Our feature writer Fiona Scott is attending the SuiteWorld 2023 conference in Las Vegas and is learning all about NetSuite, Oracle and meeting entrepreneurs from across the world. This is the last of a series of articles from that conference.
When I was invited to speak to 42-year-old Jason Kencevski, I’d not heard of him or of the company he now runs 
as CEO – Speedmaster which specialises in automotive parts for those who love their cars. The company is well known in Australia and in the USA, sadly the company does not export to the UK. Find out more here https://www.speedmaster79.com
You call yourself a millennial innovator – what does that mean?
That’s a good question and I guess it’s about being prepared to work hard, as with previous generations yet also thinking ahead and using technology to work harder and smarter. I may be a tech geek however I do believe in mixing the ‘new’ and the ‘old’ to keep moving forward in business. It sounds a bit of a cliché yet one of our mission statements is ‘a blend of old and new technology’ and Speedmaster is a perfect example of that. Some of our parts are simply works of art.
I do think being an innovator is different than being an entrepreneur. In my experience an entrepreneur will often be interested in the thrill and process of making money whereas an innovator often starts out with a ’pure’ vision and has passion and will chase that passion first.
Speedmaster is a family business. How did it begin?
It was over 40 years ago in Australia when my dad Peter loved cars and wanted the fastest car in town. Yet in pursuit of that fastest car, things began to break and they broke a lot. My dad found ways to deal with that by building and sourcing parts to be the fastest guy around and his ‘fast’ car then was a 1971 Ford XY Falcon. The business grew from this passion.
Your dad’s passion and business acumen, influenced you?
Yes I do have a picture of me as a toddler inside one of my Dad’s cars. I didn’t originally set out to join the business. I was a professional football player with Sydney FC and was, at one time, rated as one of the best strikers (and I still love football and follow English football avidly especially Manchester City). My passion for my sport means that I’ve now had five knee operations though I do enjoy keeping fit.
I also have always loved computers and used to sell them on ebay. I ended up working in a bank and selling computers and just enjoying the world of tech with its infinite possibilities. Then in around 2005, we really needed to take Speedmaster online and I got involved at that time. I took over the Australian operation, the bricks and the mortar and started taking the company online and even then there were massive gaps in our technology.
When did you move to America?
It was in 2013, when I came for eight weeks to work on some operational issues and I’ve never left – our HQ is in Los Angeles. Prior to this I’d been dividing my time between Australia and the USA regularly and would spend up to 45 days a year on a plane travelling between the two. I wanted to achieve in the USA what had been achieved in Australia.
How did you find out about NetSuite?
It was a journey which grew from a big mistake we made as a company. We invested in another technology which was hugely expensive and we ended up with three servers on site and all that goes with that. It was inefficient, very labour intensive and frustrating for us all.
After three years I had to give serious thought to limping on with it for another three years and realise the return on investment or to cut our losses and do something else. It was my Chief Technology Officer who asked me to take a breath and he’d do some research.
He did and he came across NetSuite and it simply fit the bill. We went from zero to live in six months and I can honestly say that this technology has led to the best six year of my life.
Why has it worked so well for you?
It’s so agile, if you ask questions of it, it will answer those questions and often that answer is ‘yes’. One example of that was we decided we wanted a loyalty scheme to reward our customers and show that their ongoing custom was valued. We asked if that was possible and the answer was ‘yes’ and NetSuite showed us how to do it. We have flexed the technology to our particular needs and our particular customers and it’s worked.
Isn’t there a danger that technology can make your customers feel they are part of a process?
It’s not been like that. It has made them feel valued because we’ve set out the intention of making the tech easy for our customers no matter their age or their knowledge of modern technology. The loyalty scheme is part of that. Yet it’s more than that.
With this system, our customers don’t have to waste time on repeating the same information or dealing with our customer service team on information such as ‘what’s your address?’ or ‘what’s your telephone number?”. The mundane (but necessary) stuff is taken care of.
For example, it’s easy to place an order, and if you are often ordering the same parts you can do that at your convenience without having to call us. However if you have a more complex issue or a query then our customer service team can focus on that and can actually chat directly to you about that. This means our team can develop strong and real relationships with customers because the ‘housekeeping’ is already taken care of securely.
What does 2024 hold for Speedmaster?
Where do I begin? For us it’s been all about being retail ready. We have worked hard to build consistency and transparency into our company and into our technology so that we are easy to deal with. Next year it will be heavily about sales, marketing and brand awareness.
We have formed a partnership with Autozone which has 7,000 stores in the USA so that’s massive and we know NetSuite will help us manage that.
We will also be ‘on the road’ we have a big branded rig which will be appearing at many events during the year. That’s already happened this year where the events team attended 26 events over 300 days.
When it comes to sales and marketing – as with everything else – we do believe in both ‘clicks & mortar’.