Mr Mackenzie told The Australian Financial Review the company had needed to be profitable from day one, because venture capital funding was virtually non-existent in Australia for years after the dotcom crash.
“I’m so happy for all the new software companies now because they have such a strong pool of capital. It is great days for young founders and that has flow-through effects,” Mr Mackenzie said.
“We started the business on an overdraft … but we’ve never raised a cent of capital until now, so we were fortunate. We kept it lean … and we kept the equity pool dry so it would be a clean transaction when we did raise capital.”
Humanforce’s flagship product TimeTarget is aimed at hospitality and retail businesses with large numbers of casual employees. It provides a tool that digitises onboarding, time and attendance, employee rostering and employee availability schedules.
But as well as providing a service to employers, for casual workers Humanforce provides tools including an app that lets them see what shifts are available with a variety of their employers, how long it will take them to get there and how much they will make from their shift factoring in expenses like public transport costs.
It competes with the likes of $US1.5 billion company Kronos and Michigan-based player WorkForce Software.
Humanforce’s first capital raise will go towards supporting a US expansion, which Mr Mackenzie hopes will catapult the company’s growth rate from around 40 per cent each year to 100 per cent.
“Three or four years ago we were asked to go to the UK with a big US corporation who were contractors for Wembley Stadium. It was our first client offshore and it was an incredible success,” Mr Mackenzie said.
“That just kept rolling … and we have clients all over the US now. We knew it would take a lot of capital to build our presence there.”
Before Humanforce
While this Series A raise was the first capital injection for Humanforce, it was not Mr Mackenzie’s first time raising capital.
In the ’80s he started PEG Technology and listed the business on the ASX at the height of the dotcom boom in 2000.
At the time he was able to raise money with a price earnings ratio of 140 – substantially higher than even the most valuable tech stocks on the ASX today like WiseTech, which trades at a PE ratio of about 92, according to Bloomberg.
But PEG came crashing down during the bust and Mr Mackenzie stepped down as CEO in 2002, before starting Humanforce.
Going public
Mr Mackenzie said he hasn’t let his experience turn him off the idea of listing a company again, but he said if a listing is in Humanforce’s future it’s more likely to be on the NASDAQ or London’s FTSE.
“I got asked [if I’d list] a lot during the roadshow,” he said. “The trailblazers like WiseTech on the ASX and Atlassian on the NASDAQ show the road is there and it does encourage others to get on it,” he said.
The company is planning to make an acquisition in the US and has a few companies in mind, at which point Mr Mackenzie said it’s likely Humanforce will raise another round of funding, but that is not on the horizon just yet.
“You can kill a plant with too much water as easily as you can with too little – and right now we think we have the right amount of water,” he said.
from Just News Viral http://bit.ly/2RVKt8m
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