Indesco South Coast was born at almost precisely the same time as co-founder Mark Rigoni’s first son. New family, new business, not a lot of time. Almost none, in fact. We spoke to Mark about how he managed to juggle his new babies (both figurative and literal), especially when both are growing so darned fast!
Indesco South Coast — from birth to double digits in the blink of an eye
Mark Rigoni, Ryhan Thomson, and Kelly Macdonald set up Indesco South Coast together. After each living in the area for nearly a decade, “we wanted to set up to be a part of something in the area” says Mark.
“The other two started a month before me because my wife and I had just had a baby son” says Mark. Being close to home and part of the community was crucial.
“We started Indesco South Coast with just the three founders” Mark says. Less than twelve months later and they had 12 employees. With a focus on providing services in civil, structural and infrastructure engineering and land development , the South Coast outfit is branching into the world of high-rises and structural design. It’s growth in every direction.
Conceiving — the built environment and baby
Mark is a principal civil engineer and co-director of Indesco South Coast. Big boots for a man holding fresh baby booties.
“It was a pretty stressful time starting out,” he says. “Starting a new business, having a baby — there was a lot going on, but I’m driven by the desire to create something special.”
“For me, good civil engineering is good design that creates a great outcome for all users of the area. I really enjoy creating projects from nothing — looking at land development, locating a potential development site and taking that all the way through the construction and completion, and registration of lots, that’s what I really enjoy. I also relish the civil design aspect… It’s really the whole development lifecycle I love.”
Needs met by Synergy
When they started Indesco South Coast, Mark, Ryhan, and Kelly relied on Synergy to provide the business backbone of their back office needs.
“In kicking off with a new business, and especially just three of us, we didn’t have any administration support right away” Mark says.
“We did have Indesco Canberra assisting [parent organization], but we relied on Synergy for project accounting, for tracking hours and being able to easily push our invoices out as quickly as possible for cashflow, monitoring and forecasting. Also, Synergy allows us to forecast our resource needs.”
From little things, big things grow
With a new business and new family, Mark says it was important to find cloud software so they could access it anywhere.
“I was working a lot starting the business,” he says.
“You put in a lot of hours and Synergy just allowed me to do everything without having to connect to a server somewhere. It’s really easy to use and quite intuitive — I’ve worked on a lot of other programs in the past and they were quite convoluted and complicated in comparison.”
Mark and his co-founders were clear that they needed to focus on actually getting their engineering work done, it’s what people pay for, after all. More time for design, as we like to say.
“We needed something that was efficient to take care of the back end and ensure that invoices were going out and we had money coming in so we could deliver projects and start growing the business,” he says.
“With Synergy, the expansion and growth of the business has been easier. Because of the software, we haven’t really needed to put a dedicated administration person on yet. It’s easy to manage that sort of thing ourselves, as project managers. We have a bookkeeper now that deals with that side and the connection between Synergy and Xero works really well and saves a heap of time.”
Director perspective
That’s how Synergy works for Mark and his team on a project basis, but we asked if the directors used the Synergy features for a bird’s eye perspective on the business as a whole. “Definitely,” Mark says. “I mean, looking at WIP and aged debtors — I like that that’s readily accessible and I check that a lot — I can view this easily, which is great.”
“We’re a start-up business. So as long as we’re able to keep everyone busy, we know we’re going okay.
“We’re getting to the point now where Synergy will really help in terms of monitoring project performance on projects and all those more detailed metrics as we continue to grow.”
More time for engineering, more time for family.
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