An audience with Sir Richard

When North Shore IT business FaceMe was last featured in (NZBusiness), it was February 2012 and the entrepreneurial company had just won the BNZ/Virgin Business Challenge, with its prize of $100k in cash and one-on-one time with Sir Richard Branson.

Some 15 months later, FaceMe CEO Mark Christensen and CTO Danny Tomsett have finally had their hour-long meeting with the British billionaire, in Adelaide of all places, and the duo report that it far exceeded their expectations.
“We were naturally excited and a little nervous to meet with Sir Richard, given his phenomenal success in life and business,” says Christensen. “The intention for Danny and I was to come away with his ongoing support in some form and to continue to leverage the Virgin brand for our own market awareness.”
The pair say waiting 15 months to see Branson in no way diminished the experience. “In fact we were more ready to maximise the engagement,” says Christensen. “After spending much of last year overseas promoting FaceMe and gaining a better understanding of the markets we were in a much better space to convey the potential of FaceMe.
“Plus we now have some solid runs on the board to add more credibility.”
Christensen says the meeting went “unbelievably quick”.
“I can’t remember a faster hour in my entire life. Sir Richard asked his very first question before sitting down: ‘so what did winning the business challenge do for you?’
“He also asked to see a demo of FaceMe so we did a live link back into our Auckland head office – much to the delight of our staff!”
Sir Richard congratulated the FaceMe team on winning the challenge and on what he thought was a great business product. Throughout the demo Christensen and Tomsett referenced his business groups and showed off the FaceMe video conference system’s collaboration features. There was immediate follow-up from the Virgin management team to work on Group initiatives.  
“Two hours after the meeting I rang the Virgin Group’s global brand head to ask how the meeting had gone,” says Christensen. “Apparently the first thing Branson said to his team in the lift straight after our meeting was ‘those guys were impressive’.
“The other standout for us was his genuine interest in using FaceMe across his group of companies; we talked through multiple-use cases and these resonated well with him.
“It will certainly help to have such a globally recognised brand in our stable, to reference and generate opportunities from.
“After seeing the quality of FaceMe using only mobile data he also wanted to use FaceMe from his Necker Island base instead of Skype . We said OK we can set that up.”
Christensen says they are already working with a number of the Virgin business groups – with initiatives such as providing video into their contact centres to improve customer engagement. “We came away very encouraged and have more confidence to take on some of the big idea projects. One we are keen on is to address Auckland’s ever-growing traffic issues by working with Auckland Council to make it easy for any organisation to use our technology.”    

FaceMe milestones
Since winning the BNZ/Virgin Business Challenge, the FaceMe duo has been busy. Setting up operations and network infrastructure in Australia, Singapore and Canada were the initial milestones they say. Since then they’ve secured partner agreements for representation in the US for FaceMe’s Hosted Cloud Service and in Europe (including the UK) to target major telco providers.
“Telcos in particular are looking for services like ours to drive their broadband demand and reduce churn,” explains Christensen, “especially after losing some control and taking a battering from global VoIP services such as those from Skype, Apple (FaceTime), Viber and Google (Hangouts).
“Australia has been especially good to us so far with some recent large deployments into local government, all on the back of the Federal Government’s NBN programmess.”
Looking ahead, the FaceMe team has big goals – and the time spent with Sir Richard Branson will be a big factor in achieving those goals.
“On the product front we are looking to deliver on a roadmap that will give us first-mover advantage in a number of areas,” says Christensen, “in particular with more business collaboration tools, interoperability and our mobility 2.0 app, which will be a world leader.
“In terms of the business we are seeking external investment in the form of private equity to accelerate growth and we will continue our sales and marketing efforts in our current
markets.”