Australia is a sports-mad nation, and most kids get involved with clubs from a very young age. What allows these clubs to function amid all the administrative complexities and daily human interactions? Volunteers. But there are only so many hours in the day, and with millions of Aussies wanting to play sports, the possibility of catastrophe is always around the corner.
Thankfully, technology has started to solve all the various challenges associated with operating a sports club. And revolutioniseSPORT in particular, is turning what was once a thankless, time-consuming job into something enjoyable again.
A quick fix with commercial potential
As a child who rarely dabbled in sports himself, Alex Mednis never imagined where his life would end up taking him. Before becoming CEO of SportGrid and its flagship product revolutioniseSPORT, an online management platform for sports of all shapes and sizes, Mednis used his background in computer science and law to forge a career at some of the largest firms in the country. In his spare time, he worked as a volunteer in administration for his local water polo association — and it’s here where the opportunity presented itself.
“At its height, the club had 1,200 members, which was a lot more than most local sporting clubs that may have 100 to 200 members,” he says. “We were all volunteers working behind the scenes, and the paperwork we had to manage became phenomenal.”
With his computer science background, Mednis developed software to handle new registrations, publish results and keep the team leaderboard updated.
“It got to this point where every weekend, someone would come up to me and say, ‘I’m the treasurer of a local sporting club, can we use your software?’ But that was impossible because it was completely customised to water polo and our club.”
Fast ascent to industry leader
It didn’t take long for Mednis to realise the exciting potential of what he had developed. So alongside his wife Teresa, he went into business, expanding the scope of what became revolutioniseSPORT and commercialising the product for all other sports — from hockey to athletics to sailing and everything in between. Their rise to the top was rapid.
“We service around 18,000 clubs and about 300 governing bodies here in Australia,” Mednis says. “Our market share is over 34%, so we are now the biggest provider in the country, and we’re bigger than all the other providers combined.”
Such was their success that the brand has since expanded into New Zealand, Singapore, and the Cook Islands, as well as larger and more complex markets like the United States and other parts of Asia-Pacific. The revolutioniseSPORT platform is helping typically resource-poor volunteers tackle the inherent complexities of running a sporting club, especially those with a similar set-up to Australia, where most sports have governing bodies at the local, state and federal levels.
Solving the money problem
One of the biggest attractions of the revolutioniseSPORT product is its streamlining sports club payments. But as the business began to scale up at lightning pace, Mednis knew they needed to partner with a payment gateway that would support their growth — while simultaneously servicing their key need: splitting payments in a single transaction.
“That’s where our relationship with Pin Payments comes in,” Mednis says, who adds that they first adopted Pin Payments on the platform in 2015. “Being a white-label online payment gateway, Pin Payments allowed us to architect a solution to take money for a sporting club and have it go to the appropriate places.
“In most industries, say you run a café, you take a customer’s money, and it goes into your business bank account. But the sports industry is layered and federated. If you want to sign up for your local hockey club, you might pay $150 for membership — but that’s made up of three payments, with the local club, Hockey Victoria and Hockey Australia each charging $50.”
For clubs that use revolutioniseSPORT, they don’t have to juggle the time-consuming job of splitting every membership payment, funnelling it to the correct bodies and risking missed payments or incorrect amounts.
“We are giving people their time back,” Mednis says. “The platform is ultimately giving members and especially volunteers the enjoyment of their sport back. It allows them to just enjoy being a volunteer. No one ever signs up to be a volunteer because they want to be consumed with admin and paperwork, but that’s what it can be like. Our solution is a way to insulate them against that happening.”
Pin Payments is Australia’s first unified approach to payments for small to medium-sized businesses. It supports over 12,000 businesses in Australia and New Zealand to accept payments from debit and credit cards bearing the Visa, MasterCard and American Express brands without requiring a merchant account.
