32. Mummu Sport

Revenue: $5.8 million
Growth: 166.31%
Founders: Marcel Berger, 33
Head office: Victoria
Year founded: 2010
Employees: 6
Industry: Sport and recreation
Website: www.mummusport.com

A new entry to the Smart50 this year, sports logistics company Mummu Sport was founded in 2010.

Founded by Marcel Berger, Mummu Sport partners with local organising committees at major sporting events to deliver commercial events by creating travel packages for sports teams, athletes and their fans.

Now in its fifth year and with $5.8 million in the 2014-15 financial year, Berger told SmartCompany Mummu has embraced the solutions to some of its early challenges, improved its delivery model and is slowly making a name for itself as a premier sports event and travel expert.

Berger says the idea for Mummu Sport came from the knowledge sporting events are becoming increasingly costly to run, with event organisers now needing to rethink commercial models to find revenue beyond tickets, broadcast, sponsorship and merchandise.

“Major sports events and rights holders are finding increasingly difficult to engage and commercialise live audiences,” Berger says.

“Mummu Sport offers unique solutions to these rights holders to improve fan engagement and capitalise on event assets.”

After two years, Mummu set up a subsidiary company in Switzerland to assist with its growth in Europe and, in the past five years, it has partnered with major sporting events such as the Tour de France, UCI World Championships and the Netball World Cup.

Berger says for this year’s Netball World Cup in Sydney, Mummu designed a marketing strategy to release fan packages for the event.

The packages had never been sold to this event in the past, so Berger says there was a learning curve in educating the market on the benefits of the product. But it paid off; Mummu came in 300% over budget for fan packages sales.

Running a global service business from day one has been one of Mummu’s biggest challenges, with Berger explaining while its headquarters are in Melbourne, the Mummu team are scattered across three or four continents.

“When starting a business it is important to manage costs while over-servicing your clients,” he says.

“Having clients on all corners of the global made this challenging and expensive.”

But Berger is not resting on his laurels, saying the Mummu team has plans to expand its model to mid-sized events and there are plans to open a US office, following a successful project managing the 2015 UCI Road World Championships in Richmond, Virginia.

“We have been working in major events such as world cups and world championships for the past five years but are developing a new model that will work for smaller events, offering them the same benefits larger events have access to,” he says.