changes. Directly from one portal. Um, if you’ve ever been an IT manager, you know that these are disparate, you know, portals and things like that.

You’ve gotta go to a million different places to, to do anything, even even down to an employee leaving, right? The IT manager will send off an email to Telstra to say, Hey, this employee’s no longer here. Can you please cancel this service? You get a nice little email back saying, yes, we’ll cancel that service, right?

If the IT manager doesn’t go to the bill the next month. Actually look for that phone number, then there’s no validation whether that actually took place or not. Mm-hmm. And then there’s, there’s a disconnect between accounting and the IT manager, IT manager knows that that service should have been shut off.

Accounting has no visibility, that, that, that service should have been shut off. Whereas TE in itself, in our portal, actually manages those disconnects to the point of. Obviously we’re, we’re pulling in the data the next bill, right? So we’re gonna identify that phone number. It’s gonna, it’s gonna ping straight away, show us red and say, this was canceled last month.

Here’s the email associated with it. We can go back to Telstra and say, please amend the billing, send it back to us, and remove that, that number. Obviously it’s typically not one mobile phone. It’s typically a lot. We, we had a customer the other day that thought, thought they had 900 devices. And you know, the CFO’s like, I don’t understand that because we’ve only got 722 employees, so how do we have that amount of mobile phones?

Yeah. And sure enough, when we did the proof of concept, those employees had left. Well, you know, the, the shortest one was six months. The longest one was three years.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah. Wow. But

Josh Ryder: they, they’ve been paying the billing, you know, for that amount of lines. For up to a three year period, like think about the leakage just in that one specific category.

But I could talk about heaps of different categories that we find these types of anomalies in the software. Just it, it goes through everything with a finite comb, you know, to identify any anomaly against that bill. Yeah. And it marries it up against any historical invoices and things like that as well.

So yeah, we’ve got a lot of AP and AI built into it. It’s very, very smart the way it works. So.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah, and you guys are getting some big wins on the big logos too. What? Mm-hmm. In terms of your growth strategy as, as you moved into that sort of referral, having evangelist type partners introducing you into the right people and the right teams, is that still core to your strategy or have you evolved from that to back to direct?

Where, where are you at now?

Josh Ryder: We’re actually doubling down on these partnerships because the partnerships and the partners that we’ve actually brought in, they actually bring value to our customer set in their own right. Hmm. Um, we’re providing them, our partners with visibility into their customers, right?

So the customer wants to share the information that we’ve provided in the portal with those. Trusted advisors. And, um, so for us, we’re really doubling down on those partnerships. It’s actually making us a lot stickier, uh, in the business. And we work with so many different partners now that we can kind of go, Hey, this would be a really good one for Jeremy.

Like, Jeremy’s product set would actually bring this customer a lot of value based on the discovery that we’ve done with that customer. And that being another pain point. So being able to connect that customer. With other relevant parties that, you know, we, we’ve been working with now, they’ve brought us into their organizations, their, you know, their trusted advisors within their organizations.

We’re actually able to share that back across and say, Hey, you know, these guys are struggling with that. You guys have been solving that with X, y, Z company. Love to introduce you so you could solve this for our customer as well. So absolutely doubling down on those partnerships. Right. It’s, it’s been key to, to us.

Uh, I will say, uh, because of. The runs that we’re getting on the board now, we are seeing a lot of companies come in direct. Mm-hmm. Um, especially the larger ones, which is really interesting to me. They’re actually going to the website and coming in through a lead on our website direct. Um, whereas before we had no market presence, so

Jeremy Balius: Great.

Now that

Josh Ryder: we’ve got so many partners out there talking about surge capacity and the value that 10 brings, um, and they’re doing that at a 40,000 foot view, so the customer’s got a. You know, an idea that potentially we could save them money. Not really sure how that all works, but then when we come in and offer a free proof of concept, there’s no risk for them, and we get to show them, you know, significant, significant money that we’re going to put it back in their bank.

