Mojosurf Rides the Cloud

Started out of the back of a kombi van 12 years ago, Mojosurf is a great Aussie success story. We’re an Australian surf school that runs fully-guided tours of Australia’s best east coast beaches and surf breaks. We combine the joy of travel with the thrill of surfing in a well-matched marriage that won us the Golden Backpacks Best Tour/Activity in NSW in 2009.

From small beginnings, we now have over 50,000 customers a year. Our seasonal employees number 200 in the summer in addition to the 50 core employees who service our customer base year round.

The strength of our business is our employees’ love of surfing. Unsurprisingly, our guides rarely have the same passion for business administration and IT systems.

Until recently, our staff had to deal with a static server system in Byron Bay, that was occasionally riddled with sand! And as our operation grew, we could no longer put up with its inefficiency and unreliability.

We searched for an solution that could easily accommodate fluctuating staff numbers, provide reliable remote access and was intuitive for non-techie surfies to use. Reliability was also crucial as we don’t have the time or the people-power to facilitate IT assistance to fix basic problems.

Simultaneously juggling hundreds of customers, dozens of class times and a multitude of travel itineraries, we must always stay on top of our scheduling and resourcing. We had started using Google Calendar to organise employees and adventures, such as the scheduling for our buses, before we discovered all the other functions we could use and we moved to Google Apps for Business just over a year ago.

Gmail, Calendar, chat, and video have given Mojosurf staff a one-stop-shop to tap into the administrative side of the business. Importantly, Google Apps is compatible across multiple platforms and devices, as we don’t supply devices to a lot of our staff they can still access our systems from anywhere, including on the road, from any device they like.

Ultimately, our brand is about leisure and adventure, not stress. Google Apps helps us achieve the high level of organisation necessary to manage staff, students and our crucial resources: surfboards.

Editors note: Today’s blog post is by Trevor Wistaff, IT Manager at Mojosurf