Projectworks Growth and Global Insights with CEO Mark Orttung

And I think that really is in the DNA of what we build. 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 having that really deep understanding is crucial.

The New Zealand Tech Podcast brought to you by Gorilla Technology, proactive and strategic IT. Greetings and welcome along to the New Zealand Tech Podcast. I'm your host Paul Spain.

On Matariki, I was joined by Mark Autang, Chief Executive of Project Works, and we recorded this podcast. Earlier this month, it was announced that Project Work had raised around 20 million New Zealand dollars in additional capital.

This news came just after they won the High Tech Emerging Company of the Year Award in Wellington at the recent NZ High Tech Awards Dinner. Now Project Works are a software as a service firm and have built a base of over 600 consulting firms

internationally using their software. And they were ranked number 19 on the most recent Deloitte Fast 50 with growth listed at 258%. Mark Orton joined Project Works on the board in 2023

and became the chief executive last year. He brings a wealth of experience from both consulting and software worlds, having previously grown consulting firm, Nexient,

from around 200 people to well in excess of a thousand and also had great success at bill.com where he was president and chief operating officer. A big thank you to our New Zealand Tech podcast

show partners, 1NZ, Spark, 2Degrees, HP, Workday and Gorilla Technology. All right, let's jump in. Mark Orton, great to have you

on the New Zealand Tech podcast today. And thank you for taking the time out of your schedule in between Wellington and heading back to the US today.

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. Well, you know, 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 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. 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 a hundred, right? So it's a pretty wide range

about that kind of core of working on a project basis for clients. Is that 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 time code 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 gives you time to react and do something about it.

And so then, yeah, so we also then have a bunch of pieces, which I think of as just sort to the source of truth. So getting your time sheets 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 two hour block or four hour block so we can make that a requirement that as you do your time card 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 stack. 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. It's 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. Excellent. And yeah, it 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.

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 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, as you build a firm, as you build a software or