Right. So, uh, it’s, it’s, it’s great. I, I love what we do. Uh, I’ve worked in plenty of roles where my phone rings and I’m like, oh, no, this is gonna, right, right. You know, um. Surge and, and Tam working in Tam. You know, with my experience, it’s just one of those roles where you’re just ex, you’re excited to pick up your phone.

It’s usually a customer going, man, did you see that last report that just came out for us? And I’m like, yeah, I did. That’s, man, that, that was a, that’s a good month, right? That’s a good month of savings for you guys. He’s like, you’ve, you’ve paid, we’ve paid for your service 20 times over just on this one month.

And it’s like, yeah. We, we love to bring the value. It’s like this is what you should be paying, otherwise you’re just giving the vendor, the carrier more money than they should be receiving based on the contract. So it’s, it’s exciting. It’s, we, we just get to bring organizations value, you know, um, and help them out.

And a lot of companies like you look post COVID, a lot of companies are rebuilding. The cost of everything has gone up. Staffing, everything has gone up. So it’s, it’s kind of like. We could not have timed bringing TE to Australia better, I don’t think. Um, I think our approach initially was a bit naive thinking that we could just go in direct and have trust and that was probably directed at me, right?

Because I’ve come from a US market, lived and worked my whole corporate career, you know, 17 years in the US and I’m thinking, well, this brings value to every single business in the us. If this has gotta bring value to every single business in Australia, and we had to kinda pivot around that messaging because while it brings them value, if there’s no trust, then you know, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing.

Australian companies, you could put a pot of gold down on the table and say, that’s yours. And we’re expecting nothing in return. I guarantee you they’re leaving that pot of gold on that table because they’re like, this is too good to be true. And it typically is, but with us it’s not. And it’s, that’s the hardest thing to overcome in selling.

It’s not too good to be true. We’ve been doing this, you know, for our customers in the US for 15 years, you know, so, um, which is exciting in itself, right? Yeah. We’ve, we’ve had the longevity to be able to do that. Um, yeah. So. And then look for us, we don’t leave it there. We’re evangelists in the market. We wanna bring more value so we, we don’t stop at the product.

The core of what we do and the value that that brings, we’re, we’re in massive development stage and you’ll see come new financial year. Um, we’re gonna twofold the capabilities of what we can, what we can do from 10 perspective, which is really exciting.

Jeremy Balius: That is really exciting. I really appreciate how you’re talking about value as well, uh, not just in the way that you’re.

Um, unlocking real value, uh, within your clients’ businesses, but the way that you’re talking about value in your partner network or even partner ecosystem, let’s call it, uh, in the way that you’re talking about, and I just heard you say, looking for opportunities to add value in and above what you offer as a.

As a commercial offering, but, but providing introductions and providing other, um, opportunities for your partners to support, um, in, in client businesses. I just think that’s such a great route to market. Um, knowing and trusting that doing good things brings goodness back to you and doesn’t necessarily have a direct ROI.

Other than the totality of it being ROI and it’s just so refreshing to hear you talk about it in that way.

Josh Ryder: Yeah, absolutely. It’s like I said before, that’s what gets us outta bed every day. I’m, I’m, I bounce outta bed excited to have the opportunity to educate these businesses on. You know, efficiencies. I hear, you know, every MSP on LinkedIn right now is talking about BPA, which is business process automation.

Yes. Like that’s, that’s the key. That’s the future in the Australian market right now. And I love the development of that. I love what like Atlassian and companies like that are doing around business process automation. But TE really fits into that category of business process automation. ’cause we are actually.

Doing that, we’re doing BPA for your IT invoicing, but on a much granular level, we’re automating that whole process, taking that pain point out of your business and making sure that you know you’re paying for what you’ve got and we’re, you know, we’re giving you money back to you effectively, it’s your money.

Jeremy Balius: Mm.

Josh Ryder: Yeah.

