Accounting Apps Podcast

Word of Mouth 📣 and Non-Traditional Marketing Evangelist who Literally Put Xero in the Clouds | Saul Colt

Highlights of my conversation with Saul Colt Ruffling feathers by being interesting, original and fun: the story behind the cloud writing about a cloud company and the levitating man Word of Mouth marketing insights Marketing advice for accountants and bookkeepers wanting to attract the right type of client How exhibitors can maximise their investment at the Denver Xerocon conference and beyond Denver Xerocon 2015 Social media tools for professionals. Subscribe to Episode14 of Cloud Stories on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/cloud-stories-heather-smith/id908333807 Transcript Heather:        Hello, this is Heather Smith here and you’re listening to Episode 14 of Cloud Stories. I’m very excited today because I interviewed Saul Colt who is the Chief Evangelist for Xero, so we have that interview coming up. I just wanted to quickly touch base with you about some of the things I’ve been doing since the last episode. I think I went down with a sore throat again which stops me recording the podcasts. I have just got back from Auckland Xerocon and it was in a stunning location on the wharf of Auckland. Kind of interestingly, over Christmas I was on one of those massive cruise ships, The Royal Caribbean Voyager of the Sea, and we actually cruised right into Auckland and docked there which is kind of amazing to be able to dock right beside a main city. The conference was held at something called a Viaduct which was just to the left of the wharf, which was actually on the wharf just a bit left from where we were. I actually stayed at an airbnb accommodation, so that was wonderful, sort of a lady letting out her studio apartment for a few days, and was able to walk to the viaduct for the event. It was massive, so much going on, the weather was wonderful and crisp and clear and beautiful skies, and there were so many things going on for the time I was there. It was really interesting for me to see Xero in the Xero community as an Australian girl, the sort of New Zealand take on it, and not knowing New Zealand perhaps as well as people do, I did get confused by a few of the little things that happened. I think the Kiwibank had a dance video constantly playing, and on the first day of the conference was International Dance Day. I went up and asked them why they had the dance video playing and they couldn’t explain to me why they had the dance video playing. I said, “Well, maybe it’s for International Dance Day, and them and we agreed that it was for International Dance Day. But it turned out that Kiwibank have something known as the Independence Dance which is a YouTube video sensation that is going viral. New Zealanders will know about that and maybe you want to go and check that out on YouTube. Anyway, if you’re interested in sort of my synopsis of what happened at Auckland Xerocon, you can go and read about it on Digital First. It’s called “An Aussie Girl’s Perspective of Auckland Xerocon 2015”. You can just Google that. The other thing that has happened is I’m not guest blogging on the TradeGecko blog. TradeGecko are an inventory cloud software solution. I wrote an article for them on “Xero Inventory Management Versus TradeGecko Inventory Software”, which is very topical now that Xero has tracked inventory as a feature within their solution. I talk about what does this mean for the inventory add-on solutions out there? Does it mean they’ve got tumbleweeds blowing through their office? Actually, my take on it, was this is actually a good thing, this is actually going to take people … step people up to the next level and they will use Xero tracked inventory but then they’ll sort of grow their business to actually need these inventory add-on solutions, and there’s a lot that they have to offer. So please go and visit my blog there. It’s titled “Xero Inventory Management Versus TradeGecko Inventory Software”, and I shall be blogging with them on a monthly basis which I’m quite excited about. Of course, if any other person in the Xero ecosystem is interested in me blogging for them, please get in contact. Finally, my other thing that I wanted to share with you is I’ve just uploaded two hours of free training on Australian Xero Payroll for Australia users. The level is basic. It’s all about setting up your payroll, and then I run through three pay runs. So please go to my YouTube channel which is called ANISE Consulting and you’ll see it labelled there, “Free Training in Xero Payroll”, which is subscribe to the channel and you can learn about Australian payroll if that’s something that you’ve not sort of dived into. But anyway, let’s get back to my interview, my guest today, I’m very, very excited, today I’m speaking with Saul Colt. He is the chief evangelist for Xero, the co-host for the Xero Hour podcast, North America’s best word-of-mouth marketeer, and the smartest man in the world. I started by asking him …

Transforming an Oxford MBA Assignment Into a Cloud Credit Control Solution 💳 | Steven Renwick

