Aussie Broadband’s white-label services are designed for big companies such as Origin Energy, which sell telecommunications services under their own brands.
Point of difference
The entrance of the NBN into the market saw Aussie Broadband shift from being a wireless infrastructure owner and builder to “just another” retail service provider over the NBN. It had to find a way to differentiate itself from its large and small rivals.
“We felt there was a huge gap with the way that the big telcos were treating their customers and, I guess coming from the country, we had more of a customer‑first kind of approach,” Britt says.
“And so we built technologies and systems which allowed us to serve our customers really, really well and do it at a lower cost because I wanted to keep everything onshore, whereas a lot of other telcos were offshoring those roles.”
The company automated a lot of customer service functions, which allowed it to keep costs down and keep its customer service based in Australia.
“Where that really started to take off was when COVID hit and most of the other big four telcos had offshore operations,” he says.
“They were shut down or impacted due to the various lockdowns that happened around the world. But we were able to keep operating because we were predominantly onshore.”
Days when people were unable to contact their telcos became high sales days for Aussie Broadband.
The decision to get big required a lot more capital, Britt says.
“I’ve nearly gone broke five times over the last 20 years, including as recently as four years ago. It’s been one of those cases that we’ve literally threw everything we had into the business to make it succeed and to grow,” he says.
The company debuted on the ASX in October 2020, following a $40 million initial public offering at $1 per share. As of late November this year, its shares were sitting a little under $4 each and the company had a market capitalisation of over $1 billion.
Listing has made capital a lot easier to raise.
Trusted brand
Aussie Broadband is Australia’s most trusted telco brand, according to the most recent Roy Morgan Trusted Brand Awards, and Britt says much of its customer growth has been thanks to word of mouth. “We pull a lot off the big four carriers, particularly Telstra, because people love these services, they love the experience and they trust us,” he says.
Speaking in the wake of the Optus network outage in November, Britt said several large corporates have switched their mobile phones to Aussie Broadband, even though it runs on the Optus network because they trust the brand.
Aussie Broadband managing director Phillip Britt says he’s nearly gone broke five times.
It also has spent $50 million on building its own fibre network in about three-quarters of NBN’s geographic areas, which helps it to defray costs. It means the company doesn’t have to pay a third party such as Telstra to carry data from data centres to NBN’s Points of Interconnect, which connects the NBN network to homes and businesses.
Aussie Broadband is the second internet service provider Britt has started. He founded Net Tech in 1996 and then sold it to a listed company called Datafast, which became part of the M2 Group and then Vocus.
Britt hasn’t been to university and says he barely passed high school, but has always had a passion for business. Working at Datafast, he learnt “how not to run businesses” and about small listed telcos.
“I call that my uni degree period of learning how I didn’t want my businesses to look,” he says.
Along with accessing capital, another challenge in growing the company has been making a lot of changes very quickly and communicating them to the 1300 staff. Britt says the company sometimes is accused of being “fast and loose” with the way it manages time. “But that also allows us to move very quickly and adapt to changing market conditions quickly,” he adds.
The company will have close to 1700 staff once it completes the Symbio acquisition.
Finding the right talent is a challenge. Britt says it’s difficult finding people who “can think big enough” for what the firm is trying to achieve. “A lot of people have trouble not seeing what the future looks like when it’s unclear or a bit murky,” he says.
Aussie Broadband is now a national internet provider, but Britt says it still has a “strong regional heart”, with call centres in Gippsland and Dandenong and one in Perth.
In the 2023 financial year, it earned revenue of $788 million – up by close to a quarter – and operating earnings of $89.6 million. It also increased its NBN market share to 7.6 per cent.
When the Symbio acquisition is complete in February – subject to regulator approval – the company’s revenue will be made up of about 50 per cent residential, 30 per cent wholesale and the remainder split between business, enterprise customers and government.
Britt expects Aussie Broadband will make more acquisitions in future.
In the next 18 months, the company will be installing new technology systems. “Our technology has been what’s allowed us to lead and differentiate and we feel that we can do more in that space to let us to continue to disrupt and lead in that space,” he says.
Britt, who admits to having recently contemplated his future with the company, took three months of long service leave in the middle of this year. “I’ve come back from that quite reinvigorated and ready to continue to roll the dice a bit longer,” he says.