SMART and Neverfail – not enough bottle to go full throttle

Henry Ford, of the US car company, once said that ‘if you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right’.

At The SMART Group, whether its one of Australia’s largest energy retailers, or Melbourne’s most read newspaper – our success has always been driven by the belief that ‘we can’.

In 2004, when Makybe Diva won her second Melbourne Cup and Australia bagged a record 19 gold medals at the Athens Olympics, we decided it was time to take things up a gear for The SMART Group as well.

Little did I know that the inspiration for that new challenge was literally in the palm of my hand.

Just like our pitch to the head of marketing at Melbourne’s Herald Sun, I sold our door to door solution to Neverfail Spring Water, owned by the Coca-Cola Company. Under our campaign, SMART’s door to door team would give customers two free 15 litre Neverfail water bottles, delivered and installed for $99. This was at the time when bottled water was going head-to-head for sales against water filtration companies.

Discussing our growth plans with my SMART co-founder Will Scott, we had the dream of SMART’s next stage, we just needed the vehicle to drive it. At that moment of contemplation, I looked down at the bottle of water in my hand and said ‘we’ll sell bottled water’!

By the end of the campaign, our sales demand exceeded Neverfail’s supply – our door to door team were a winning victim of their own success.

SMART’s National Sales Manager Donnie Stewart was part of our door to door team back then, and set a record of 14 sales on one Friday night. This success saw the Neverfail trial go national, with campaigns in Adelaide, Sydney and Brisbane.

But we had to be innovative, and before we ran out of bottles, SMART applied the winning techniques that had us breaking sales records with energy contracts and newspapers. I bought up bulk on DVD players, and offered a free DVD player to sweeten the deal for our customers. They loved it!

On top of the unbeatable sales offer, customers were won over by being able to sign up with one of our reps and have their water bottles delivered and installed within half an hour, especially when we’d promised Neverfail we’d have it done within 48 hours.

The key to being quicker than a pizza delivery would also become the God father of SMART’s customised in-field technology. Our call centre would text message the customer’s details to the palm pilot of one of our reps on the road as soon as the sale went through and our rep would drive straight to the customer’s house.

The Neverfail campaign is a key chapter in SMART’s story of success – in the end, we literally had too much sales throttle for the Coca-Cola water bottle. But just like Henry Ford said, we thought we could, and we were right.

Thank you for the memories Gav

I asked Gavin Devane one of American Express leading FX salespeople worldwide  (number 2 in fact) to write something about his time at SMART.


Fresh from running door to door teams for a Canadian energy company, my best mate and I started at SMART in May 2004. We wore a path around the streets of Victoria running SMART’s very first energy campaign – the one that made SMART synonymous with successful direct energy marketing. 

I was hungry for a challenge and on the lookout for new opportunities and a working environment I could love. But I could never have imagined how crazy and exciting my three years at SMART would turn out to be. From the moment I landed at SMART, you could just feel how the company was on the verge of some really exciting change and explosive growth. I wanted to be a part of that.

One of the practical challenges of being part of a company that was growing so quickly was that we were quickly running out of space. But just as the business was run, ingenuity guided our approach to smaller issues too. It’s amazing how a pokey, empty room with a couple of picnic tables and a few old phones could become a 25 seat call centre with state of the art technology (for that time, anyway!) in just a few hours. All of the offices were already packed with up to three management staff each, so we just had to build new ones along the side which we packed with even more staff from the moment people were finished. In total, the number of staff coming in and out of the office grew from a comfortable 50, then to 150 people, then to a packed 300 in just Melbourne alone.

Eventually I had to move our Vodafone operation to a completely separate building just to we could accommodate our growth in Vodafone and the other burgeoning channels. While there wasn’t a lot of room to move, the faces and stories passing through were amazing. The entertainment factor was gold, and friendships were forged that would last a lifetime. Everyone was getting shuffled around all over the place, but people were getting promoted and making lots of money.

At the beginning of my last year at SMART, I was made National Manager for the American Express campaign. It was great to be able to put my most senior manager in charge of my old role running the Vodafone campaign. With Amex, I was now responsible for staff right around Australia, as well as focussing on the corporate sales aspects of the campaign. This was the campaign that brought me to where I am today.

In 2007, I had to go back to Canada, so the prospect of leaving SMART was a very hard personal decision to make. The friends that I made at SMART are friends that I know I’ll have for the rest of my life. My life became all about the people I worked with and I’m sure it was like that for those people as well. The senior management team were like a family. The best part was that everyone worked hard but we played certainly played even harder. From the Ski trips to the Spring Carnivals it was always the time of our lives. Sometimes it just felt like we were a bunch of kids running the company but it worked and we did it better than our competitors.

