What do Apple, Disney, Nasa, Nike, Shell and Microsoft have in common? Well, besides being some of the world’s biggest brands, they also use project management tools from a Kiwi company.

Ex-project manager Jason Westland has created a little empire of online project management tools. Headquartered in rather humble offices in the Auckland suburb of St Lukes, Method 123 has close to 50,000 customers worldwide and has sold licences to every single country in the world, except the Vatican City.

Westland’s first website — offering downloadable templates for time-pressed project managers — made more than half a million dollars in its first year back in 2003. He used some of that revenue to fund his next venture — a site that sets out the entire project lifecycle step by step, helping companies streamline their processes for delivering projects. The site went live with methodology content and software in 2006 and within the first year, the company made half a million dollars again.

But it was with his third venture that Westland really struck gold. Projectmanager.com is a scalable software-as-a-service (SaaS) business that has customers paying monthly. This year, the company has doubled its revenue and customer base every eight weeks, says Westland. The entire operation is run by 15 staff in Auckland and a handful of contractors in the US and Europe.

So how do you build three successful online businesses that practically run themselves, in addition to attracting global customers?

According to Westland, it takes experience, guts and belief in the ‘work smarter, not harder’ philosophy. Westland has been in the industry since the 1990s, most recently working for local success story Marshal Software before its sale to US-based NetIQ in 2002, and prior to that as general manager of Designer Technology, the company that created Marshal. As a project manager, he had experienced the frustration of using spreadsheets and he knew he had a solution to the problem. During his time at Designer Technology, he also learned from Marshal’s shareholders how to build a high-growth business and, with that, gained the confidence to go out on his own.

Westland had a whole bunch of project management templates he had written himself. He stuck them online (just for fun, he says) with prices ranging from US$5 each to US$300 for the full kit of 52 templates. He seemed to find a chasm in the market: within the first three months he had half a million downloads.

The website was soon earning more than Westland’s salary at Designer Technology. That’s when he decided to go fulltime. Two years later he launched MPMM.com, which turned out to be one of the few sites offering downloadable project management methodology content and software.

“It took off quickly, and suddenly I had two very successful businesses,” says Westland.

With his online businesses going well, Westland moved to France for a couple of years. But he came back to New Zealand in 2008 for the invite-only Morgo conference, an exclusive forum where the crème de la crème of local entrepreneurs get together and share experiences. It was there, among people like Rod Drury and Sam Morgan, that Westland realised SaaS was taking off. And to get a piece of it, he needed to make his business scalable.

He already had the name for the company; he had managed to buy Projectmanager.com earlier. He got a great team together to build the software, which features a colourful dashboard that instantly tells you the status of your projects. It also integrates with “everything under the sun”, says Westland and, most importantly, Excel. “Around 70% of all project managers use Excel, but how many applications have full Excel integration?” he asks. “Next to none. With our software, users are able to drag and drop Excel data into the application.”

The site went live a year ago. Today, around 3,000 customers pay for the SaaS on a monthly basis. The way the company’s IP is built into its products is similar to the way IP is built, for example, into Adobe and Microsoft’s products. This protects the templates and software from being copied.