Projectworks Growth and Global Insights with CEO Mark Orttung

Paul Spain:
Mark Orttung, great to have you on the New Zealand Tech podcast today. Thank you for taking the time out of your schedule in between Wellington and heading Back to the U.S. today.

Mark Orttung:
Thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be here and I’m really glad this worked out. To be able to record together, it’s great.

Paul Spain:
Well, this kind of comes hot off a couple of recent wins for Project Works both at the New Zealand High Tech Awards where you’ve been awarded the ASX High Tech Emerging Company of the Year and and also significant capital raise with your Series A funding round. You’re the CEO based in us. Most of the team at the moment are Wellington and I guess we certainly hope that will continue as you build out around the globe. But maybe you can share a little bit. For those who aren’t familiar with Project works, tell us a little bit about what you do.

Mark Orttung:
Yeah, ProjectWorks is a platform for small and mid market consulting firms. So think 10 to 500 employees and this could be it. Consultancies, small management consultancies, architecture firms and engineering firms. So like structural engineers, civil engineers, all of them work on a project basis. They’ll have a statement of work, a set of people they assign. It may go for a few weeks or even a few years, maybe two or three people on a project or maybe 100. Right. So it’s a pretty wide range.

Mark Orttung:
But that kind of core of working on a project basis for clients is at the heart of it. What we help them do is really run the core business. So one big piece is resource management. So who’s on the team? What projects are you doing? Getting the project set up, getting the budget set up, getting the timecode set up and getting people assigned. And then by doing that you can look at the profitability of a project and you can look at it in real time. So rather than an accounting system which can tell you whether you had a good month last month and it’s sort of too late to do anything about it, we tell you as of this moment what is the projection for each project. And testing gives you time to react and do something about it. And so then, yeah, so we also then have a bunch of people which I think of as just sort of the source of truth.

Mark Orttung:
So getting your timesheets done, getting your expenses in, getting your leave requests or vacation requests, and all of that feeds into resource plans and how you staff people. And it also becomes the source of truth for doing a very detailed invoice out to the client. And you can, you know, clients will Some will want a very detailed thing. They’ll want you to get your people to comment on each 2 hour block or 4 hour block. So we can make that a requirement that as you do your timecard, you got to do those kinds of details. And so the whole thing comes together and gives a set of companies. These companies are really fun to work with. They’re small, they’re experts in some really key area, but they really spend all their time with clients and they do not spend a lot of time on their own admin, their own process, their own tech style.

Mark Orttung:
So we can come in and really help them just up their game and most importantly, spend more time with clients. So we really just enjoy that. It’s great to be part of what they’re doing in the world and helping them make an even bigger impact and a bigger dent on some of the world’s best and most difficult problems.

Paul Spain:
Fantastic. I spent a little bit of time looking at project works, signed up for the free trial to have a little bit of a look around.

Mark Orttung:
Excellent.

Paul Spain:
And yeah, looks like a really, really capable product. And I’m certainly keen to sort of delve into how it came about and some of that history. But to start with, on these recent wins, tell us how the team felt to win the High Tech Emerging Company of the Year award at the High Tech Awards.

Mark Orttung:
That was fantastic. And back to what you were saying about. We’ve got about 40, a few more than 40 today in Wellington and we’ve got about a dozen in the States. Our intention is to grow both of those populations and I think we will for the long run have a large hub in Wellington and hopefully a growing hub. We’ve got three co founders that have been at this for quite a long time. They did this and we’ll get back into the sort of the origin story, but they were the inside tool for Provoke and then spun out in 2019 to form Project Works. So they’ve been working on it since even before 2019. And as you know, as you build a firm, as you build a software, a SaaS platform, you hit a lot of walls, you get kicked in the head a lot.

Mark Orttung:
There’s just a lot of bumps. Right. So the high tech award win was so nice to be able to have an audience and a setting that just makes you stop and celebrate a bit all of the journey that’s happened and how far they’ve come and how far we as a group have come. So yeah, it was just really nice from that perspective. And Matt, one of our three co founders, got up and kind of talked about the journey a bit and his own advice, I think at the end he kind of wrapped up by sort of saying, just keep going. The ones who win are the ones who just stay in and just keep going. And that was just great, I thought, for him to share that with his Kiwi tech startup brethren out there. So it was great.

Paul Spain:
That’s great. And this recent Series A round, I think brings the funds, if we put it in New Zealand dollar terms, to somewhere around 33 million New Zealand dollars, which is pretty significant at this point in the. In the journey. Walk us through what’s that journey like? You’ve been involved in these things over the years and sometimes these things go well. You get really good investors who can contribute more than just the money. How is that kind of shaped out? And in terms of the size of this funding round, what opportunity does that create?

