Adam Poulton shares how Launtel achieved 1000% client growth

A high-achieving Tasmanian company is earning rave reviews from influential organisations and is onboarding an additional 450 customers a month. Here’s how they did it.

Launtel founder Damian Ivereigh. Picture: Facebook

The rocky transition to NBN in a northern Tasmanian city helped launch a telco juggernaut, with the chief executive able to boast of 1000 per cent customer growth in the four years since extending its services onto the mainland.

For the first eight years of its life since it was founded by Damian Ivereigh in 2008, Launtel was a humble reseller of phone and internet plans to the Launceston business market, current chief executive Adam Poulton said.

However, the arrival of NBN transformed the business, starting with the hiring of employee number six, Mr Poulton – the company now boasts 42 employees, including teams in Melbourne and Adelaide.

NBN’s arrival in 2015–16 spelt dark and stressful days, Mr Poulton said, which Launtel was able to capitalise on.

“Businesses around Launceston lost voice calls for weeks on end,” he recalled.

So they turned to Launtel, which was virtually the only local outfit with in-depth knowledge of voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) – how phone calls are made via broadband.

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“VoIP was very fringe. They (Telstra) couldn’t handle it,” Mr Poulton said.

“Whereas now, we don’t have landlines at all, all calls are done over the NBN.”

Launtel used this as a springboard to move away from just reselling plans – they became a “directly connected supplier of broadband services”.

After successfully expanding out from Launceston to get a good foothold statewide, Launtel launched on the mainland in 2018.

Launtel chief executive Adam Poulton. Picture: Facebook

“We are on the cusp of 15,000 customers. Four years ago we had 1,500 customers, our numbers have grown tenfold over four years,” Mr Pulton said.

“We are still growing in Tasmania, a lot of people hear of us by word of mouth, but most of our growth is on the mainland. We are onboarding 450 new clients a month,” he said.

Launtel’s success was underlined earlier this week with Product Review dubbing it the Best Australian Internet Provider for a third year in a row, with an average score of 4.9 out of 5.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission crowned Launtel fastest NBN provider in its most recent Measuring Broadband Australia report, while Choice also feted the speeds amid a 97 per cent rating for Launtel’s 400/50 Mbps Fibre to the Premises plan.

Mr Poulton said the key to Launtel’s success was not engaging in the “race to the bottom” he believed other providers were attracted to.

“We could sell 100 times more services if we dropped our prices. But then people are expecting a 100 Mbps speed but only getting 60 Mbps because you’ve jammed too many onto the network,” Mr Poulton said.

“Then they ring up and they’re on hold for half an hour.

“We are doing everything the opposite, we provide more bandwidth than we need, we put on more staff on than we need.”

Founder Damian Ivereigh agreed with Mr Poulton’s assessment.

“Our focus is on being the best, not the biggest. The fastest, not the cheapest. We’re earning our reputation as a boutique provider and we’re happy with that,” he said.