Little guys connect with bold business growth

Leaders of a growing Coast start-up say “it’s not all doom and gloom” in the business world as they aim for further expansion.

Connect Fleet staff members Lisa Britten, Kevin Carbe, Will Penney, Jayden Barry, Daisy Edwards, Adam Jervis and former staff member Lewis Green have managed to grow the Noosa business quite rapidly in the past two years.

Even the brains behind a smart tech start-up can be a little star struck when connecting with Australian sporting royalty.

And so it was two years ago when fledgling Noosaville-based Connect Fleet directors Adam Jervis and Will Penney realised their GPS fleet management and operations software was keeping close tabs on the transport movements of Anna Meares’ bikes.

Meares, one of Australia’s greatest cyclists, was an ambassador for the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games and had the official velodrome named after her.

Mr Penney and IT guru Mr Jervis, who first teamed up in 2016 to develop their core business of finding fleet management solutions, had landed one of their personal best business deals.

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Their business Connect Fleet was selected by global company DB Schenker to help handle the logistics side of the Games.

“At one stage in their warehouse in Brisbane they were tracking Anna Meares’s bike,” Mr Penney said.

“There was one small truck getting around with her gear in it – it was just one of those neat little things.”

Fast track to late October 2020 and the 10-person team of Connect Fleet have struck gold with their latest business contract.

“Obviously the business environment is pretty tense, so with our current clients we work through a lot of strategies to help them with bottom line costs,” Mr Penney said.

“We’re still remaining quite busy from a sales point of view.

“We are signing some great deals, this morning we got one from a client who has over 120 items (of machinery) – they’re a civil construction company,” he said.

Mr Penney said any business that had a fleet could use the platform, but a fair chunk of their clients were civil construction companies.

“We do more in plant machinery, excavators, dump trucks, those sort of things,” he said.

“An excavator, as you can well imagine, spins around on the spot so the location side of things other than for a bit of security isn’t necessarily the big winning thing for business.

“It’s when they’re being used, how they were being used.

“You can imagine if they’re at least a couple of hundred thousand dollars, a civil company wants to know whether or not they should invest and buy another one.”

Connect Fleet allows companies to see whether or not they’re maximising the usage across their fleet already and indicates how they can reorganise to save themselves money.

“We work with lot of hire companies that provide that type of equipment to civil companies,” Mr Penney said.

He said his company often competed against much bigger outfits.

“We normally have a really good go and a good percentage of the time win the business over those guys,” he said.

“We’re really trying to do something here in the Noosa.

“We recognise that sitting in a town where it is heavily dependent on one form of trade around tourism, it’s a bit of a scary prospect for a local community,” he said.

Mr Penney said the vibe among some traders understandably during coronavirus was a bit fearful so the company was looking to help inject some more positivity.

Their motivation at the moment is to step up and say “it’s not all doom and gloom” with the aim of expanding wherever possible.

“You have to put your money where your mouth is further down the track as things continue to develop,” Mr Penney said.

“So there is a fair bit of sweaty, hard work in the background.

“We’ve so far been able to hang on to do our very best to try and hold on to people,” he said.

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