In the world of grassroots football, managing a club can be just as challenging as playing the game itself. From registrations and finances to scheduling and communication, the administrative workload can overwhelm even the most dedicated volunteers. That’s where Majestri comes in.
Founded by former TechnologyOne employees Mike Clahsen, Andrew Holman and John Kent, Majestri was born from a desire to simplify club operations by bringing enterprise-level software to the community sports space. What started as a solution for a single Brisbane football club has since expanded to 250 clubs nationwide across multiple sporting codes, helping streamline administration and improve efficiency.
In an exclusive interview with SoccerScene, Majestri’s Andrew Holman shares insights into the company’s journey, its deep-rooted connection to football, and its commitment to working closely with clubs to provide tailored solutions.
He also discusses the challenges of expansion, the growth of grassroots football, and the future of Majestri in Australia and beyond.
Theo Athans
Speaking on your specific journey, can you talk about the previous jobs or roles you had before the creation of Majestri?
Andrew Holman
In a previous life, the three of us that started Majestri worked for Australia’s largest software company, TechnologyOne. That is where we each learnt what it takes to build and support enterprise-level software.
We saw an opportunity at the end of 2010 to go out on our own and try to bring some of those sensibilities from building software for the big end of town into the community sports world and that’s ultimate how Majestri started.
T.A.
Can you discuss why the company chose to focus on the local football industry? Is it because you have a passion for the game?
A.H.
The real requirement came from Majestri co-founder, Mike Clahsen, who was the president at his local club was up here in Brisbane. That was where a lot of the early requirements for a club administration system stemmed from.
Personally I’ve played football for over 40 years now, from the age of 7. It’s a fantastic game, it’s the best game in the world, and we can see in every community just how important it is through the junior representation. Football is truly the world game and you can see that even in Australia where it isn’t the national code.
I’m getting a bit old to keep playing regularly now even though I do have a run for 10 weeks in a social competition at the end of every year. I’m 5 years into my coaching journey now with my son’s team, which I’m finding is very fulfilling. There’s immense reward to working with talented kids at that younger, discovery age around 8-12 years.
I guess that’s where the passion has come from, after playing for many years and now into coaching as a parent of a young player.
T.A.
The participation rates are growing every year and the numbers are huge for grassroots soccer so do you see a big potential for growth in this industry?
A.H.
I can tell you unequivocally because we see the numbers. Many clubs have been with us for over a decade now, and their player numbers have at least doubled in the last 10 years. This is even before you factor in the recent meteoric rise of female football on the back of the Matildas World Cup campaign. The demand is accelerating and clubs are at their respective limits in terms of trying to cater to that local demand.
T.A.
What was the inspiration or motivation behind starting Majestri and moving on from your previous job?
A.H.
TechnologyOne was a great place to work, and taught us so much of what we know about building product software, but there was always a latent desire to do our own thing.
Mike had retired from TechnologyOne by 2010 but was actively involved in football, and club administration in particular. When he described ‘Sign-On Day’ activities as having his room full of player registration sheets and sports bags full of cash that couldn’t be banked until the following Monday, we identified that there was potential for a software solution.
With a specialised skill set around financial software in particular, we decided to start with the Treasurer, and have been iterating on the software ever since to cater for other committee positions.
T.A.
How big is your current club portfolio?
A.H.
I would say we are at around 250 clubs around the country and not all of them are football but most of them are.
Although we started with football, we’ve since learned that there is a common set of problems for volunteers no matter what code of sport you play. Certainly, football is what we’re most familiar with, but it’s amazing what you learn about how the nuances of other codes work along the way.
T.A.
Speaking of ambition, do you see Majestri becoming mainstream with leagues and/or associations over the next few years?
A.H.
No, I don’t think our offering will ever been mainstream. The most surprising aspect of this whole journey is the near-uniform resistance of sporting associations at all levels to a club administration system like Majestri.
Despite repeated attempts to rectify this, we’ve accepted that our future lies in our past. This system got to where it is because of working directly with the magnificent volunteers on the ground that give up big parts of their lives to ensure kids get on the pitch, and that is where our success will continue to lay.
There is no shortcut to earning the trust of clubs and the volunteers, so at the moment we’ll continue to introduce them to Majestri one at a time and give them the personalised experience that demonstrates we know what they do.
Every club is unique and part of the overall ‘technology problem’ is this expectation that one solution to capture player registrations will be an immediate fit for all clubs. It’s nowhere near as simplistic as that. Club operations run a wide spectrum of complexity, which is calculated by factors such as how many players are at the club and the different licenses that may be held to field teams at a range of competitive levels. Combine this with a year-round expectation of additional programs such as holiday coaching clinics and skill development programs, and some clubs are serious operations. Others are more traditional where the Winter season is played and then there’s a marked off-season. We endeavour to cater for either end of that spectrum and all clubs in between.
T.A.
Thinking very long term here, do you see the company going international at any point or is the goal to stay in Australia and grow here?
A.H.
There’s always the possibility of overseas opportunities, but I think there are still plenty of problems left to solve in Australia. There are plenty of clubs that we haven’t spoken to yet, and there’s a chance our offering could really help.
Taking a product overseas necessarily introduces complexity to accompany the growth, and I think our prerogative is to build more features. Club operations aren’t static – the compliance and governance continues to grow with the expectation that volunteers will give up more time as a result. It’s just not sustainable without an industrial-strength system underpinning it all, and that’s where we want to focus.
T.A.
You started with the three co-founders but has the company grown in size with employees or any help to operate the 250 club portfolio?
A.H.
We have two active developers involved which is John and myself, two of the three co-founders. Mike has taken a step back from administration to devote significant time to a charity called BrAshA-T, which seeks to cure a particularly awful disease. We also have a gun administrator named Nicole who takes a lot of work off our hands four days a week.
We consider ourselves experts in business automation, and part of proving that is that we can streamline and automate our own business as well. We learnt how to do this by building product software for many years, which is a very difficult skill in our industry. The software we built for TechnologyOne was used by over 1,000 enterprise customers, so a lot of the learnings from our respective careers there have been refined and implemented in Majestri.