Mark Orttung:
So maybe I’ll just give a quick intro to the round which was we added a new US investor, 10 coves. They’re a growth equity firm out of the East Coast U.S. but they’ve been quite engaged in the Silicon Valley for quite a while and their whole portfolio is SaaS, B2B FinTech. So what it does just to be the beginning of it is it adds us to this community and gives us access to this community of about 40 B2B SaaS fintech companies. And if our CTO wants to reach out to the CTO of one of these firms, they’re now a sister company and they’re very open to sharing and it just gives us this vast amount of knowledge that we can take advantage of as we go through our journey. So that has been wonderful to have 10 coves come aboard as part of the team. And the partner there, Steve Piaker, is somebody that I worked with in a prior role. I used to be coo@bill.com and he, he had invested in bill.com was on our board.

Mark Orttung:
So I got to know him quite well and I got to know the Tencos family. So we’re just thrilled to have the chance to work with them. In terms of what it allows us to do or sort of what it unlocks for us. One is really to invest more deeply in our product. So we are growing our product team overall. So sort of product managers, engineers, test engineers, that’s going to grow about 50% from where it is today. And we’re really excited about that. We’re looking for some fantastic engineers in the Wellington area.

Mark Orttung:
So if we’d love to have people come come join Us that’s one piece and we’ve, you know, we’ve got a really rich platform that’s quite deep in terms of how it works for these project oriented consultancies. But we also have a really long list of new things we want to add to it and, and that, you know, the what you can do now with large language models and other AI technology as it’s coming about really on top of a platform like ours is a really compelling set of things we can go do. And so we’re pretty aggressively pursuing those. The other thing we’re doing is we’re expanding our go to market. We are even for a small company, we are in five countries. So New Zealand, Australia is our strength today. But we do also have quite a presence in the us, in Canada and in the UK and we’re adding, actually for the first time we’re adding people on the ground on our go to market team in the uk. Previously you had to get a hold of one of our people in Seattle and the hours just don’t really overlap.

Mark Orttung:
They’re not that convenient. So maybe there’s three or four hours at the end of the day in the UK that we will be able to talk to you. So we’re excited to have a team properly on the ground in London and in the time zone and able to address the whole UK and really get into that market as well. So a lot of great stuff coming out of the round.

Paul Spain:
Fantastic. Now a lot of people will be familiar with Xero Story and Zero grew across New Zealand. Australia and the UK were kind of where it grew initially and the US was probably a fair bit sort of further back. Where are you seeing working best as the US streets ahead of the UK for instance, in terms of your growth at this point?

Mark Orttung:
Yeah, it’s a good question. Right now they’re sort of neck and neck in terms of how many customers we have in each. So we’re excited about both. One thing that we’ve been that I’ve been personally very happy to see prove out is that the core of our product works well. And this is something maybe that we have an advantage over what Zero had because their product being deep into accounting and payroll and all the weird taxes in the U.S. i think that was a really difficult thing to get their product to address Some of the weirdness of the US market where that does not. That’s not the case for us. The way we look at projects and profitability and resourcing and utilisation is the same across all five markets.

Mark Orttung:
So I feel very Lucky that we don’t have. Yeah, like we don’t get into tax calculation or payroll taxes or any of these kind of wonky things. And the US is, you know, each of the 50 states always has its own opinion on how to do all these things. And so there are whole companies that just do some of those pieces. But we’re lucky that our market, it’s pretty much the same. So we’re looking at it as if both the UK and the US as well as Canada will become quite high growth for us and already have done.

Paul Spain:
That’s exciting. It’d be really interesting to hear a little bit about your backstory because you’ve been involved in the tech world and the consulting world. World really, I think probably across your whole career from what I understand. So maybe even back to your younger years in terms of studying and so on. What did that look like for you?

Mark Orttung:
Yeah, I’ve been very lucky. I think the through line is the Geoffrey Moore technology adoption curve. I’ve been sort of fascinated by that my whole career and working at different parts of it. I started out at what was back then Anderson Consulting. It became Accenture, which is the largest, most successful consulting firm. And one of the things I learned there, they are really good at reinventing themselves every three years. The world is wildly different today than it was in the 90s or the 80s. They continue to reinvent themselves and stay relevant and stay to be really strong.

Mark Orttung:
So I had an unusual ride through working there. I started in the headquarters building software that effectively deployed the playbook to all of the Accenture engagements worldwide. And then I got really lucky and I got to spend two years of my. I went back to Northwestern and got a master’s degree in computer science specializing in AI back in the 90s.

Paul Spain:
It’s pretty early for AI from a lot of people’s perspectives, but we forget how long AI has been around, right?

Mark Orttung:
Yeah. My conclusion after my two years was this is not ready for prime time. And I was always more interested in the commercialisation or the application of technology than the pure technology. So if you wanted to be a researcher in a university, there was plenty to do. But I didn’t feel like there was much to do in the commercial world in the 90s. But it was a great way to learn how to do a lot of things in computer science and build large scale applications. And it’s quite relevant today, obviously. So anyway, so I’ve.

