Bird-on-trunk idea a winner

BY TINA LAW

Donald Hastie has never met his software developers.

Some of them live in the United States and others live in Europe.

He talks to them daily on the internet via Skype and pays them upwards of $200 an hour.

He found them after an extensive internet search and believes they are among the best in the world.

This is just one of the aspects of ERMLive, in which Hastie is following a completely non-traditional model for the new software company and as a result is generating large sales growth.

He directly employs just one staff member, uses Microsoft technology to develop software and does not chase clients.

The model must be working, if the company's growth is anything to go by.

ERMLive develops multilingual employee management systems that look after payroll, training and development, recruitment, performance management and health and safety.

This year Hastie is predicting 800 per cent turnover growth, which will see it become a multimillion-dollar company.

If projected sales come to fruition the rate of growth could even slip into four figures, Hastie says.

He is about to pitch for a job in New York, is in the middle of discussions with companies in Britain and has just signed up his first Australian distributor.

That level of growth could have been a contributor to ERMLive being named the winner of the champion small producer/manufacturer at the Champion Canterbury 2009 business awards in September.

The award has created unbelievable demand, Hastie says.

"In the last two weeks, 12 months of business has walked in."

He has also been able to secure the company's first South Island customer, because until now all his customers had been based in Wellington, Auckland or Australia.

In the last 10 months ERMLive has dominated the New Zealand education market, securing seven learning institutions as clients.

Hastie founded ERMLive in 2006, after being tossed out of PayGlobal the year before. He founded PayGlobal in the 1990s and in order to expand he sold stakes to two private equity firms. Those private equity firms ended up getting rid of Hastie following a series of disagreements.

A restraint-of-trade agreement prevented Hastie from setting up another similar company within six months, so he spent that time thinking about his next venture, ERMLive.

"I did a lot of research during that six months. I looked at what products were around."

He decided he needed to look for elephants.

"I wanted to be the little bird that sits on the trunk and gets carried around Africa."

Microsoft was Hastie's elephant. He has embedded his system inside Microsoft, giving ERMLive almost instant credibility.

Microsoft gets a percentage of every sale Hastie makes.

Having Microsoft backing could be one of the reasons Hastie does not have to go chasing clients. They come to him. Maybe that is not surprising since one client has managed to save thousands of hours in staff time a year managing leave.

"We have decided that when people are serious about investing in transforming their HR processes then they will find us.

"That's not an arrogant thing."

Hastie says he wants the company to spend its time working on improving its software.

Paul Ritchie, who in 1991 was Hastie's first employee, remains Hastie's only staff member, but another two appointments are planned, including a business manager.

Hastie outsources almost every aspect of the business, because he prefers to engage people who also work for other companies and are constantly exposed to other challenges.

He believes plenty of people are more intelligent than he is, but no-one is more persistent or tenacious.

The developers were found following an extensive worldwide internet search.

Hastie believes he has the best.

Instead of giving them a project with a four-month deadline, Hastie gives each developer a two-week window.

By doing that, it means if something is not working, he loses only two weeks and not four months worth of work.

It also encourages the developers to try new things because they are not scared of attempting something that could potentially hurt the company, he says.

ERMLive is the result of Hastie working 20 years in the industry and realising, often the hard way, what works and what does not.

He is using that knowledge to reach his goal of turning ERMLive into a $50m company selling software into 20 countries by 2015.

"We want ERMLive to be the world's payroll system."

- © Fairfax NZ News