Speedwell’s mantra is: “We create seamless digital experiences across connected digital ecosystems.” As if that weren’t already important, in 2021 a seamless digital experience for people looking to access mental health care providers and services couldn’t be more vital...

Bruce Young is Speedwell’s CEO and he’s long known how IT can deliver when it matters. Describing himself as an ‘old hand’, Young graduated from Queensland University of Technology in 1986, back when it was still called QIT (it moved from institute to university status in 1989).

He started his career at a company called Powell, Clark and Associates, which became Data #3, before leaving there to start his own business. He co-founded Actionquote in 1992, selling to listed IT company Misys Plc (UK) in 1996 and says he’s worked for himself in the software development area ever since.

Along the way there have been directorships and contractor positions – the latter with Brisbane City Council, looking after business analysis, system and database infrastructure and implementation of intranet-based corporate systems.

Young acquired the Fortitude Valley-based Speedwell in 2004 in a management buyout and, as CEO, looks after the strategic management of a web and mobile development company that numbers such heavy hitters as Allianz, Brisbane Airport, and Tourism and Events Queensland among its clients – along with the Federal and at least two state governments.

His background is in programming but his career path saw him work his way through analyst programming to systems analysis before taking on management roles. “I still like to get my hands dirty every now and then with a bit of coding,” he says. “But generally I’m working with clients and project managers to help shape the projects that we deliver.”

In that strategic space, Young works closely with his wife, Catherine Young, who is the company’s chief operating officer. “She helps implement the strategies and works closely with our senior team to get the work over the line,” explains Young. “I work with the clients, either helping them from a business strategy perspective or talking them through the technology options.”

Those options may be wider than those offered elsewhere, he says. “People come to us because they have a problem to solve that no one else has been able to solve. We often look at it in a different way. We’ll get them the outcome they want, but not necessarily in the way that they’ve asked for it to be done,” he adds. “We have the ability to look outside the square and come up with a solution that meets their needs, rather than what they thought they were going to get.”

From an operational perspective, Young says his job has its challenges. “We run a people business, the majority of our costs go in staff, and we do find it hard to find good staff.”

He laments that Speedwell can sometimes feel like a ‘poaching ground’, with the bigger firms offering lucrative incentives to syphon off staff. “I’m a programmer,” he explains. “The HR stuff doesn’t come naturally to me, but I rely on some other people in the business to help with that.”

Like so many others, the business has been negatively impacted by the pandemic, he says, despite its traditional resilience. “The three major industries we were working in – which didn’t bear any relationship to each other – all got affected in a big way by COVID-19. Health, insurance and finance and some other service industries were trashed during the first three months.”

This has largely turned around now, although identifying the right staff can still be an issue. “It’s been a bit of a roller coaster in the last 18 months,” he says. “But look, we’ve been around for 24 years, 25 years in January, we’ve seen the up cycles and the down cycles, and we’ve proven that we can ride out the bad periods and bring it back during the good periods.”

Approach

At Speedwell, the team approaches the tech from a digital engineer’s perspective and has strong partnerships with several providers, including Microsoft and Sitecore. Importantly, though, Young says there is a strong belief that the technology should take a backseat to the outcome. “We’ve quite often been given challenges that are not in our traditional stack of technology... and we tackle it from an engineer’s perspective. The engineer doesn’t always get to choose the tools or the technology, but the same things apply.”

He nominates a few instances of which he’s particularly proud. “For a long time we were mostly known for the work we did for Domino’s,” he recalls. “We took their online business from one percent of their turnover to over 60 percent – that was six or seven years of work.”

There are also long-term clients like Allianz, the insurance company Speedwell has now worked with for nearly two decades, plus government clients like the Federal Department of Health and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and the work the company has done in automated passport processing and international COVID vaccination certificate application.

A recent example of Speedwell working outside of its usual square was its first significant government GovCMS delivery. “We’ve now delivered three major GovCMS projects in the last six months and we had no major experience in the technology until December and January this year. We had done some Drupal work and so understood it, and PHP (hypertext preprocessor) and the stack, but hadn’t built any large systems. It just goes to show [what you can achieve] if you put some good developers on a new technology stack.”

The project was delivered on budget and in the six-month timeline. “The clients were rapt,” he says.

The Local Scene

With his wealth of experience, Young has witnessed notable growth in the Brisbane technology industry, but despite this and the number of big players now operating in the region, he says it still comes down to “dealing with people on the ground”. He relays some advice given to him by a Gartner analyst that seems contrary to the perceived wisdom. In times of financial crisis, we often hear of the big banks and other industry leaders being ‘too big to fail’. But the analyst told Young it was imperative that he convince his staff that they were ‘too small to fail’.

“As a leadership team, as owners of the business, we can’t afford to have it fail,” he elaborates. “It’s our business, it’s our asset. So we go the extra step, we make sure the project is delivered on time and the client gets the outcomes they want.

“We don’t tend to compete with the smaller web development firms; we try to work on the larger and more technical projects. And, because of that, we play at the higher end of the market.”

Paying it forward

Clearly at a stage in his career when he’s looking to share his knowledge and insights and give something back to the industry, Young took on a directorship in March last year with Blaque Digital. Speedwell has partnered with Blaque, a full service digital agency, which was formed with the mission to grow Indigenous participation in information and communications technology.

And on a day-to-day basis, Young’s advice for up and coming tech companies is to roll with the punches. “There are good days and bad, good weeks, good months and bad months... so have some passion about what it is you’re doing. Try and look to the future. It’s never perfect, but open some doors that you didn’t know were going to come your way.”

AC3

Speedwell’s ongoing partnership with AC3 began around six years ago and it’s a very satisfying one, says Young. “They’re there when you pick up the phone, they’re there when you send an email. They know their technology and they assist us when we’re pitching for work or when we’re helping an existing client choose the right platform.”

With this established relationship, AC3 was a natural fit when Speedwell was looking for support on a project for the Federal Department of Health, building a platform that would enable users to easily locate mental health resources.

Speedwell needed to find an enterprise-level 24/7 supported platform and so its lead technology team worked with the AC3 solution architects. Together, they determined that Microsoft Azure was the most appropriate option and AC3 helped to stand up the platform in Sitecore PaaS. “We then built the software on top of that and deployed it all within about a four-month period.”

And the result?

“The site went live at the time the Federal Minister announced it. It has since won numerous Australian and international awards for content, strategy and implementation,” says Young.

AC3 now monitors the site and is often able to fix any issues on the spot. If the team is unable to find the solution, they contact Speedwell’s developers and tech team to work on it.

“It’s pretty well seamless,” says Young. “They basically work as part of our team.

“The site has been live ever since, with minimum downtime. It’s been a great success.”