Mark Orttung:
After Accenture I got the bug to go do startups and so I did a series of four startups One was an old school software company where we shipped. We actually shipped physical software to large enterprises. And that really burned me out on that model. I felt it was a terrible, terrible model. Like, we knew some of the stuff didn’t work that well, but you’d ship it anyway, and then you’d sort of like ship them a patch or whatever.

Paul Spain:
Some people listening won’t know what. What that even means. Physical software.

Mark Orttung:
Yeah, we used to like literally ship a CD and you’d have to like load it on your server yourself. It was this. It was a terrible model. And yeah, I did. One of the first SaaS companies was called Get There. And this was in. I joined them in 1999, and I’m not even sure we had the buzzword SaaS yet. I remember by chance, I sat next to Marc Benioff on an airplane.

Mark Orttung:
I didn’t know who he was, and I didn’t know what Salesforce was. And he was doing a pitch for investors and was excited to hear that I was also doing SaaS. And so the two of us created a slide about Get There for him to pitch. Like, here’s a fourth example of somebody else doing this crazy thing. Wow. And at the end I asked him, like, what’s your name? And then like, what do you do at this company? I didn’t know who he was, so it’s kind of random. But that was back when he was flying on a commercial jet. I doubt that you can sit next to Marc Benioff on a random American Airlines flight anymore.

Mark Orttung:
But yeah, so I got into it pretty early. And then, yeah, so I did one. So Genesis was the old school software for telco, then get there for travel, one called Reardon Commerce, that didn’t work out. You got to have at least one in your series that didn’t work out. And then I went to Bill.com, which was the first time I got to work with SMBs. So it was this play for SMBs to manage their bills and to send their invoices out to customers. And when I joined, There were 12 people. We had eight customers, none of whom paid us.

Mark Orttung:
So we had like $0 in revenue. And we built this whole engine to manage payables and then actually run the payments through on behalf of our customers. And that one, I think, is one of them, maybe that I’m most proud of, because this engine and this payment network of companies we built now processes north of 1% of the GDP of the US so it’s like when you think about the duct tape and Paperclips that we were using to run the payments by hand in the beginning, and then that has scaled to that level of payment volume is really cool. Like, you know, like, I think at the, at my heart I’m like a software engineer. And the worst thing for software engineers is that you build something and nobody uses it right. So, like, to get that level of adoption is really gratifying. From there, I went back to services. A friend of mine that I had worked with talked me into running a company which we renamed to be nexiant, my first chance as a CEO.

Mark Orttung:
And that was a real attraction. And I actually liked the idea of a services company because it would be profitable. You know, I’d been in all these venture backed, just burned your way through growth kind of companies. And it works. But it also seems I just had this curiosity, like, what does it really mean to run a business that is profitable? And all the hard work that goes into that first three years, I think I was really bad at it. We took it from 39 million in revenue down to 34 million and almost broke the company. But I was able to get the right team on board and sort of get the right differentiation. And then we were able to grow it over the next five years to about 130 million in revenue.

Mark Orttung:
And so we took it from at the bottom. We were at about 200 people and then at the top about 1100 people. So I just trial by fire. I learned a lot about how to run a services company. And there’s a lot of great things that other people that had more experience than me came in and taught me as we worked as a team.

Paul Spain:
What would be your biggest lessons from that period?

Mark Orttung:
Yeah, I think for us, I break them into sort of three categories. One is you have to differentiate your firm. So we were outsourced software development and. And in the beginning we were all engineers. We didn’t have any product managers or designers or anything, just engineers. And we were not differentiated. And if you went to the Gartner Reports at the time, this was 2014 when I joined, they said there were 10,000 firms globally that did what we did. So I just, you know, that number stuck in my head, like, how do you stand out if there’s 10,000 doing what you do? And like, so you have to figure out some thing that you do that’s different.

Mark Orttung:
And if you went and looked at our website, we said we did everything and we’re only 200 people. And so there’s no way we could be good at doing all these Things, right? So it was a process over that three years of eliminating things. And finally we got to we want to build software that people love to use. Like that’s all we want to do is custom software with a really great user experience. And we ended up writing our mission statement. And I noticed a lot of other companies had a parenthetical remark on their mission statement, so we just put on ours. We had something sort of boring about we want to build software that helps our customers, whatever. And then at the end we said, because life’s too short for crappy software.

Mark Orttung:
It was just this little parenthetical thing we put in. That’s what our team remembered without even asking. They all got hoodies made with that on the back. And we were like, oh, that’s actually the message. That’s what we should be out talking about. And so we used that kind of as our mantra, etc, both to get new customers and to hire great talent. And we ended up building up a design group and a product management group. And we ultimately sort of turned our what we sold to be a team that was, you know, some engineers, a UX person and a product manager that as a whole could build you a team.