Jeremy Balius: Josh, this has been so awesome. I really appreciate the way that you’re thinking about this, the way that you guys have built your business, the way that you’ve entered Australia with it, not just with a company, but with a category, uh, and just your overall approach. Massive congratulation on, on all the, the wins you guys are are getting.

I just know that you guys are just gonna propel upwards from here.

Josh Ryder: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. We’ve, uh, I feel like, you know, early stages we’re on the rollercoaster of just click, click, click, going up, and then we’ve hit the peak and just, it’s flowing so, so quickly and rapidly. Um, and it, it’s exciting. I look at my calendar, you know, now versus six months ago, it’s completely booked wall to war.

I mean, I think we’ve rescheduled this like three times because there were just meetings that I couldn’t leave on the table. So, um, it’s, it’s, it’s a really exciting place to be for us. And like I said, you know, kind of what’s next for us is really doubling down on these partnerships, bringing more value to companies.

You know, we’re, we’re expanding our, our data and analytics layer to get down to a really it, when I showcase this for, for yourself and for LinkedIn with our partners, what we’ve developed. It is absolutely mind boggling, especially with where the Australian market is now. I think, you know, I don’t wanna call the Australian public cloud situation less mature than the US but I, I feel like there is a lot of learnings there to be had.

I think that people have overinflated, you know, public cloud environments and I think that what you’re gonna see from the level of data analytics layer that we can put over. Things like cloud and finops and utilities and, you know, proactive insights. It’s gonna, it’s abso and, and on the SaaS side as well to, to that point, getting it down to a granular level where you can actually see, you know, how many times your employees used teams, you know, in the last month.

You know, or have they not logged in? Or how many people are using Zoom? How many licenses do we have out there? How readily, you know, are they using those types of services? So. We’re really kind of extending our reach and providing more value and simplifying the process in which we have to do that. So yeah, it’s, it’s exciting for, for where we’re going as an organization for sure.

Jeremy Balius: I tell you what, get all that stuff to market and then come back on the show and tell me about yeah, how you guys launched it and got, went from new market entry. And we will, uh, we will do the next episode on extending the reach and launching new services on top of the, it’ll be cool.

Josh Ryder: Yeah. Yeah. And the other, the other exciting thing, I know we’re kind of time poor right now, but, um, we’re, we’re a few weeks away from doing a, a, a rebranding for, for surge kind of, uh, separating out our consult consulting side to our, our tech side, uh, because we’re really bolstering out the tech, uh, approach that we’re taking, uh, in the Australian market.

So you’ll see that hit the market here pretty soon. Uh, it’s, it’s really exciting for us. Um, and just bolsters everything that we’re doing in the Australian market right now. So yeah, leveraging those partners, they’re, they’re absolutely gold for us. The other plug too, um, if you haven’t already, uh, get Derek Morgan on your podcast.

Uh, he work, he running a company called Refer It, uh, marketing. And effectively it’s a platform in which, because we we’re receiving so many referrals from partners. And as you’d be aware, it gets lost in Outlook and you’re like, did I follow up with that person? He, he’s actually got a platform where it shows and you can actually invite people and introduce people through the platform itself, but it keeps it in a really nice, succinct, you know, type environment where I can see all of my value partners and when the last time I touched had a touch point with them, I can.

Interact with them through that portal. That’s really been key as well. It’s been amazing. So just a, a plug to those guys for really helping us out and, um, being evangelists in, in, in the marketing space. So it’s really, really cool what they’re doing as well. Yeah,

Jeremy Balius: We’re all in on that. We’ve partnered with them officially, as a system integrator.

We’re helping those guys roll out into channel programs and, by the time this episode publishes, his episode with Derek will have been three episodes prior to this. So, uh, he’s on the show. So it’s all, it’s all synergy. It’s all working together.

Josh Ryder: I love it. Yeah.

Jeremy Balius: Awesome. Well, hey, thanks so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it.

Josh Ryder: Yeah, thanks for having me, man. I really appreciate it. As always, Jeremy always.