About emtel

The road to emtel

Emtel has been formed from a merger between The Ironing Board New Zealand Limited (Ethan Hohneck) and Information Consulting Service Limited (Martin Roundill).  Both directors of each company realised the potential in the Geospatial Industry which would involve the companies merging and aligning the different skill sets to create a consulting business and software company.  For nearly a decade now these companies have been developing software applications on a major scale and providing IT services to a vast number of clients.  Upon merging, the business plan drawn up included a number of professional IT services being offered to clients, as well as a web mapping software as its key flagship offering.

Where to start

Before any good business starts you have to plan out your road map to create your overall business plan.  Designing emtel meant two things:

  1. Whats the current geospatial market doing right now?
  2. What can we offer as a business?

The first thing to do was understand the movements of the geospatial market.  Research was the answer.  Both directors began their research by first starting with existing clients and understanding what services they provided existing clients.  Next we researched past clients to compare what we delivered and when we delivered the services.  Finally we analysed what geospatial software applications they used and determined what their short falls were.  Once all the analysis was complete the business plan started to form.

Getting the emtel ball rolling

Starting a new business can be easy, it can take time, and it can often change as ideas grow.  Staying focussed on your goals is what keeps you grounded ensuring that you dont lose sight of the end goal, or in this instance, reaching the starting line.  We decided to set a date for launching the new brand, emtel, and chose the ALGIM Annual Conference 2016 held at SkyCity Auckland from 21-23 November 2016.  This was going to be our re-introduction to a number of past clients and new potential clients within the Local Government arena.  To reach this goal we set a number of milestones that started in July and ended in November.  They were:

  1. Choose a company name and incorporate the company.
  2. Build a brand around the company name.
  3. Create all the marketing material necessary e.g. the 3 b’s (banners, business cards, brochures).
  4. Design, develop, and deploy a unique web mapping software application (version 1).
  5. Promote geospatial services.
  6. Register for the conference.
  7. Plan and build a stand at the conference.
  8. Attend the conference.

Over 142 days, at an average of 6.3 hours a day, we spent 900 hours combined to achieve the launch.  This was also on top of Business As Usual (BAU) as both directors had to keep their existing companies running (to pay the bills).

The end, or start, result

The end result of creating emtel, which gets us to the start line to launch the company at ALGIM, was achieved no later than the day before the conference.  All parties were satisfied that we could launch a brand that we were proud of, show off our web mapping application, MapIT v1.0 (which is built entirely in New Zealand), and attend a conference with a number of other large vendors all aiming to catch the eye of a potential client.  Below is a pic of our stand at this years conference.

ALGIM Annual Conference 2016