Highlights of my conversation with Steven Renwick Offering cloud credit control and accounts receivable solutions to small business turning Oxford MBA projects into a cloud success story utilising the crowd equity funding platform seedrs to launch Satago partnering with Experian to offer free access to credit data on UK businesses Subscribe to Episode # of Cloud Stories on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/cloud-stories-heather-smith/id908333807 Transcript Heather:        Hello and welcome back to Cloud stories. Today I’m interviewing Steven Renwick. Steven is the founder and CEO of Satago. Satago is a clever credit control and accounts receivable software that helps companies get paid faster. Satago connects to user’s accounting software and takes over the process of chasing customers for payments as debts age through automated statements and escalating email reminders. Included with Satago is free credit information and payment behaviour data about all of your customers, allowing you to determine which customers you can offer credit to and on which you should concentrate your collection efforts. I first met Steven at Sydney Xerocon, and that’s where he gave me blue sunglasses which you frequently see me wearing in pictures from Xerocons and Xero events, and there are a few of us around there sporting the Satago blue sunglasses. I started by asking Steven, what did you like to do when you were a 12 year old? Steven:          Wow, as a 12 year old. I was very much into fantasy/war gaming. That’s like these lead models you get. You paint them up and then you play battles against each other or you go into dungeons and explore. So me and my brothers used to play that quite a bit. Did you ever manage to sell those models for money? Steven:          A few of them I have but most of them I’ve still got in my parent’s attic. They’re now worth quite a bit of money because they’re all out of production. Heather:        My son keeps trying to convince me to buy them, which he does, he buys them and he’s like, “They’ll make money. They’ll make us money.” It sounds like you’re on the same street there. Steven:          Yes, could be. Can you explain to our listeners essentially what your business, Satago, does? Steven:          Sure, Satago is an add-on for Xero. What it is; is clever control and accounts receivable software. We connect into your Xero account and then we basically take over the process of chasing your customers for payment through automated monthly statements and through customised escalating email reminders which get more serious in tone as the debt gets older. We also automate the sending of hard copy payment demand letters and we also get actual credit managers on the phone for you to call up your customers for payment. You can either be using it as an in-house tool to improve your own credit control, or to effectively outsource your credit control. Something else we have is credit data on companies. Once you’re integrated with us, you can see the credit score, suggested credit limit and the payment behaviour data for your customers. In terms of the credit data, is that England specific or UK specific, or everywhere global? Steven:          At the moment it’s only UK specific. We actually only launched that a couple of weeks ago. It’s through a partnership with Experian, which is the big credit data company. It’s quite expensive and took a wee while to negotiate the deal. So we really need to see what the uptake is for that in the UK first of all before we consider doing it around the rest of the world. What’s interesting with the credit data is that the quality of it varies greatly between countries depending on what sort of statutory rules there are for releasing information. One company might have good coverage in Australia but not in the UK and vice versa. So we have to look at it on the country-by-country basis. Heather:        Absolutely. What has been the customer reaction to that new feature addition? Steven:          The phrase that kept on getting used is “this is a no brainer” because we’ve actually made it free to integrate … it’s free to integrate with Satago and it’s free to see the top level Experian data. So everybody gets to see the credit ratings and the credit limits and the days beyond terms data for all their customers. Even if you don’t use Satago for chasing customers because it’s not always necessary, you should at least know their credit data. It’s been really good so far. I think, on a daily basis, between about 30-50% of our users are looking at the credit data. Heather:        I’m sure for a lot of small business owners, this is actually the first time they’ve looked at credit data. Would you agree with that? Steven:          Yes, exactly. That’s why I wanted to do it because not enough small businesses look at this sort of data. When it comes to good credit control, although we started Satago and the whole ‘chasing you customer’ payment idea, the first real bedrock of credit control is knowing your customer. That means the very basics like knowing where they are actually based, knowing their real trading name, and knowing the very basic credit data. We’ve just made the very top level data for free because often small businesses don’t really know what they’re looking at when they look at that full credit report. So just the top level data but if you do want the full credit report, you can buy those through Satago as well. Heather:        Okay, sensational. It’s a really interesting add-on and I think from a small business owner’s perspective, they weren’t able to afford it in the past to even consider going down the route because for every new creditor that you took on board, that would be a costly exercise to do a full assessment of them, especially