Jonathon De Conno is a Senior Consultant and key member of the EngageRM team across multiple areas, and that’s a role that suits the all-rounder on the cricket field just fine.
Dad-of-three Jonathon is based in Adelaide, South Australia, and made the switch to EngageRM just over four years ago, having previously worked with the company during his time at Adelaide City Council.
Sports and entertainment are not just EngageRM’s areas of expertise, but also the great passions of ‘Jonno’s’ life. His successes on the cricket field include an A-grade hat-trick, although he just missed out on a century with the bat during a career that spanned more than three decades. Golf and the AFL’s Hawthorn Hawks are his other sporting loves, while the band he played bass for was once featured on national radio station JJJ’s Home & Hosed show.
At home, he has a busy family life with his wife, three kids aged between 15 and 10, and Opie, a three-legged Australian Kelpie.
Tell us about your role at EngageRM…
JDC: I like to sub-categorise myself as a user adoption specialist in helping customers through training and training resources to get more out of the solution. It’s not just about education, it’s about identifying, gathering and designing enhancements too, because customers are a tremendous source of product improvement.
As EngageRM was initially a small organisation when I joined, my role has always been across multiple areas, from training to product configuration and describing changes for our developers. I have also been involved with certain product focus areas, such as Local Government and our online Kinder Application & Allocation solution.
I have provided thought leadership around bulk email marketing through the Dynamics platform, and Dynamics Marketing is becoming a bigger focus of my working week.
Tell us about a typical working day for you?
JDC: Being global and still in a growth phase can mean early calls to one time zone, then a period in your own time, and then going on to evening calls in a third. We’re developing local knowledge all over the world now, which is great.
I’ve always been in a remote location away from the head office in Melbourne since I began working for EngageRM, and so whilst I did travel a lot more pre-pandemic to deliver training in person, I’ve always had the home office.
EngageRM affords me and all of its staff great flexibility. I take my kids to school, I work from parking lots at school pick-up, I take my kids to sport, and to balance that, there are times where early morning and/or late evening sessions are required.
What’s the most rewarding part of your job?
JDC: What I love is that we are all so excited about the opportunities that have been created with our involvement in the Microsoft ISV Co-Sell program. We have great access to Microsoft, we’re having opportunities to input into their products, and we’ve been granted access to opportunities with some incredibly successful organisations. It is an absolute privilege.
What about the challenges?
JDC: The challenge at the moment in this exciting time for the company is where to focus. There are so many great process enablers coming out of Microsoft, and so many notable use cases to apply those enablers to; it is difficult to pursue it all.
Our CEO Ned Coten sums it up well when he talks about the challenges in growing as a business. Early on, it’s hard to on-board 10 new, effective staff. There’s a huge knowledge-transfer activity for new starters given the breadth of what we are delivering.
The more often we on-board those 10 new staff, the better we’ll get at it, and our capacity to on-board will be greater, and it will eventually get easier and easier to grow.
It’s hectic, and we have a great pipeline, so we just need to navigate those growing pains, just like any other business. But the commitment from all of us is high.
Tell us about EngageRM as a company to work for?
JDC: It’s energetic and there is passion everywhere you look! The team is great at what they do: designing and delivering great solutions is what drives us all. We’re motivated, aligned, eager, and our client list – from a fairly small outfit based out of Melbourne – is seriously sensational.
