How I was inspired to create a new IT product after Black Saturday

Jason McClintock started Jasco Consulting 13 years ago, an IT consulting firm that focuses on strategic planning, project deployment and IT support. It’s experience some drastic growth over the past few years, and although the company would not reveal revenue, sources within the industry and comparison with similar businesses suggest Jasco is turning over about $10 million.

McClintock explains how he came up for the idea of one of the company’s products after the Black Saturday bushfires, living in close proximity to the fires and with limited knowledge of where they would spread next.

Can you explain how the business started?

I started Jasco after working for other resellers and distributors. I thought there had to be a better way of doing the job, in the way we treat customers, and so on. So a little over 13 years ago I took a big leap, with all the joys that entails, and went through a number of struggles doing that. After a few months I even looked in my bank account and realised I had $10 to my name. Great things like that.

Fortunately we moved past that pretty quickly, and then over the next eight years it was me and a small group of people, about six or seven people who I liked working with and who were smart guys. It always made it fun and entertaining, and most of our work was done through word-of-mouth.

If you go back to a few years ago, circumstances change. I got married, had kids, and I needed to make a decision one way or the other about the business and whether to make something substantial out of it.

What did you do next?

I rewrote the business plan, and created a plan for how we were going to grow. We pared back the number of vendors we worked with, and just focused on working with Microsoft. That’s paid off incredibly well and has been a great decision for us.

What sort of products have you developed with this new strategy?

Traditionally our business has been consulting on core infrastructure and messaging, and we still do that today. But we’ve extended that messaging environment.

One product we’ve developed sits on Microsoft Lync, and voice enables pretty much anything. Getting data from a website, voice enables everything.

This is the start of our second transformation, that is, being able to sell our own products.

You’ve experienced some pretty strong growth over the past few years

It’s been significant, but I think we’ve managed it quite well. We’ve had some fairly rough periods in the GFC, and some turbulence again at the moment, so it keeps us on our toes. But we’ve had 600% revenue growth over the past four years.

One of your products started after the Victorian bushfires. Can you describe how that came about?

Jasco MessageLinx actually starting during the bushfires. I live in North Warrandyte, and during that time it was really hard to understand where all the fires were, and what was happening. A couple of hours later and you’d find out the fires were closer and you’d need to leave.

So how did the product start?

So I walked into work and said that we needed to develop a system that allows us to be able to make one phone call that goes through an entire group, providing information on whatever’s happening. An automated voice call, that’s how it first started off.

We used that for groups. So if a group sets off their alarm, you get an automated call, and you can see via Google Maps if someone else’s alarm has been set off.

The idea was that you could see all these groups with automated voice calls saying that fires are coming. All of this tech was built in to allow this to happen, so we took weather from official weather stations, wind directions, wind speeds and so on.

We’d even go a step further and develop an automated call that would tell you when a total fire ban had been called. The system would place a phone call to people saying that a total fire ban had been called and that fire danger index is at whatever level.

You’ve also expanded the product to new areas, right?

We wanted to be able to automate as much of the process as we could. And of course, we had all this technology worked into it as well, that we thought we could put into other situations, like schools.

You may have a school that has a system where if someone doesn’t turn up to school, the parent gets an automated call saying, “Do you know about this, press one, or, do you wish to the youth coordinator? Press two”, and so on.

What’s happening with it now?

We’re in the process of migrating that software to the cloud, the Microsoft public cloud, so we can book into telephone exchanges all around the world. Like flood alerts in Brisbane, and so on, to be able to respond to all sorts of disasters.

Is anyone using the product now?

There are a couple of trials still being run, community-based trials, we have a number of schools using it, we have a number of large commercial and enterprise customers using it right now that are using it for varied reasons.

One is the inbound timesheet system, which alerts field auditors that jobs have been completed, and so on.

It’s a fascinating story for the beginning of an IT product.

It is. Necessity is the mother of invention. When we looked at the product after the bushfires, we realised that this is really applicable for any situation.