For so many people, SMART was the first chapter of so many success stories. That goes for my friends who are still at SMART and those who have since left for other challenges. Looking back on my journey with SMART, I’ve got so much to be thankful for. Working side by side my best, the SMART family I’m now a part of, and even my fiancée (yes, I met her at SMART too!).

I can honestly say that my experience at SMART changed my whole life.

Happy Anniversary boys! Thanks for the memories... you’re done very well.

The genesis to SMART’s success

From one campaign we became many – the genesis to SMART’s success

The Latin phrase on the United States coat of arms really appeals to me. You know the one, the shield with the eagle on one side, clutching the arrows, and the olive branch on the other side. With the stars and stripes below. Well, the Latin inscription translates literally; from one.

Just like the United States of America, the United Campaigns of SMART began the same. From one. We grew. And just like America, we beat out our competition too.

But we had to start somewhere, and why not start big. Really big. Like Melbourne’s most read newspaper big. If you read my first blog, you’ll know that Will Scott and I founded SMART on the back of our last 500 bucks.

Well it was that last $500 that made us who we are. Set the mould for the SMART way of marketing. Left our competition scrambling in our wake.

One of the most important things I’ve learnt in marketing is this: If it’s location, location, location in real estate, then its presentation, presentation, presentation in sales marketing. That goes for pitching to the marketing manager at the Herald Sun, and it goes for knocking on the door of the guy who plays Harold Bishop on Neighbours. True story.

With next to nothing behind us, we persuaded Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited to throw us the marketing keys for a spin in its worldwide flagship newspaper – the Herald Sun. We had no resources save for four staff. As it happened, we just had to split them four ways to get off the ground.

SMART outdid our competition to clinch that deal. Will and I persuaded the decision makers in the HWT Building in Southbank to give us the reins to a 10 week trial that had us selling $4 a week, free delivery newspapers across Melbourne.

And sell we did. We doubled subscriptions for a start. And that 10 week trial - it lasted four years. SMART sold 20,000 newspapers a year. Then we launched deals with the Herald Sun’s sister newspapers in South Australia, Queensland and New South Wales.

That campaign made careers and moulded leaders. Like Donnie Stewart. He started as a door to door rep on the Herald Sun trial. Then he made it to channel rep. Today, Donnie is SMART’s National Sales Manager.

The Herald Sun campaign was so successful we replicated it to our other campaigns. SMART’s award winning, record breaking energy marketing campaigns were conceived by the Herald Sun model. It is in the DNA of every SMART campaign that has followed. It is the genesis of SMART’s ten years of success.

Where it all began

If a week’s a long time in politics, ten years is a lifetime in business.

And that’s what it’s been like with The SMART Group. I’ve been able to grow and develop with the company I started as a 21 year old door to door salesman that turned into an ASX listed corporation.

Back in the year Sydney hosted the Olympics, my best mate Will Scott and I spent the last $500 left on our credit card to offer News Limited a trial run selling the Herald Sun.

Remarkably, News Limited entrusted Melbourne’s most read newspaper to our sales and marketing dream.

A million sales and ten years later, and our trial run turned into an established industry leader.

Trusted by some of Australia’s largest blue chip companies to enhance their name and sell their brand, every chapter written by SMART has a fantastic story to tell.

So let me share it with you. Because I want to celebrate SMART’s decade in business. To look back on the audacity of the dream we started with.

To remember the courage and effort it took to build a business from scratch, not because it was easy, but because we were prepared to have a go. From one door to door contract, we became a $70 million ASX listed company before either of us turned 30.

After starting out in a cooped up office at the Baghdad end of Melbourne, we’ve expanded to three states and six major cities. A lot of SMART’s story has been about growth.

Our growth has been phenomenal, but it’s also been sustainable. It means we can employ someone almost anywhere in Australia. And it’s an amazing feeling to be able to give someone a job. But it’s even better to mentor a person’s career and inspire them to become a leader themself.

Someone like Gavin Devane, who started out selling energy contracts door to door. He’s now been voted Amex’s number two salesman. In the whole world.

But you can’t live the dream without surviving a few storms. SMART’s success in charting a course through the global financial crisis showed its not luck, but sheer tenacity and strategic acumen that gets you through a crisis. When many of our competitors folded, SMART consolidated our base, while boldly going after new opportunities.

The industry we work in has changed dramatically in a decade. It’s harder to recruit good people, and with more competition, you’ve got to be at the top of your game to win over new clients.

SMART has a reputation as a fun, dynamic, rewarding place to work. We’ve been voted by BRW Magazine the best sales and marketing company to work for, and celebrated more than a few staff weddings,  too.

SMART doesn’t just compete for new clients - we compete for staff as well. Because we want the most enthusiastic, people focussed professionals with us, not with our competition. It’s our business model that gets the clients, but it’s our people who break the sales records.

Join me again soon to share in another snapshot of SMART’s 10 years of success.