Victorian event staff rostering and management startup Rosterfy has announced a rebrand as it gears up to open an office in the United States after signing on clients including the 2018 Super Bowl, the Aspen Ski World Cup, and the City of Minneapolis.
For the startup, now Event Workforce Group, the US growth comes after a placement at the Australian landing pad in San Francisco, where cofounder Bennett Merriman said the startup was able to grow its revenue forecast by 300 percent on previous years in three months.
“The biggest positive was the opportunity to arrive into a new country with a support network already in place. Without the landing pad, we possibly may have delayed moving international as quickly as we had,” he said.
“The office environment was motivating, being around founders in the same boat, particularly Australians expanding into the US market, and it was helpful to take workshops on the operational aspects involved in launching a business into the USA.”
This growth has also been spurred by further product development. Coming under the startup’s Technology pillar is its existing Rosterfy product, while it has also created a white labelled workforce management platform for clients.
Rosterfy was designed as an online solution to help event managers with tasks including volunteer registration, communicating shifts, post event reporting, and timesheets. It also includes a training module that provides event workforces with visibility on what kind of training staff have completed or still require.
This platform can then go hand in hand with the Talent offering, or the physical workforce the startup provides clients; with a community of over 20,000 Australians on board, the startup is able to connect event clients with a pool of ‘workforcers’ ready to run.
This community is then tied to the Academy. The startup has partnered with tertiary institutions to provide students and graduates with a pathway into the events industry. The platform allows students to build up their work experience through placement in events managed by the startup, while also taking part in online training modules.
The startup has now placed over 60 of its ‘workforcers’ into full time roles in the sports, events, and entertainment industries, while Merriman said between 100 to 200 casual event placement opportunities are open to students on any one weekend.
To build out its North American workforce, the startup has partnered with a US company conducting background checks on volunteers and introduced a video interview function onto its platform.
With a clear focus on growth in the US over the next year, Merriman said the biggest market opened up to the startup has been the city-based sports commissions and convention bureaus.
The Super Bowl, for example, is planned by a committee from the host city rather than the NFL. Here, the startup is able to offer to clients a single platform through which they can recruit, screen, and place volunteers.
“This city based model also enables us to build our Event Workforce Academy in each city, allowing us to provide both the physical workforce and technology solution to large city-based events. Many cities are required to provide proof of an on-demand event workforce ready for upcoming events; our technology platform can do exactly that, while engaging more members of their community to be actively engaged,” Merriman explained.
To continue this growth the startup is looking at a potential office in San Francisco, while Colorado is also an option. Of course, Australia has not been forgotten, with Event Workforce Group also signing on the 2017 Rugby League World Cup.
Image: the Event Workforce Group team. Source: Supplied.
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