Success stories
Real results for businesses like yours

JDL Strategies has been a leader in the Australian financial market for over 30 years. They help everyday Australians build long-term wealth through low-risk real estate investments and customised strategies.  

Headquartered in the Gold Coast, over the last 3 years they have grown from a team of 10 to a global virtual workforce, with an international customer base.  

This has been achieved by transforming their processes and turning their proprietary software into a scalable, high-value solution for a broader market.  

Challenge:

JDL faced significant challenges during the pandemic. They found investor activity slowed, and high CRM (Customer Relationship Management) licensing and hosting costs were straining their operations.  

They worked to address these issues by developing their own in-house CRM platform however they found that this introduced critical limitations such as reduced security, manual backups, and poor scalability, all of which hindered sustainable growth.

Solution: 

They turned to AWS for support. AWS helped them to overcome challenges with a powerful combination of security, scalability, and cost-efficiency. 

Through AWS tools including AI, they transformed their platform into a world-class CRM solution hosted in a private JDL Cloud environment. This delivered unmatched efficiency and speed and eliminated vulnerabilities, which in turn led to revolutionising their operations along with their go to market offering. 

Results: 

Today JDL Strategies have new revenue streams generated through the commercialisation of Wealthgoal Software, owned by Asset Realty, which has broad appeal to accountants, financial planners, real estate agents, brokers, and investors—across new markets that include Europe and South America. They have also significantly increased productivity. One example is they moved from hosting digital events every six weeks to weekly events. Today they have 4000+ active clients and manage over $8 billion in real estate transactions.

How did Jim’s Mowing future-proof itself to help franchisees grow? 

Founded in 1989, Jim’s Group has grown from a lawn mowing business to Australia’s largest franchise, with more than 4,650 franchisees offering a range of services to customers nationwide as well as in New Zealand, United Kingdom and Canada.  
Over the past two years, Jim’s Group has had its biggest growth period due to a rapidly increasing volume of work and more people wanting to start their own businesses. 

Challenge:

Jim’s Group currently serves over 500,000 customers annually, via web and phone enquiries, which are then allocated to the relevant franchisee in their area.  

For over 20 years, all business operations and data storage ran on an internal server – which often led to process and reliability issues, and regular downtime. This was costly and often delivered a poor customer experience, resulting in lost revenue for the franchisees. 

Solution: 

Having grown rapidly, the organisation realised it would be unable to continue to scale with its current technology. To compete globally and develop smarter, more innovative solutions that would result in greater profitability for franchisees, Jim’s Group began its migration to the cloud, with Amazon Web Services (AWS). 

A key priority was to ensure that the migration was built to last, so they connected with a trusted AWS partner who worked closely with the existing internal team to help transfer knowledge throughout the transformation, while co-developing tools, processes and practices.  

Results: 

The complete modernisation journey took just six months from initial contact to completion, with no interruption to customers. This created a newly empowered team who were even more motivated by the new business potential. Overall, it freed up time, delivered a more predictable and consistent cost model, and enabled clearer accountability. 

Ultimately, any improvements to the business makes life better and more profitable for franchisees, which in turn helps Jim’s Group attract more franchisees and provide better, more reliable customer service to a rapidly growing market.  

How did Les Mills scale into a global business?  

Les Mills is a family-fun business founded 52 years ago in New Zealand. They have been constantly driving forward with their core belief and passion for helping people to fall in love with fitness. Starting as a tiny gym in Auckland, New Zealand Les Mills has evolved into a global fitness movement spanning 23 different programmes including BODYPUMP, BODYCOMBAT AND BODYATTACK.

Challenge:

Les Mills had strong growth aspirations to scale their programs to global audiences and knew technology was instrumental in providing instructors and customers with access to fitness when, where and how they wanted it. However, an outsourced development model meant that they had a legacy environment that was expensive to run and limited its ability to innovate cost-effectively at speed. 

Solution: 

They didn’t want to grow their IT team or add engineers to maintain new infrastructure so, with guidance from a trusted AWS expert partner, they migrated to the cloud and built up their internal DevOps competencies. Architecting a new identity platform to provide a secure and streamlined access point for content and to drive engagement amongst users was critical. 

Results: 

Today, AWS is the backbone of the Les Mills API platform that powers its digital products. Les Mills workouts are licensed in 20,000 clubs worldwide, with a team of 140,000 instructors delivering group fitness classes to over six million people a week.

Working with AWS they have reduced the costs of their identity platform by 50%, gained flexibility to experiment with minimal risk and brought IT control in-house while improving DevOps practices. They have also automated end-to-end testing, significantly freeing up resources. 

“AWS really stood out for its serverless capabilities, so we could experiment and prove the value of a new service before scaling, developing and growing it.”

— Anthony Naulls, Head of Technology, Les Mills International

How did PaySauce invest for long-term growth?

PaySauce began as a simple solution, but one that was built to grow. They started in 2014 with Asantha and Troy, two guys with very different skill sets and a shared background in payroll problem-solving.

PaySauce was the space to put their "what-ifs" into practice, with a people-oriented pay solution that you’d actually want to use. They gathered a few customers, mostly through word of mouth, and started turning an idea into an application. 

Challenge:

To scale demand, they needed to focus investments into driving long-term growth. Key to this was creating and successfully launching a wholesale payroll solution. 

