Spotlight: South Australia’s Nuago

The ‘ARN Spotlight’ series explores partners operating in the local channel landscape right around the country, from Cape York to Hobart, Byron Bay to Fremantle and beyond. In this edition, we focus on South Australia and Adelaide-based managed service provider (MSP) Nuago.

Co-founder and director of sales Connor O’Rourke was one of five founding members of Nuago. While this may seem like too many cooks at first, the broth they serve certainly isn’t spoiled, and in four years the business has a number of successes under its belt.

Moving with the times

Nuago’s journey started back in 2016 with O’Rourke and four others – Ben Scholefield, Craig Howarth, Brendon O’Rourke and Mick O’Rourke – coming together in South Australia after they noticed a gap in the managed services and ICT consultancy space for mid-sized enterprise customers.

“There’s a lot of people going out there and consuming software as-a-service or cloud based services, but there wasn’t a service wrapper that aligned to that and often used heavy contracts that weren’t able to be adjusted as customers transformed their environments,” he said.

“We set out with pretty heavy restraint clauses from our previous employer – we were all associated with a large national and international player previously – and we really wanted to be owners and decision makers in our own destiny, and that started Nuago.”

Although the five founders are all based in South Australia, O’Rourke said the decision to start Nuago in their home state was more than that, as the conditions for the MSP’s arrival were ripe with the co-founder and director of sales pointing to the example of car manufacturer Holden, which ultimately closed its Adelaide factory in 2017.

“The manufacturing sector was starting to die off and there was a change in focus towards the defence space and cyber industry, so I think the timing was critical,” he said.

“South Australia needed a revival and a new look in terms of what our state’s GDP was focused on, and we really wanted to be a part of the technology and security space.”

Over time, Nuago found their bread and butter in small- to medium-sized corporates and the education sector, and recently found a groove with the defence and government sectors.

Hitting the highs

One of O’Rourke’s crowning achievements was an entire overhaul for Land Services South Australia as it transitioned from a government business to a private one, which started in 2017 and was completed in early 2018.

“With that came an enormous program awards to transform the idea and effectively build a new greenfields organisation on everything from hardware, software — everything in there was ripped out and replaced over a weekend after a six or seven month project to get everything ready to go for that flip over,” he said.

“That was a significant deal – we did everything from the design, implementation – and they’re an ongoing managed service client of ours and we’re now going through the next phase of their technology transformation.” 

Another highlight was Nuago’s work with supermarket chain Drakes, deploying Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) to refresh an ageing IT system, spanning late 2018 through to the middle of 2019.

“They divorced a wholesaler for their goods last year and now they want us to supply them in 60 or 70 grocery stores across the country,” O’Rourke said. “We’ve been trying to lower each family’s budget by thousand dollars a year on their grocery spend by taking control of that whole third party logistics space. 

“That was a significant project and in 11 months they built a $125 million dollar distribution centre and we supplied all the underlying infrastructure technology for that.”

Throughout its work, the MSP has worked with a number of vendor partners, with its top 10 by spend being Nutanix, Lenovo, HPE – which O’Rourke added includes Aruba Networks “in a big way” – Cisco, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks and Dell. 

“In the early days, we were certainly with Microsoft, Nutanix, Lenovo and Cisco. More recently, we started to scale up significantly with Aruba and AWS,” O’Rourke said. “We’ve been doing a decent amount of work with Microsoft from the early days, and we’re doing a lot more in the Azure and Microsoft 365 space now, and probably getting a lot deeper with the folks over at Fortinet and Palo Alto.”

And the successes aren’t just associated with their projects, but with the business’ turnover too – since the start of the MSP, O’Rourke said Nuago has a compound annual growth rate of 92 per cent.

“In year one, that was $3.75 million. Year two, we did about $7.8 million. Year three, $13.8 million, and this year we’re on track for around about $20 million.” 

There’s also been noticeable growth in the MSP’s headcount, expanding up to 50 staff.

Culture is king

Culture is a big deal for O’Rourke, and finding people with the right skills and mindset has been a juggling act at times.

“That’s probably one of the single largest challenges and continues to be for us because it’s not just about finding the right technical skills,” he said.

“We always talk about hiring for culture and teaching skills. I think what we find often in the tech sector is it’s the other way around – hiring for technical aptitude and then trying to teach people culture. We find it just doesn’t work around the other way. 

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast, but if you can add killer strategy into that, you listen to your people, you continuously adjust, then you really are a byproduct of the feedback from your marketplace.”

He added that his mantra for new hires is “if you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room”.

“They say hire slowly and fire quickly, so we make sure we measure twice and cut once before we bring people on board because you can really undo your culture very quickly with a poor hire or one that’s not approached with the best diligence,” O’Rourke said.

In addition to disrupting general business, the coronavirus pandemic also caused complications for the MSP’s employees, splitting them up due to a shift to remote working. During this time, O’Rourke emphasised the necessity to maintain the business’ culture.

To mitigate the mental disruption, some internal digital initiatives include sharing Friday beers digitally, catching up with a randomly selected colleague, a workspace sharing activity in the same vein as the TV show MTV Cribs and what the co-founder referred to as an “office Olympics”, where employees competed in challenges such as a quiz show and Pictionary.

To the future

Looking towards the end of 2020, O’Rourke sees the business to keep going as usual despite the overwhelming disruption of the coronavirus pandemic.

“The show must go on, as they say, and we’re seeing consumer confidence start to bounce back,” he said. “We’re continuing on with our objectives as well as being sensitive to the fact that different businesses in different geographies are at different stages in their recovery at the moment.”

The MSP also plans to reinforce its management and not to become a vertical organisation.

“We really want to have a bit more of a flat structure and empower people to make great decisions. At the end of the day, we hire great people who tell us what to do, not to tell them what to do.” 

In the end, O’Rourke is pleased with the direction of Nuago, and even if he had the opportunity to go back in time, he wouldn’t have changed a single thing about how the business was operated.

“I am today where I am as a result of the decisions that were made. There were certainly some things that were painful along the way – starting businesses is absolutely hard work, especially when people’s livelihoods are in your hands,” he said.

“I’m very proud of the organisation that we are today. If we hadn’t gone through some of those opportunities and challenges along the way, I don’t think that we would be the same business that we are today.”

Some of those decisions, O’Rourke added, saw the business narrow its focus, yet he also said it was important to not to go too deep.

“It’s easy to be a bit of a magpie and look into some of the shiny things and go after all of them but, maintaining a level of focus and having a clear vision that you’re moving towards and executing against is absolutely critical,” he said.

“Having a level of adaptability and agility and not thinking that you know everything is important. The second you start to think and believe your own bullshit is the second you really start to drift away from what made you great.”

Want to be featured in ‘ARN Spotlight’? Send an email to arn@idg.com.au with the contact details of the partner you’d like to nominate for us to profile.