Mark Orttung:
And that was in 2017. That was still pretty early. Now that’s pretty standard for how a lot of services are companies go to market. But we were on the earlier side of going to market in that way. So anyway, so one is differentiate. You got to stand out. The other half of it, I’d say is you have to have a team that can take that differentiation to market. Because our typical prospect would say, can you give me three engineers to do X, Y and Z? And we wanted people in our go to market team who could say, what are you trying to do? And ultimately guide them back to hiring a team that we lead our people, work for our manager and we give a business result and that’s much more valuable, much more strategic.

Mark Orttung:
But almost none of our sales cycle started that way. So you need a really talented team to sort of bring your differentiation to market and sell it. And one of the things I learned, and this was sort of an Accenture approach too, is that we wanted deep practitioner expertise and then those people would sell. So it’s really hard to find these people that have shipped a lot of product either as an engineer or a designer or product manager. And they want to carry a quota like it’s. But if you can find them, they’re magical because that’s who our customers wanted to talk to. They didn’t want to talk to somebody who didn’t really deeply understand their problem, they wanted to go to the whiteboard and try to figure out the solution together. So having these practitioners selling helped us kind of take this differentiation we had come up with on paper and actually get customers to buy into it.

Mark Orttung:
And then the third category I call a thousand little things. So we were agile fairly early on and that has this whole routine of looking back every couple of weeks on what’s going well, what’s not going well. And we just applied that to every part of our business. So we would do these retrospectives and we would just try to remove the friction from everything inside our company. And all these little things over the years really add up and each little one is nice. But actually when we sold the company, we sold it in 2021 to a large consulting firm, NTT Data. They undid a lot of our thousand little things. And that’s when I really appreciated how much friction we had taken out of the system.

Mark Orttung:
Because you go back into there a 400,000 person company, so they have a lot more process, a lot more checks and balances. By definition they have to have some friction. And that’s when I really appreciated that last one. I was like, oh, wow. It was sort of sad to see it, see it go. Yeah.

Paul Spain:
Well, in New Zealand, of course, we are mainly smaller businesses in the scheme of things, particularly on a global basis. If we put aside the multinationals, but even the multinationals that exist here, they tend to have reasonably small operations, which.

Mark Orttung:
Is, I think, a luxury. I think I’d much rather be in a smaller group. I forget there’s somebody that’s done science around this and somewhere around 150 people, the dynamics of the group break down and it ends up spending energy on being big rather than on doing the thing that it’s meant to do.

Paul Spain:
And then. Yeah, what was next from there?

Mark Orttung:
Yeah. So one of the challenges at nexient was a platform to run our own firm. We tried three of the solutions that were out on the market at the time. This would have been in the mid-2015, 2016, that kind of timeframe. They were all really bad. Bad user experience. Data was clunky. The whole process was clunky.

Mark Orttung:
So being a bunch of engineers and software nerds, we decided we’ll just build our own. Started as a shared spreadsheet. Later it got a JavaScript front end and then we ultimately moved it to a database. But it was ultimately a bad idea. We, we would take our software people when they’d roll off a Client engagement and they go to the bench. So we’d say, go work on this thing. And they would get to stay between four and six weeks on average before a shiny new client project would start up. And we would need our best people.

Mark Orttung:
So we’d grab those people that were working on it and put them on the new client engagement. And so from a software development standpoint, it wasn’t at all clear that that made sense or it was a good idea. So anyway, so I had that pain point in my mind and one of the guys that worked for me, Andy Lynn, went off to run Provoke, which is another New Zealand based or at least originated in New Zealand consultancy, and he asked me to join the board. So that’s how I got to know the Provoke group. And that’s ultimately where Project Works came from. It was the internal tool for Provoke and it spun out because of that. They shared an investor in the bridgewest Group. And so through them I met Matt and Doug, two of the three co founders, and really liked what they were doing and really liked the product.

Mark Orttung:
And I felt that especially in the SMB space, there wasn’t a great tool that was lightweight, great user experience, and yet powerful enough to really do what consultant firms needed. And so I just loved the product. So I actually approached them and asked to join their board. And so it was, you know, that was probably almost three years ago now and I just, I felt like it was a luxury. As I was wrapping up, I sold Nexion in 2021. I spent about two more years helping NTT Data take Nexion plus a bunch of other acquisitions and create a new thing. We created a new brand called launch by NTT data. But my heart wasn’t in being in a 400,000 person firm.

Mark Orttung:
And so I was sort of working my way out of there and it just kind of came about that it was a good moment for Project Works where we, we lost our product lead. So Matt, who was running Project Works and I were chatting about it when one of the investors was kind of nudging me and we sort of, Matt said basically I could become the product lead or I need to hire one. So if you come in. And so just kind of the timing was great for me to join as CEO and I have this luxury normally. I think when you join a company and a running company and you join a CEO, there’s something really, really wrong with it. Like, it’s like, you know, and that I discovered that at Nexian we were, there’s all these walls. You hit as you grow your consulting firm. And they were hitting one and I.

