About Expert the business

Expert was founded in 2000 by its two directors, Evan Bayly and Aaron Main, and has outlived many others who entered the sector around the same time. Expert is one of Wellington’s longest established web design and development companies, offering specialised software development, website design and hosting, software development of Enterprise Management Systems (EMS) and Content Management Systems (CMS) applications.

Expert’s clients are based in New Zealand, Australia, UK, Europe, and North and South America, and represent multiple business and non-commercial sectors, including membership associations. We work with small local start-ups through to large international financial market bench-marking authorities.

Operating out of our own offices in the creative centre of Wellington, New Zealand since inception, Expert provides its services seamlessly to clients throughout New Zealand as well as overseas. Once a project has ‘gone live’ most communication with clients is by email, however we welcome phone and zoom conversations too – Expert staff are accessible and we greatly value the relationships we build with our clients.

We’ve created a world-class infrastructure platform

All our websites are built ‘mobile-responsive’, catering for different devices and screen resolutions, and most of them are built in our own MoST (Management of Site Tool) EMS (Enterprise Management System) which we created in the early days of Expert. Check out MoST here. In addition to offering a ‘one-stop-shop approach’, MoST also provides a range of other specialty features such as multi-cultural content; it can automatically switch between the different versions of content based off the browser’s language, or allow the user to manually switch if they choose. It can also read out loud to the user without the need to record or maintain files.

We also build websites on other platforms such as open-source Word Press, however these are less popular with our clients, usually because they are seeking extensible and secure software solutions for their organisations.

Secure hosting and disaster recovery is a given

Each site Expert hosts is monitored 24/7 and alerts a technician via SMS in the event of an issue such as a website outage, DNS (domain name service) issues, SSL (secure) certificate issues, or domain name registration expiration etc. Problems are rare, however any errors are logged along with in-depth detail, allowing Expert to know what happened, by whom, using what and when, and the ability to reproduce the issues for diagnostics. Expert can even run the website through an IDE (integrated development environment) and step-through code to determine exactly what the cause is, allowing any issues to be fixed in a very short timeframe.

With our own servers located in both Wellington and Auckland, New Zealand, Expert offers disaster recovery, should the need arise.

About the Expert Team

While co-founders Evan Bayly and Aaron Main established Expert in 2000, they had worked together for some years before then and were early adopters of anything web. Prior to forming Expert, Evan had a strong management background and Aaron had worked in the IT sector since the early 1990s. Evan is Expert’s CEO and manages the business, while Aaron, as CIO, undertakes most of Expert’s client development and software application work, as well as being the creator and guardian of our MoST product.

Expert is a family business and has been since inception. This means there is a huge commitment to succeed, and shared values and ethics are vitally important. It also means that communication between the team is easy, clear and concise. Accountability and accessibility are a given. The culture at Expert is healthy and wholesome; we experience very low staff turnover as a result.

Clients’ accounts/projects are managed by Expert’s Business Strategist, Beverley Main, and in most cases are worked on by the same designer or developer from start to finish, so there’s always consistency and continuity throughout the project. Bev’s been involved with Expert since it began, first as a client for many years, and since 2014, as one of the Expert team. She also has extensive small business and membership association experience and knowledge.

Training and accessible support is vital

Our Senior Designer is Amanda Main who has worked at Expert since 2001 and she is joined by designer, Sam Wilson, who has been with Expert since 2018. Both Amanda and Sam are experienced web, graphic and print designers and they work across all media with ease. Amanda also provides MoST training and education to many of our clients.

Technical support is provided to clients by our small Systems Administration team. The team also manages the hosting environment for Expert, overseen by Aaron.

Consultant Warren McDonald has been working with Expert and our clients since 2015 and he provides sales and marketing support as required. Warren’s background is in FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) and national media.

Our newest team member is Indika Jayarathna. Indika is a software developer and app builder and brings his international experience to Expert. Indika joined the Expert team during Covid lockdown in April 2020.

In addition, Expert has an arrangement with an international agency to source back-end developers as required, and we also have relationships with other industry experts who work closely with us and our clients on specific projects.

