Kathy Ross had her ‘aha’ moment one day while out on the water on her launch — a Pelin Empress if you must know.

“I was sitting on my boat one day meditating and a voice said ‘redesign your software as an internet cargo operating system’.”

That was the genesis of Icos Live, an online transport management system. It evolved from a transport management software Ross and her partner Chris Grace launched 20 years ago. Grace passed away nine years ago and several years afterward Ross had her epiphany: why not migrate to the cloud?

Simple really, apart from the hours of work the Icos Live technical staff spent to ensure they got the product right. “It’s designed to help customers streamline their business and enable them to manage the business, not waste hours in it. Many small transport operators are husband and wife teams. They may have several trucks or 30 to 40 trucks but their biggest problem is often revenue leakage caused by losing dockets.”

Ross knows of one small operator who started with one truck, signed up for her monthly fee system and in eight months is about to add his fourth truck. Another New Zealand outfit with more than 100 trucks saved more than $1 million in salaries in a year, says Ross.

Even better, the system is integrated with Eroad, the Kiwi tech startup that built the first integrated electronic road user charges system for the trucking industry.

Get Ross going on the Icos Live system and she will happily fill your ears with detail. She’s clearly passionate about the innovative product she produced with her small development team of Keith Russell and Jesse Morgan.
“I guess this is driven by my passion. I will leap up and down and get all excited every time a sale comes through.”

Like much larger smart tech companies, a lot of development has been in response to customers’ wishes. “We love user feedback,” says Ross. “We always encourage new customers to send us a user wish list.”
Technophobes got the Ross treatment. “We would just keep saying, ‘do you use internet banking? Do your staff use Facebook? It will be a doddle’.”

So far the company makes most of its sales in New Zealand and Australia. Ross faces the usual challenges of SMEs: resources and capital. “We run a small, lean ship,” she says. “I keep a very tight rein on development and delivery.”

And she’s learned plenty about dealing with developers. “One thing my partner taught me was that programmers especially tend to have idiosyncrasies and you need to allow them to work their own way and allow their creativity to come through. I do make them wear an Icos shirt though.”

She’s been approached by plenty of suitors but is in no hurry to take on investors. “My vision is to take this global — I so want to take this global — but it is very easy to get married and harder to get divorced. You need to choose the right partner.”