Mark Orttung:
That was part of why it took me three years to understand it and get around it. But it was also a big challenge. A year and a half on the board, I got to see everything and I could tell it was actually a fantastic company and team was great, market was great, product was great. So I just, to me, that was really powerful to be able to step in and not have to change direction or rebuild anything. It was just like, how do we accelerate this? So I saw that as just awesome.

Paul Spain:
So what are the complexities of running an international but quite largely New Zealand based, in terms of sort of team from North America? And how do you kind of see the evolution kind of playing out over the years ahead?

Mark Orttung:
Yeah, we’re really interesting if you just think about the, like, we have a big chunk of our team is in the office in Wellington and then another big chunk of our team is remote in the States. And so it presents a lot of interesting challenges. Most of us in the States have been remote for a while, so we’re pretty good at it. And most of us, like, I come here about four times a year, so we do get a fair bit of FaceTime. And our team comes up to the States more and more now as well. So we’re getting enough face time to build the relationships that we can be quite effective on virtual tools. It’s got some funny things like, I am not a morning person, which turns out to be great from the time zone. We always joked with our kids that they preferred Hawaiian time over California time because it’s about three hours later and they would rather sleep late and stay up late.

Mark Orttung:
And I’m kind of like that too. And half of the year, that’s the same exact time zone as New Zealand. Right. This time of year, unfortunately, it’s five hours instead of three. So it just means you adjust your day a little bit later. And for me, that’s actually a bonus. There’s also, you know, there’s one day each. Like my Sunday afternoons, my slack starts to really go crazy.

Mark Orttung:
Yes. So that’s not ideal. But then Fridays I have very few meetings, so I can get a lot of really kind of work that I need to either be writing or thinking or whatever. You get a nice block of time. So it’s got some really interesting kind of little side benefits of. Of the. The different time zone and. Yeah, but it, you know, as with most startups, you end up working a lot of hours and a lot of weird hours.

Mark Orttung:
So there’s enough of them that overlap that it seems to work pretty well.

Paul Spain:
Yep. And I guess what are your observations around, you know, working, working with New Zealanders? What are the things that you’ve learned that help us do well on the global stage? And maybe some of the things that we could work on a little bit more or where we need to tap in on, on others to maybe balance out some of those areas.

Mark Orttung:
Yeah, I think there’s a lot of strengths and I’ve really been enjoying getting to know the Kiwi team and the culture here. One I would say real strength is just this pragmatic approach to things that there’s a very honest conversation about what’s wrong, what needs to happen and then just get on with it. And I really love that. And there’s not a lot of sort of whinging or debating about it. It’s just like we gotta get that done. So I’d say that’s a real strength. I think there’s a lot of commonality in the culture between, at least between California and New Zealand. I think they’re actually quite similar.

Mark Orttung:
And the Bay Area and with everybody in Wellington. I think both San Francisco and Wellington, you can sit inside, you look out the window, it’s a gorgeous day, it’s sunny and then you go outside and it’s windy and cold and it like, you know. So I think there’s like a twin city thing happening between San Francisco and Wellington that I think is kind of fun. Maybe that, you know, you said, what, what could I push you on a bit? I would say pace would be the thing I would push a bit on and I’m not sure it’s a good thing. But in the valley we just work really hard and people are, they’ve been finding ways to get like this bias towards action and motion that they can really not just work harder, but also make a lot of really big steps quickly. And I think watching the AI tools, if anything, is just pouring gas on that fire. Like the rate of change right now of what’s happening on all the different fronts from AI, you know, if you just pick any. If you look at like the developer IDEs and how quickly they’re changing every few weeks it feels like one of the new large language models comes out with a new, you know, was Windsurf.

Mark Orttung:
I’m not sure that’s the cool one anymore. I think I was just talking to somebody this week and he’s, you know, moved to Claude code and you know, the pace is just mind boggling. Actually. It’s Cool. It’s fun, but it’s. Takes a lot to keep up with it and to operate at that pace.

Paul Spain:
Now looking, looking at projects work sort of, you know, stage and in the journey. What’s happening in the world of, of AI, you know, what’s, what’s your thinking in terms of how easy is it for you to be incorporating the latest of AI into, into, you know, project works? Because I guess I’ve sort of looked around at differing vendors and products. You know, some do some sort of bolt on that or, you know, some change that doesn’t really add a lot of value. Other ones, you know, they’ve really gone in boots and all. But there does seem to be, you know, big variations in terms of how successful, different, you know, software companies are with really taking advantage of AI, not just in terms of how it might help them in terms of developing the product, but the capabilities that they can build into their software.

