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Helping Awaze build a business
Awaze
How Awaze accelerated its product development capability to become one of the leading managed vacation rental businesses in Europe
Awaze was formed in 2018 through the private equity backed purchase of the European managed vacation rentals arm of Wyndham travel, which comprised several travel and property rental companies (including Cottages.com, Novasol, Hoseasons). The company was growing fast and needed the technical infrastructure and ways of working to facilitate that pace.
Equal Experts was brought in to help transform Awaze’s technology platform to support this consolidation, integrating data and systems from the acquired companies. Awaze wanted to expand their own development centres in Manchester, UK and Copenhagen, but couldn’t allow the speed of hiring to dictate the speed of their business plan. They needed a partner who could both rapidly and flexibly deploy different types of teams and provide deep technical expertise to ensure the right platform was being built.
We took an approach of “seeding” new initiatives and teams, starting small then building solutions up to a point where they could be transitioned over to Awaze’s internal staff as their teams formed. This allowed Awaze to rapidly create the foundations of their integrated business and build new capabilities without being constrained by the speed of staffing.
This engagement wasn’t just about creating technical solutions, but helping Awaze build a business by supporting an end-to-end transformation.
Challenge
Storms everywhere and only one umbrella
Backed by private equity, Awaze was growing fast. Each of its acquisitions was a fully operational business, with distinct operational processes. Awaze had a rapid expansion plan, and didn’t want the scale of its business growth to be impacted by its capacity to build the product, platform and data foundations and the teams that would support it. The rapid scaling required was further complicated by the huge demand for ‘staycation’ holidays in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Establishing a centralised platform for multiple brands
A key challenge was creating a “single source of truth” for Awaze’s business. This required:
- Supporting Awaze to build common platform components that could be used by each of the brands they owned or were purchasing.
- Development of a common data model for all brands and the migration of data from legacy systems into unified models.
- Creating unified approaches for reporting and tracking performance.
- Replacing legacy components (e.g. checkout and reservation management) with new ones designed for the new platform.
Solution
Turning small beginnings into a responsive platform based on trust
Starting in October 2020, our first piece of work addressed the need to reduce operational cost and risk in Awaze’s pricing tool, a core service which enables business development managers to provide quotes to prospective suppliers and property owners. You can read more about the complexities of providing a single tool for multiple businesses across disparate geographical domains here.
Starting small to accelerate quickly
From the beginning, we understood that Equal Experts was there to help Awaze accelerate to build their business. The requirement was to both help deliver new pieces of work, but also provide deep technical expertise to ensure that work was done the right way. Staying responsive to their need for new teams, we worked on understanding each new problem and identifying the key stakeholders we needed to work with in order to have impact quickly. In this way, we helped establish new tech and new teams in crucial areas, working on the frontend, middleware and backend systems before handing over to Awaze teams as we moved to the next area of focus.
Awaze had a phased transformation strategy: fixing the technical foundations; building leading digital experiences and consolidating the core of the business. Each piece of work was effectively a problem-solving experiment to help clear the way for Awaze to complete the next phase of its growth.
Negotiating stakeholder needs across different markets
Creating a unified e-commerce platform to serve acquired businesses across different countries and marketplaces presented a significant challenge. Balancing the trade-offs between organisational structures, processes, and stakeholder needs required a collaborative approach.
A particularly challenging domain was the Reservation Manager system, which needed to serve both the English and European markets. Through stakeholder interviews and user research, Equal Experts understood what each of the legacy systems did and distilled it to a core set of features that would serve both markets. By mapping out existing services, we provided the clarity and insights needed for the client to make key decisions.
This also highlighted an important lesson: building a platform without evolving the organisational structure is rarely sufficient for success.
People – a joined up but flexible approach
Part of our ability to mobilise new tech and build solutions quickly came down to our approach of responding to each challenge in the way that best suited the business need. We knew Awaze’s goal was to be a technology business in its own right, so whilst in some cases we took full ownership of a workstream, in others we embedded our consultants into Awaze’s own teams, or initiated a team for Awaze to build alongside us. We also had key individuals on the engagement who were able to ‘wear many hats’, helping us to respond quickly by taking a cross-functional strategic approach.
In supporting Awaze to develop their own delivery capability, we focused heavily on the quality of people (ours and theirs), connecting the dots between silos, putting expertise where it was needed and pulling back when our time was more valuable elsewhere. Awaze quickly understood that we regulated our own teams, ensuring that skills gaps were taken care of quickly and using people’s expertise where they could add the most value.
Results
Shifting from growth to cost optimisation
As Awaze’s business matured and private equity ownership changed, the focus shifted from rapid growth to cost optimisation. Through the platform and trust that we’d built, Equal Experts was able to help Awaze scale back certain capabilities as needed, without negatively impacting the core business.
In a nutshell, our work with Awaze followed an ongoing process of repeating patterns in each domain:
- Discovery and inception of technical workstreams to lay foundations and enable rapid growth.
- Creating a team and building development capability in Awaze staff.
- Handing over to Awaze teams, freeing up our own resources to start work on the next business need.
Providing this kind of surge capability allowed Awaze to scale up where they needed to, reducing cost once the initial specialised work was over.
Conclusion
Awaze is now a technology-enabled online travel agent with its own development centres in Manchester and Copenhagen. This engagement demonstrates Equal Experts’ ability to adapt our approach to the evolving needs of a client, from consolidating legacy systems to enabling rapid growth, and then optimising costs.
This is something we feel strongly about at Equal Experts. Without creating dependencies on our expertise, we helped ensure that the pace of business growth for Awaze was not dictated by the speed at which it was able to build its development centres, and that Awaze was in good shape to continue without our support once the work was done.