TAKING THE LEAD

STARTING out of a home office in Coomera Waters, Efficiency Leaders has expanded its footprint as far as India.

Lee Fisher co-founded the business solutions company with Luke Shaw in 2009, taking the helm as CEO and driving growth.

Efficiency Leaders has achieved a 20 per cent increase in earnings before tax every year since inception, with 30 employees across offices in Sydney, Auckland and Bangalore.

The company automates manually intensive business processes, such as accounts payable, payroll and mailroom, without the hefty price tag.|

Traditionally only large corporate or public sector organisations have been able to afford automated processing, whereas the software by Efficiency Leaders is available to the broader market on a pay-as-you-go basis.

ELAP Premise is integrated with a company's existing systems to process both paper and electronic supplier invoices, saving time, money and the risk of human error.

After recognising the gap in the market, Fisher says he established the company on the foundation of honesty, integrity, trust, professionalism and innovation.

"I saw many businesses operating against these core values and knew there was plenty of room for good business to be done, rather than some of the behaviour I had witnessed in some larger corporate organisations," Fisher says.

"While some intelligent software existed in the market, I knew that most organisations weren't aware of the technology available.

"I recognised the opportunity to utilise some existing technologies for what they were good at and develop products that would be able to fill the gaps.

"We can provide a holistic offering to automate data extraction, validation and entry into client's existing back-end system applications."

By developing a strong and profitable business, Fisher says it has afforded him the chance to educate the market and be "creative, not competitive".

Respectively, Efficiency Leaders has attracted a number of clients to work smarter, including Brisbane City Council, Twin Towns Clubs & Resorts, Wyndham Vacation Resorts, Suncorp Group, Brookfield Multiplex and Endeavour Foundation.

"I believe we've been able to successfully grow the business by keeping focused on our goals and approaching every challenge with an innovative and passionate mindset," Fisher says.

"Our customers then become advocates and evangelists of our solutions and this has greatly assisted us to gain the confidence and commitment of new customers.

"The strong desire to innovate has also led to the development of unique solutions which add further value to our existing client base and allows us to open new markets."

A partner channel has been developed to take the system internationally, in addition to the release of ELAP Cloud V2.0 in October.

Fisher says growth through partners is a key strategy, particularly establishing a reseller presence in the US and UK.

"We have plans to appoint a global partner manager, who will be responsible for on-boarding and enabling our partner community locally and our internationally targeted markets," he says.