Mark Orttung:
Yeah, we’ve been pretty thoughtful about it and we’re looking for transformative ways to apply it. And so we’ll be coming out with in the next few months our first kind of beta versions of whole new areas of the product for us. So if you look at our world today, we’re really good at. Once you win a contract, we’ll help you optimize it, we’ll help you get the right margin, we’ll help you predict if it’s going to be profitable, where we’re going to move. And where I think AI is a really natural fit is helping you win new work. So putting together a proposal and kind of inherent in that, there’s another piece which is needed for a proposal, but also needed for staffing your project, which is a deep knowledge about who’s on your team and what have they done and trying to capture that for them. Because I know you’ve been in IT services, you have a person roll off a project and you say, could you please update your cv? If you’re lucky, you’ll get a few sentences out of them, they just aren’t very good at it. And then if you go look at like what I found in Nexient was my most successful client, leads would go back to the statement of work, pull out six paragraphs, figure out who worked on it and jam that into their cv.

Mark Orttung:
Right. So there’s a lot of these kinds of pieces that we think we can make a really impactful dent in with an AI tool and we’ll do some of the other things. We’ve already done a number of things in our own operations. So when we have a support ticket we have a suggested answer and things like that that really allow us to scale the number of customers we support without scaling the team linearly. But we’re really looking forward to September, October kind of timeframe where we’ll have some of our first private betas going with really helping people apply a language model to the front end of consulting. That’ll be the first big area. We’re also applying it to try to take away some of the really core pain points. If you talk to people who’ve worked in consultancies for a long time, they all have this visceral reaction to time cards.

Mark Orttung:
They just hate doing their time card. So true. It’s just a natural for one of.

Paul Spain:
Those things we all wish could happen, but without having to think about it.

Mark Orttung:
That’S what we’re going to attempt. So at least we’ll get you a draft and then you can say it’s correct or it’s not to start. And then hopefully over time that becomes it’s just done. And there’s a lot of sources of data that we already have and some others that we’re integrating to that we can bring in. And then AI is a great way to just kind of put it all together and say we believe this is your time card for the last two weeks.

Paul Spain:
Wow.

Mark Orttung:
Yeah, so some fun stuff. And we’re trying to go sort of into some deeper problems that are really for consultants, the hard things.

Paul Spain:
And from your time working in consulting and software development worlds, what are the big lessons or the lessons maybe that are not so commonly known that stick in your mind that listeners might enjoy hearing?

Mark Orttung:
Yeah. I feel very fortunate to have joined Project Works when it had product market fit. And that’s something I’ve been, I’ve been my whole career. I’ve sort of joined companies and help them really scale. So I’m not like a blank sheet of paper founder type. I’m more of a scale up type. And so I think that’s, it’s just this magical time in a company. When I joined we had, when I joined the board we were about 100 some customers.

Mark Orttung:
We’re now over 600 customers. But when you get to 100 firms using it and liking it and sticking around at a high percentage, you just know there’s some real value there and really just trying to understand the pain points, get to know them. I spend as much of my time as I can with prospects, with clients or with potential partners. And I think a lot of it is just getting that deep understanding of where are the pain points? Like what are the things that like in consulting is timesheets, it’s getting the invoicing on time. We would have some contracts at Nexient that if you didn’t invoice by 30 days, you were not allowed to.

Paul Spain:
Wow.

Mark Orttung:
And we would struggle to hit that all the time. Like most of the time we would hit it, but every once in a while it was very close. And so there’s just these sort of administrivia kinds of pain points in and around the consulting. We all enjoyed building software, designing the experience, actually building and deploying the software. But there’s all this other stuff. You gotta figure out how to help the company. So I like finding those, what are those real pain points. And I also think the trend now is really deep vertical expertise.

Mark Orttung:
And so as a company, Project Works has more than 150 years of experience in consulting. And I think that really just is in the DNA of what we build. It’s just, you know, we know. And I get these comments a lot when I demonstrate the software. It’s like, oh, that feature tells me that whoever built this had my job once. Right. Like it’s, you know, so yeah, so having that really deep understanding is crucial.

Paul Spain:
And from the consulting world.

Mark Orttung:
Well, so I’ve been doing some work on like how firms grow. And I think there are these hidden walls where if you go start from zero, you hit a wall somewhere around 30 to 50 people. And I think that first wall is the founder in the beginning should do everything because they’re probably like a leading expert in whatever it is the firm does. But somewhere around 40 or 50 they have to stop doing everything because they break. And so what usually happens there is they hire a team, one person in sort of sales, one person and delivery, like in the main functional areas. And that allows them to break through that wall and keep going. And then I think they hit another wall somewhere around 200 to 300 people. This is the wall I think nexient hit as I joined.