Solution: 

PaySauce migrated its production servers and back-end tools to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and put in place the information infrastructure to quickly scale with the flexibility to offer continuous upgrades. 

AWS’s global network of state-of-the-art data centres, with its built-in redundancy, guarantees high availability and fault tolerance, provides a seamless customer experience. Meanwhile, its world-leading compliance and protection frameworks align with PaySauce’s priority to safeguard sensitive data and maintain customer trust. 

Results: 

These days, they have more than a few customers, and have become an established leader in the farming space. They’ve succeeded in agribusiness, especially in dairy, by building solutions with and for real people in the industry.  

The PaySauce Platform is now taking off as not only a payroll provider, but also as a full suite of employment solutions. 

Troy and Asantha still own and look after their experiment, but now they’re a whole team. They continue to be all about bright ideas and people, and they plan to keep their scrappy, start-up spirit as they grow. 

How Quickmail doubled its fulfilment business in 12 months   

Established in 1992, Quickmail is a Perth-based family business, with less than 50 employees. It specialises in third party logistics (3PL), warehousing, fulfilment and distribution solutions for small and medium enterprises and ecommerce businesses. Quickmail also provides direct mail and printing services.

Challenge:

In 2020, Quickmail’s 3PL service experienced a huge surge in demand after the COVID-19 pandemic triggered an online shopping boom. 
Despite having a strong growth agenda, their paper-based systems and manual processes weren’t built to handle this sudden and unprecedented spike. Quickmail realised that they needed to quickly digitalise its workflows and automate processes to secure more work and grow market share. 

Solution: 

Quickmail partnered with a trusted AWS partner who guided and supported them to develop and deliver digital solutions to reinvent Quickmail’s daily operations, optimise costs, improve integration with its business partners and capture a larger market share. 
Key aspects of the solution included:

• Moving their core legacy application to AWS Cloud
• Using AWS serverless architecture to build an online platform that provides customers with a streamlined experience, including detailed information dashboards for stock visibility, order status updates and customer support. It also centralised data to optimise fulfilment processes.  
• Making their service offerings available on the Shopify online shopping platform to attract more e-Commerce customers using Amazon API Gateway.  Implementing Amazon Simple Storage Service to securely store and protect business-critical data

Results: 

As a result, Quickmail grew daily orders by 500% resulting in doubling its fulfilment business within 12 months. Quickmail is now well positioned to respond promptly to changing market conditions and nurture a culture of innovation and growth.

“Working with our trusted AWS partner, for average shopping days, together we’ve grown our daily order volumes by over 500 percent while maintaining the high standards of performance and processing that are essential to staying competitive in this industry.” 

— Sophie Stott, Managing Director, Quickmail  

How a small team delivers a big impact to some of the world’s best companies 

Behind Thematic – a global leader in customer intelligence and feedback analysis – is a small New Zealand-based business with less than 20 remote employees. Before Alyona Medelyan became the founder and chief executive officer of Thematic, she ran a consultancy that specialised in natural language processing (NLP). In 2015, three companies came to her with the same problem: What are the driving factors behind our Net Promoter Scores? 

Challenge:

They were tasked with building a solution that met customers’ needs that included. More specifically:

1. Create a faster and more effective method to process millions of feedback comments from surveys, reviews and support conversations. The solution needed to be robust, turning the data into clear and meaningful insights in real time. To enable fast, accurate decision-making the solution also needed to provide the context and core drivers of the feedback scores and sentiment.
   
   
2. It also needed to be highly secure and compliant, meeting different regional regulations for protecting data integrity and privacy, without compromising the speed and quality of insights.

Solution: 

In collaboration with their business customers, Medelyan developed an NLP-based prototype that analysed unstructured customer feedback, connected themes from qualitative feedback to metrics and generated insights that explained the drivers behind the Net Promoter Score.  

From there they partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to use generative AI to turn customer feedback data from multiple channels into curated, accurate and reliable customer intelligence. This enables them to process large datasets quickly and efficiently, ensuring high performance and low latency. By leveraging these cutting-edge tools, Thematic's customers can analyse even more data sources while speeding up the time to get insights from customer feedback. The result is better and more efficient decision-making. 

Thematic uses large language models (LLMs) readily available on Amazon Bedrock to perform hundreds of tasks, such as extracting themes, applying relevant filters and summarising feedback. Without the need to build their own LLMs, Thematic is freed up to focus on streamlining operations and increasing the quality of insights while realising cost and time savings. 

The robust compliance and security infrastructure on AWS allowed Thematic to meet the stringent security and data sovereignty requirements of its clients. 

Results: 

In 2017, Thematic officially launched and has grown quickly; they are now helping some of the world’s biggest companies such as Atlassian, DoorDash and Woolworths to accelerate growth through more accurate, reliable and actionable customer insights. 

Looking ahead, Thematic plans to continue pushing the boundaries of generative AI and gain even deeper insights into customer feedback. 

“Using Amazon Bedrock is just so incredibly easy that it just makes sense. Whenever we design a solution, we test more than 10 large language models (LLMs). Consistently, the ones offered by AWS are winning those competitions.”  

— Nathan Holmberg, CTO and Co-Founder, Thematic