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WithYouWithMe’s Tom Moore shares his business insights

The Technology Fast 50 program ranks the 50 fastest growing public or private technology companies, based on percentage revenue growth over three years. The competition has been running since 2000 and the 2019 program was proudly sponsored in Australia by the ASX, DLA Piper and NAB. In this blog series, we take a look at the 2019 winners to find out how they got to where they are.

The 2019 Tech Fast 50 and Tech Fast 500 overall winner WithYouWithMe, hit the top spot with a massive 13,361% growth rate. Co-founder and managing director Tom Moore shares his key actions for building a successful tech business.

“Find the reason for your company to exist. For WithYouWithMe, we want veterans and other under-represented groups to have meaningful employment. And all we care about is helping them reach their full potential.

“That narrative is the core of everything we do, everything we say, and it has held us together through our challenges, helped to attract top talent and it's very important to get the break-ins at large B2B businesses, which is the market that we play in.”

“We went from eight people to 45 in three months, that was terrifying!

“What held us together was people who were passionate about the mission. Seventy per cent of our workforce are veterans, a number are from Pacific Islander background. All are people who have struggled to get into meaningful work, and they want to fix it.”

“We practice what we preach and that has created trust and given us integrity, which has led to more opportunities in the market.

“People and businesses have seen that we live our purpose – we hire people with potential, we give free training to veterans and their families – so they know we’re a highly ethical and socially responsible company.

“This has led to companies coming to us to ask us to solve their problems by using our products and it has led to much more diversified growth.”

“We went into the United States, Canada, Papa New Guinea and Fiji all at the same time – was it the right time? Yes, although it was quite painful, it's given our organisation substantial institutional upside from a knowledge perspective. 

“It validated very quickly that the IT training in the market wasn't good and it showed us our key value proposition. So, it identified the total addressable market and validated that we had product market fit elsewhere.”

“Always enter.  What I love about the Tech Fast 50 is that it’s based on revenue and it puts you in the market with a whole bunch of people who are just like you – that are growing – and you see how you add up.

“We re-entered this year because I think it’s important to see where we sit in the market, so we can keep having customer value and have validation and it’s important for your team to win – sometimes winning is seeing the impact you have on the wider space and I think the Tech Fast 50 does that really well.

“There's been a number of investment opportunities open up [since winning] and a number of clients that are working with us are very excited to continue their programs.

 “It means we’re heading in the right direction and it means the market is coming back to us and saying we want to come with you to.”

Find out about more about the awards, meet all the 2019 Tech Fast 50 Australia winners and pre-register for 2020 Tech Fast 50.

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