Mark Orttung:
I didn’t understand this at the time and I also didn’t know how to be a CEO. So the combination was kind of lethal. And that’s what got us from 39 million to 34 million over a few years. But what I needed to do was like we had this fantastic founder who had built it from 0 to 39. He had a great team, but everything went through him. Yes, he stepped out, I stepped in and they all wanted me to do everything. And I was like, I Can’t do all this stuff. It seemed crazy to me.

Mark Orttung:
But you really, I think to get through that wall, have to rebuild your organisation again. And the way I did it was we created five geographic regions in the US and appointed a general manager of each. And effectively, they were now the bottleneck for their 1/5 of the company. And so if the company can get to 2 or 300 now, we could get to about 1500 before we broke. And as we approached, we passed 1100 as we were selling, I could tell we were going to break again and that there was another wall coming. And if we weren’t going to sell, we better reorganize again. And I wasn’t sure how or what was the right way to do it, but yeah. So I think growth is magical in a services firm.

Mark Orttung:
If you’re growing, it just makes it easier to attract talent, to keep your own talent happy. It’s just great. But there’s this set of walls and this really hard challenge. I call it the consulting balance, where you’re trying to sell work to and hire people in exact unison. And I think in the seven years that we were at next, that I was at nexiant, there were maybe two or three days where we actually had the two balanced correctly. So if you don’t hire enough people and you do sell the work, your new clients are really angry because you said you’d start in two weeks and you can’t, and they’re really mad about it. And if you hire too quickly and you don’t get the work sold, you have this giant bench. And I mean, and it’s painful, right? You’re just all this money going out the door that is not returning billable hours.

Mark Orttung:
So you’re constantly fighting this balance. And. Yeah, and that’s, you know, one thing I really like about the core value of Project Works is we’re all about your resource planning. And we’ve got a very visual way to look at how am I set for the next. You know, and you can kind of see the cliff. If you look at any of our customers, they’ve got it nailed for four weeks or six weeks or eight weeks, but there’s always a cliff. And it’s just this natural part of the sales cycle and the hiring cycle. Yeah.

Mark Orttung:
So I think that’s. Those are some of the things like figuring out your way around those walls and figuring out that balance of hiring.

Paul Spain:
Some of the biggest challenges now as a chief executive now of a good number of years, no doubt some really sort of solid lessons, wearing that Hat and you’ve shared some of those with us. I guess when you look at where you’ve been most successful in terms of building great teams, what has that required of you? How have you had to act and operate to be able to really build a thriving team where people are able to really excel in their own areas of expertise? And you’ve been able to help that in the right sort of way because I guess you can get too involved or you can step back a little bit too much in some areas. Have you worked out how to really make that work?

Mark Orttung:
I think in the beginning I was really focused on just the very measurable. Is our revenue growing? Is our margin correct? Is our bench at the right level? And really that’s what I worried about. That’s what I lost sleep over. And as we finally got nexiant really growing it, I was able to take a step back and really appreciate the intentional culture that you build and the sort of the way you build the team has the biggest impact on the long run. So you start out with these very sort of short run tactical things of trying to get one more deal done, a little more revenue, but building a group of people that is resilient, that is always learning, that is always growing, that’s actually what’s going to make you win in the long run. Especially in a consulting business where you are your people, you can have a methodology, you can have an approach, but if you don’t have fantastic people, your clients aren’t coming back. I shifted my focus in the early days to sort of tactical, measurable financial stuff to much softer, like how does this team work well together? How do we think about adversity? What do we do when we hit a wall? How do we recover from it quickly? How do we keep learning? How do we attract really good people? Yeah, so I worry about those things a lot more today than I did and less about the short term. You always have to get the short term right.

Mark Orttung:
But usually if you have a great team, they will help you get most of those things right. And you can kind of worry more about the long run and build in the right organisation that can be resilient, quick learning, nimble, all the things that you want it to be.

Paul Spain:
And how have you gone about finding great people?

Mark Orttung:
It’s interesting. I think the hardest part is the first few. You have to really like put your energy into selling them well, finding them and selling them. So a lot of it using networks like LinkedIn and using your own personal network. Most of the really great people are busy Most of the time they’re not out looking, so you got to hunt them down and then talk them into coming. And once you get that core, they tend to attract other really great people. So if you get the first five or ten on your team to be really, really rock star talent, they attract others and it just, you know, so. And it’s sort of similar to building a culture.

Mark Orttung:
I think culture is more about what you do than putting something on the wall and saying, we have these five things. But, I mean, that’s a good way to get there. But if you sort of hold your team accountable for what you’ve all agreed is the culture, you really see it going when they. You see them holding each other accountable and them holding their teams accountable and you’re not even in the conversation. And that’s when you can see the culture go. And I think hiring is similar. If you hire rock stars, you’ll see them insisting that the other people are, you know, like, oh, that person. I don’t know if they’re going to be as exceptional as we need and like holding each other accountable in that way.

Mark Orttung:
Then it really starts to go. So you gotta get that flywheel going both on hiring and on culture.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, I guess all of those things are. It’s easier said than done.

