It's been a tough journey for QLBS.com to push into global markets, but the hard work has paid off.

QLBS.com's business is assessing the viability of other businesses, but that doesn't mean this fast-growing company hasn't had its own fair share of hurdles to overcome. Partner, investor and mentor Keith Phillips says the Auckland-based firm has a "great big, hairy, audacious vision" which is starting to pay off.

Founders Steve Lewin and Margaret Mulqueen fought to establish a global presence with limited financial and people resources and with the added challenge of a long lead-time for sales of the company's complex technology. QLBS.com has developed a software system which measures the performance capability and risk of a business to ensure the company's management knows how to move through “growth inflection points". Its measurement framework works over the business life-cycle, from idea evaluation to the business growth stage and into the business excellence arena.

The system was developed by Lewin who was an IT management consultant for 17 years. It is essentially an assessment system that uses a complex scoring mechanism to rate a firm's chances of survival and is based on years of work identifying the most common factors in business failure or success.

QLBS.com now has 33 different assessment products covering everything from health and education to brand assessment. It has made inroads into tightly niched markets in China and Iran, helping incubator managers assess their own effectiveness in promoting growth among the companies using incubator facilities. It has also had some successful uptake in New Zealand in the economic development field (NZ Trade and Enterprise and Te Puni Kokiri) and sales in Singapore, the US an the United Kingdom.

As Margaret sees it: “You have to push the technology for so long before the market pulls. Now we've been going for about three years and the market is starting to pull”.

The question for any business, says Phillips, is how to scale itself from a New Zealand base into global markets when cashflow is a problem and selling cycles are long. Mulqueen says sales are only now coming through from customers they began talking to two years ago because they are dealing with organisations which have to change their strategy to adopt the technology. “ You have to work to keep the relationship going and have to continue to grow your credibility with the customer”.

Phillips, who has been working with the company for the past 18 months, came on board as an equal partner in September. He is involved in several other companies including Cadmus, where he is chairman, and Deep Video Imaging, where he is a director. Of QLBS.com, he says that when a company has thin resources of people, money and time it is difficult to grow from a small domestic base. QLBS.com has faced what Phillips sees as a classic Kiwi conundrum.

While initially Mulqueen and Lewin had some revenue from consulting work, they decided in July 2002 to stop consulting to focus on the product itself. It was, says Mulqueen, “an excruciating decision”. "We had to cut that [revenue stream] off. The next year was pretty stressful because we had no cashflow. We still had sales but not enough to grow the business. But we knew if we didn't make that decision the business could not develop. It was the hardest call we had to make. But if we didn't do that we would not be where we are now”.

Phillips says that as well as financing issues, it is often difficult for businesses to decide where to focus – particularly if the company wants to be a global entity. But QLBS.com has been very clear at solving some of these issues. “Classically companies spend a long time working out which market to focus on and who the early adopters will be. This company did much more research than other SME's I've seen and had identified the early adopters [the economic development sector and international incubator markets].”

Domestically, QLBS.com also faced the problem of many New Zealand companies being unwilling to look at locally developed technology until it had been proven in off-shore markets.

Mulqueen says the investment and input by Phillips has been fantastic. She says the company was “poised” but was stuck on strategy and needed more clarity and focus, which Phillips has brought on board, along with his international marketing experience. “We needed Keith in the business more than just the funding”, says Mulqueen. "We could have continued to fund ourselves but the money gives us the opportunity to accelerate and lift off. We really have a sense of partnership and that is important for the three of us”.

More than just the funding, Phillips coming on board was also a validation of everything they had been working on. Mulqueen says it also re-energized the company.

Phillips has also bought in a new perceptive on the management of resources. “When you are building a small company from New Zealand it is all about resource allocation and management, knowing how to get that in balance.” He says small business will always have a shortage of resources and its knowing how to recognize when enough is enough on a particular project. Mulqueen says they are learning to be quite clear about when and where the resource is coming from and to anticipate any [financial] holes that may be coming up. “You're always planning forward and taking action to address what is ahead”.

Phillips says companies have to anticipate when a lot of business is suddenly going to come their way and then “run madly to make sure you don't drop the ball”.

Phillips also puts some of QLBS.com's success down to building a strong relationship with NZ Trade and Enterprise and leveraging off the government agency's international networks and support. The company has also forged close links with major players in the international incubation market and these relationships are starting to pay off. The establishment of incubators is growing internationally and Mulqueen does not believe there is any other assessment tool which measures and benchmarks the effectiveness of incubators in helping small firms grow.

The company is looking at international patents but Phillips says the real protection is the knowledge base the company is building. Mulqueen says there are so many opportunities it's hard to allow some of these opportunities to sit there while pushing into other targeted areas “But we have learnt to focus and target very specifically.”

Part of the challenge in scaling up a small company is to think global and act global and support your global business. Lewin, says Phillips, has been clever in building a product that can be supported globally from his home base through an electronic network with their customers.