How things work at Expert

At Expert, we have a wide range of diverse clients undertaking a wide range of diverse business activities – no two clients are the same – which makes life for our techies and designers really interesting, and there’s never a dull moment, thankfully.

When a new potential client initially approaches us, we try to find out as much as possible about their business – what they do, how they do it, where they do it and who they do it for. We need to understand their business almost as well as they do, in order to come up with the best solutions possible for the right online outcome.

We interview these potentials and ask lots of questions about their operation before we ask them about their online needs and how they would like these needs met. It helps enormously that two of our key people have extensive business backgrounds spanning many years, across a range of activities and sectors. We’re not a company of fresh-faced, skateboard–riding kids straight out of school who learnt how to build ‘free’ websites by watching You Tube. Conversely, we don’t come from a large corporate background where people work in silos, are supported by a team of admin flunkies, and who have clients with huge budgets and incredibly generous timelines.

As a small business, we are far more like most of our clients and we ‘get’ the issues that they face on a daily basis

Once we’ve established our clients’ needs, we sit them down with the appropriate techie specialist – a developer or a designer, or maybe both depending on what the project requires - and we talk through the project in detail. Once we have all the information we need, we prepare a formal proposal for the client which outlines everything that will be covered by the project, including a timeline. On acceptance of the proposal, a contract is drawn up and executed and the work gets scheduled and is soon underway.

As mentioned earlier, Expert has a dedicated project manager (currently me, Bev) to keep the project on track and this results in great communication between clients and techies, so nothing gets lost in translation. Scope creep is managed and projects are usually completed within budget and on time, unless there have been unavoidable delays at the client’s end.

Specialist knowledge of membership associations and the not-for-profit-sector a bonus

Over the years we’ve specialised in helping membership associations to reach their members and we see the issues they face on a daily basis and across all sectors. We’ve been able to do this really effectively and our software, MoST, has been built specifically to make life easier for administrators. Plus, we have staff who just love problem-solving and helping people.

And as a small business ourselves, we really understand the psyche of our small business clients, and their needs often resonate with our own needs. We value flexibility, responsiveness and good value from our suppliers and in turn, we provide the same to our clients. We work hard to respond quickly to requests and if something takes longer than we thought it would, or if a more urgent job crops up, we make sure that this is communicated to the client as soon as possible.

Borderless business and flexi working days are critical components in a virtual world

We have a number of overseas clients these days, and since Covid we find ourselves working more and more with people from a distance. Thank goodness for Zoom. Working across time zones can be a bit challenging sometimes, though we usually manage to find times to meet when both parties are awake and reasonably focussed. Having our staff working flexible hours throughout a 12-hour period means that we’ve nearly always got someone available to make urgent changes or updates at short notice.

Having a good relationship with our clients is especially important to Expert. We find that our clients can achieve more if we work together on their problems, and we try to work with organisations that have a similar culture and values to ours, where mutual respect comes naturally. We have clients who have been with us since our beginning start-up days of the late 1990s and early 2000s; over the years many have become friends and are part of the Expert family.

So, what makes us different from our competitors?

For starters we’ve probably been around longer. We have a mix of skills, talent and experience, including having strong business skills and vast technical ability. Our staff represent a range of generations – boomers, gen X, gen Y and millennials – as well as a diverse range of cultural backgrounds. We listen to requests and try to fulfil them as much as possible, and we provide insights into potential issues and possible alternatives if required.

Working with many clients from the not-for-profit sector, we understand what it’s like operating on a tight budget – we’re a small business and appreciate how important careful money management is. While we’re generally happy to provide estimates of the cost of proposed work, sometimes the estimates can take longer to prepare than the work actually takes to be done. We provide guidance on this too.

No hiding behind an anonymous call centre for us

Being a family business means we have a lot of skin in the game and everyone is accountable, all the time. There’s nowhere to hide should things go wrong. We work on a ‘prevention’ model – do it once and do it right. Robust planning and execution are critical to the success of everything and so is good, honest communication. We are Expert – WYSIWYG!

If you’d like to know more about Expert – in particular about our staff and clients, visit our website www.expert.services. If you’d like to know more about our specialist software MoST, visit www.most.software. Or if you’d prefer to talk to someone, give me, Bev, a call on 04 3849833 or drop me an email using the form below.