Starting and scaling a business must be in the top 10 most difficult things anyone can do. How tough is the road to success?
Meet Engenera, a civil engineering consultancy firm specialising in structural work, water work, and road infrastructure, founded by Luphus Oosthuizen and Nico Strydom in 2024. Operating with a global footprint but firmly rooted in Australia, they came into the market with a clear vision: build a firm that was lean, competitive, and set up to scale from the very beginning.
After two years of laying the foundation, the projections for growth are starting to take shape. But how do you move from zero to profit without the tools, systems, and infrastructure that established firms take for granted?
Tackling One Problem After Another
Every new business faces the same early temptation: keep costs low, use what you know, and figure out the rest later. For Engenera, like most firms in their early stages, that meant spreadsheets.
Excel is an easy call at the start. It's familiar, flexible, and costs nothing. When you're a small team trying to get jobs across the line, it does the job. Until it doesn't.
The problem with spreadsheets isn't what they can do, it's what they can't scale into. As Engenera's project load grew, the cracks started showing:
- No real-time visibility into where each project stood financially
- No reliable way to track revenue across multiple active projects at once
- No means of sharing timely, detailed project information with clients at speed
- And no honest answer to the question every founder loses sleep over: are we going to hit our numbers this month?
The business was growing. The tools weren't keeping up.
Implementing a Job Profitability OS From the Get-Go
Nothing like a friend and colleague to find the necessary tools you need when you need them. The path to WorkflowMAX came through a trusted source: a colleague in New Zealand who had used the platform in a previous business and didn't hesitate to recommend it.
From there, Engenera brought in Setupmysystem, a WorkflowMAX implementation partner led by Dan Roggenkamp. The process was exactly what a growing firm needs it to be: fast, structured, and painless. They assessed what Engenera had, identified what they needed, and got the platform up and running without disrupting operations.
What WorkflowMAX gave them from day one was a real-time operating system for project profitability.
- Revenue tracking, in real time: Rather than waiting for end-of-month reconciliations, WorkflowMAX gives the team an always-current view of revenue across every active project, regardless of when you log on.
- Instant financial clarity: For a firm still building its financial foundations, knowing where you stand at any given moment changes how decisions get made.
- Better client communication: The volume of project-related information Engenera can now share, and the speed at which they can share it, has become one of their most visible competitive advantages.
Looking Straight at the 10-Year Horizon
For a firm only two years in, Engenera thinks about the long game. They have the mix of newcomer effervescence with the vision of a veteran, the kind of strategic confidence that comes from having the right infrastructure in place early.
WorkflowMAX becomes the perfect partner to solve today's problems while creating the base for building the next decade on.
