Need a job? Tech firm on hiring spree amid Covid-19 disruption

Friday, 19 June 2020

Hadleigh Bognuda, of veterinary software firm EzyVet, says he would like to hire 50 to 70 people over the next year.

It might seem that every other day brings news of redundancies and business closures, as New Zealand battles through the fallout from the Covid-19 lockdown.

But some tech firms say it's not all bad news, and one is using the downturn as a chance to hire skilled people who were hard to find when the labour market was tighter.

EzyVet, an Auckland-based company that makes software systems for vets, says before the Covid-19 outbreak, it was like a lot of IT companies, struggling to find enough skilled staff.

Now it's finding the pool of workers is growing due to redundancies, permanent residents finding themselves out of work, and returning ex-pats.

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“We'd have really key roles that we needed to fill that had a specific experience level or skill set that we were looking for, and just finding that talent was really hard,'' Hadleigh Bognuda, EzyVet's chief executive said.

Hadleigh Bognuda says the pet-centred US has been EzyVet's best market.

''We had some roles we'd been searching for 18 months to fill, and now since Covid we're starting to fill some of those roles which we couldn't before.''

EzyVet hopes to hire 50 to 70 people in Auckland over the next year.

Most of its business comes from North America, where it has an office, and its ambition over the next two to three years is to lift its headcount from the current 170 to 500.

Bognuda said Covid-19 had put a dent in its growth forecasts.

But by April, many of its customers' revenues in its key North American market were back in the black, and the company still hopes to make $30m revenue this year.

''We were expecting our sales to just fall off a cliff, but we've actually seen them accelerate in the Covid period and we think the reason is that our customers, which are essential service businesses, have finally got enough respite … to work on the business rather than in it,'' Bognuda said.

EzyVet is Bognuda's third start-up. Originally from Gladstone in the Wairarapa, he also founded Think Concepts, a pharmacy software system, and co-founded boutique ISP provider Vibe Communications.

Bruce Gordon, chief executive of Kiwi firm PushPay, employs 100 staff in Auckland and another 360 people in the US.

In 2015, he came across a gap in the market for cloud-based veterinary tools. Overseas veterinary practices had tended to create in-house, and sometimes quite complex, systems.

The company has become well-known in New Zealand vet clinics but not so well outside them and needing bigger markets, it targeted North America and Australia.

People often avoided the United States because it was a complex market, but nearly four-fifths of EzyVet's sales now come from there, Bognuda said.

''I think our product initially had some key wins for larger businesses so if you have a 100-staff veterinary hospital or larger, our product is a very good fit.

''So naturally, America being the biggest pet-focussed market in the world, we've done well there.''

The company has also made a point of forming partnerships with universities, particularly Cornell, one of the world's top training institutions for vets.

Its aim is to have half of all US vet students trained up on its software, which financially was ''a really big call,'' but well worth it.

Having faith

Another Kiwi technology stock that's quietly doing well in America during Covid-19 is PushPay.

The NZX-listed company has made a name for itself in the US ''faith'' community for a mobile app that simplifies church donations, which is fast expanding into church administration.

It's a surprisingly big market niche, said PushPay's chief executive Bruce Gordon.

''We always focussed on the US faith market from New Zealand, and it's a very large market. There's around about 330,000 churches here in the US and giving to religious organisations is estimated to be US$124 billion in giving.''

Gordon says Americans give US$124 billion to religious organisations a year.

When the market plunged in March, Pushpay shrugged it off, its share price peaking on Thursday at a record $8.18.

Although its net profit this year actually eased 15 per cent to US$16 million (NZ$26.59m), against a large one-off gain the previous year, it beat its own guidance in a number of areas.

Operating revenue is up 32 per cent to nearly US$130m.

However, as recession looms, will PushPay's users keep on giving?

Speaking from the US, where he has been in lockdown since mid-March, Gordon said the company was better insulated than most.

While there was a strong correlation between economic growth and giving to religious organisations, the US church community was quite resilient.

''So if GDP is down, giving to churches can contract but it's often a lot less than GDP because the church is very central to people's lives …They're very generous here.''

There were also still a lot more people shifting towards digital donations, meaning PushPay still achieved growth.

Many of PushPay's workers came with the acquisition of a church management system last year called Community Church Builders, which cost PushPay US$87.5m but put it closer to its goal of becoming a sort of ''one stop shop'' for churches.

Something PushPay ''got very right'' when it started in 2011 was to be mobile-focussed, Gordon said.

But there was still room to expand, and the company is building up its range of services to include such things as check-ins for children to Sunday school, streaming services and church noticeboards.

A deep donation database also meant it could do such things as thanking first-time donors and showing them what they were giving to.

''We're sort of bringing churches into the modern era in some way, using mobile technology,'' he said.