Mark Orttung:
Yes, no doubt. Yeah. It’s really hard to find that first group and get them on board and. Yeah, yeah. And especially like when I was at nexient, I had never been a CEO before. I hadn’t really been in services for a long time, so I did not have the network, I did not have the team I could just call and bring over. I’m a little bit spoiled here because I’ve done so much software. I was able to assemble a team pretty quickly that I had worked with before.

Mark Orttung:
And I know they’re rock stars and that just is feeding on itself.

Paul Spain:
Now we’re in a world where distributed teams and people spread around different parts of the world, as has become pretty common. You’ve mentioned you’re coming down to New Zealand on a pretty regular basis four times a year or so. But how do you kind of make that work, working across the different time zones? Obviously you’ve worked something in there in terms of being at a crossover a bit more with New Zealand time, which I haven’t heard so common. I’m more often hearing. Hearing about Kiwis that are saying, oh, we’re doing this and that, so we fit in with the US rather than vice versa. So that’s good to hear. Other sort of Tips and techniques to make things work when you’re not necessarily face to face all the time.

Mark Orttung:
In some ways I think the tools are better. It’s kind of funny like in 10, 15 years ago, you go into Silicon Valley startup and there’d be whiteboards on every wall and people would write on the glass. And now all the virtual whiteboards are so good that you can use a zoom or whatever virtual meeting you’re doing and you can share a space digitally and you can do the same level of brainstorming and you get a result that’s already digitized, it’s already shareable. In some ways it’s kind of funny when you are in an in person meeting and somebody projects something on the other side of the room, you can’t see it as well. You can’t actually just start doing stuff in it. So I find sometimes, especially when it’s hybrid, you’ll see the people who are remote have better access than the people sitting in the room. So yeah, so I think there’s enough really great tools out there to allow you to collaborate really rapidly and have it all. Then your, your deliverable is done.

Mark Orttung:
The thing, it’s all written down, it’s all digital. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s good, that’s good.

Paul Spain:
Well, before we finish up, any other things you’d like to share? Particularly things that might be interested? We’ve often got founders, startups and software firms, but also people I guess right across the gamut of the tech sector. So anything else that might be of interest?

Mark Orttung:
I mean, I think for us, for me it’s really just finding that community of end users that you can really help change how their companies work. So I’ll just give one example of a. We have an architecture firm there in Australia that came aboard in the last year. Like all great architects, they’re great at design. Everything they do is digital. They have these giant monitors for spinning buildings around in 3D. Before they adopted our software, the way they entered their time, they have an in house accountant. That person had a desktop computer and there’s about just under 40 of them.

Mark Orttung:
They would queue up to this one desktop computer and add their hours to a spreadsheet. This is crazy. These people are world class architects building these well known buildings and, and then they’re doing that.

Paul Spain:
Wow.

Mark Orttung:
And I think that kind of captures the essence of what we’re able to help firms with. They’re so good at what they, these problems are solving in the world and so bad running their own firm, you know. And so like I really have a lot of passion for helping them and I love talking to them about it and working through how they can really. And then as they, you know, they’re now about a year into the deployment and they were talking about not only just the most obvious things, like not doing that anymore, but all of the sort of decentralisation of information that allows their team to make decisions much more rapidly and in a much more decentralized way. And it really just changes the way their company works in a really good way. So I think for other founders and for other people building a company, you want to have like that kind of a story, right? Like, who is it that you’re helping and like, what is their pain point and how do you help them make a bigger dent on the world? Right. And so that’s what drives me. I’m passionate about helping these small firms and they need it.

Mark Orttung:
And it’s cool, right? It’s cool to find that pain point that you can really help them overcome.

Paul Spain:
That’s good. And now you mentioned that there’s going to be about 50% kind of increase ahead in terms of your people. So what will that look like? If we’ve got people that are listening in and think, thinking, oh, project work sounds like a pretty cool company with a good culture. What sort of roles and so on do you expect to be adding?

Mark Orttung:
Yeah, we’re looking for people across the product organisation. So primarily either product managers or engineers, front end, back end, full stack and. Or lots of experience in AI is always valuable as well, but really just people who have a bias towards action, who really want to be part of a team and really be collaborative. And yeah, it’s, it’s. We’re actively hiring right now and in Wellington and we’ve hired a few people in the States. Most of our hiring will be in Wellington and so, yeah, we’d love to. If people, people are out there, we’d love to take a look and chat and see if it’s a good fit.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, that’s great. Oh, well, thank you so much for joining the show, Mark. Really, really appreciate it. Big thank you. Also to our show partners to One NZ two, Degrees Spark, HP Workday and Gorilla Technology. And yeah, thanks everyone for listening in and joining this episode and we’ll look forward to catching you again next week. All right, see ya.

Mark Orttung:
Thank you.