NOVEMBER 22 2022

Published in The Australian Financial Review

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Two former HR executives from Qantas and NBN are transforming the way corporations are managing their workforce, providing technology to help big businesses predict their optimal employee headcount and looming skills gaps.

eQ8, which started life in 2014 as a professional services company before pivoting to become a software business in 2019, already counts the likes of Metlife, Barclays, Mercer, Nestle and the United Nations as customers. It has now raised $5.5 million in a round led by Go1 and Advanced Navigation investor OIF Ventures to propel its business.

Started by former Qantas head of strategic workforce planning (SWP) Alicia Roach and former NBN general manager of planning, rewards and sourcing, Chris Hare, the company analyses thousands of internal and external data points to predict a company’s future workforce needs.

The pair teamed up while they were both working for NBN Co and spotted an opportunity to reshape how businesses think about the workforce.

“The workforce is a value-generating asset ... and it needs to be harnessed and optimised,” Ms Roach told The Australian Financial Review.

“The workforce is the execution vehicle, but businesses don’t plan for it in a way that’s forward-looking or holistic.

“SWP is the integration of business strategy, finance and HR, answering what is our purpose and what does it take to get there?”

After leaving NBN, the pair set up QHR Consulting, which until 2020 provided consulting services around SWP, HR analytics and remuneration design.

But, Mr Hare said Ms Roach had envisioned the company as a software business from its early days.‍

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Interest from Exxon‍

“We felt like we needed to test the market, see it in a few industries, so we could hone our methodology, but Alicia knew from her background that there was a tech gap here and advocated that we build the technology,” he said.

The pivot was not straightforward. While the business had clients from its consulting business, none immediately wanted to transition to the tech platform, so the co-founders effectively started eQ8 from scratch using the capital from the consulting company.

The co-founders assumed their first clients would be from Australia, but thanks to some articles on LinkedIn published by Ms Roach, the company started getting calls from major corporations in the US including ExxonMobil and Metlife.

Just before COVID-19 sent the world into lockdown, the start-up closed Metlife and the UN as customers in March 2020.

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‍‘Kissed a lot of frogs’‍

Unable to “roadshow” the technology to other businesses, Mr Hare said the pandemic forced eQ8 to focus on the success of these cornerstone customers.

Having since grown its customer base, he said the time was right to raise funding.

“We are not serial entrepreneurs. We built this thing out of belief ... now we’ve proven out a market, and shown the product does what it needs to do, we decided to raise our Series A,” Mr Hare said.

“We were in Austin, Texas, and had a bias toward US VC funds... we used our network and kissed a lot of frogs in the US market, then we were introduced to a few Aussie funds and OIF was one.

“We came out of that meeting and said they really understood where we were right now, and what we’re trying to do.”

Ms Roach said the company was going through a growth surge on the back of worldwide workforce shortages, plaguing everyone from the accounting giants to the airlines.

“[In the US] it’s so extreme that airlines are paying people not to get on flights. The airlines find themselves in these situations because they have made short-term knee-jerk decisions without a long-term plan,” she said.

“They didn’t step back and say what if things bounce back in 12 months, or two years... we’re doing research on the impact of the layoffs [and believe] if they’d held the workforce, the cost would have been less.”