when you’re starting out and your small and you’re trying to grow. It’s like, “Anyone who wants to be my client can be my client.” Steven:          Exactly. I mean if you’re thinking about giving someone a £20,000 line of credit, it’s probably worth spending the £15 or £20 on a full credit report but if you’re doing large numbers of clients, that’s maybe not quite so feasible, so just having the top level data for free is very sensible. Having it integrated with your Xero account makes it even easier. You don’t have to go in there and start searching for all your customers because we’ve already matched it up for you. Heather:        Absolutely. I think it’s an excellent idea. I used to work for a company that standard payment terms were 18 months but the people selling to them didn’t realise that. They were like, “Yes, we’re a big company. That’s our standard.” So it makes things very difficult. Sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you off. Steven:          I was going to say, 18 months is a bit crazy. That’s the way you put your own suppliers out of business. Heather:        Yes, that was the industry normal for that particular industry. Steven:          Okay. Why did you start Satago? Steven:          I don’t know what industry you were talking about. Maybe it’s the construction industry because that was my family business background. In Scotland, my dad started a business which ended up installing and maintaining passenger lifts or elevators. Heather:        Like Schindler’s Lifts. Steven:          Exactly, they were the big competition. Heather:        Oh were they? Sorry. Steven:          Yes, slightly bigger than my family business, nevertheless they compete. That’s in the construction industry and they’re at the end of the supply chain more or less. I kind of grew up with this issue of late payment. My dad would come home and say, “This contractor has not paid us yet for this job we’ve done,” and there would some pretty big bills we were waiting on, like £20,000-£30,000 at a time, when they’d finish a job. The payments would drag on for weeks and weeks and weeks and months and months. Then occasionally these customers would just go into bankruptcy and leave you with this £30,000 invoice that you can’t pay. I always thought it was really unfair how the big guys treated the little guys and I kind of wanted to do something about it for a long, long time. Then years later, I was just thinking about what industries are ripe for disruption. I looked at the credit data industry and I thought, “Well, you’ve got the big guys like Experian and Dun and Bradstreet but nothing new has really happened there for a long time.” I thought, “Well, why don’t we take advantage of the internet and all these new cloud accounting software companies that are coming up, and build a way of encouraging companies to anonymously share data about when their customers pay them versus agreed terms.” I thought, “It will be a bit like EBay where the buyer rates the seller and the seller rates the buyer.” So basically I actually investigated this idea on my MBA at Oxford. I spent a year doing all the usual business school stuff but at every opportunity possible, I would investigate this idea I had. So was it a project? Was it an assessable project? Steven:          Yes, I gamed the system a little bit and used it for every accessible project possible which meant I got to have my classmates working with me. I got what would otherwise be quite expensive consultants, these guys were used to charging thousands of pounds a day, but because it was a project for school they were doing it for free. Heather:        Sensational. Steven:          I used it for a few projects, used it for a few competitions, and did quite well from it but I didn’t manage … I’m talking by the end of the MBA I would have convinced someone to give me enough money to build a prototype of it just to test the idea out and get started. I didn’t manage in the end, so I had to go off and get a job. Heather:        You’ve mentioned Oxford, so I’ve got to stop and ask you for our listeners who perhaps are going to visit Oxford. Steven, what’s your favourite pub in Oxford and what beer do you suggest they try? I just know that if you were at Oxford Uni, you’re bound to know a good pub there. Steven:          Yes, Oxford is overflowing with good pubs. I’ll give you two to try. On Broad Street, there’s one called the White Horse. It’s very small. It’s quite compact. It sells a lot of good beers. One I would recommend is White Horse – it’s from a relatively local brewery. Heather:        So White Horse selling White Horse. You just said the name of the pub was White Horse? Steven:          Yes, the pub is called White Horse, I think coincidentally, because the white horse is a famous prehistoric chalk drawing on one of the hills in the Cotswolds. Heather:        Yes, in Denver. Okay. Sorry. Steven:          Or in the Cotswolds. Heather:        Devon not Denver. But anyway, yes, I’ll take the Cotswolds then. Steven:          Yes, so the brewery and the pub is called that. Another one you should look for is called the Turf which is Oxford’s worst kept secret. It’s down some secret little alleyway but then there’s this beautiful big pub which gets very busy because actually everybody knows about it. Heather:        Fantastic. I’m sure some of the listeners will venture there. Steven:          They should. @HeatherSmithAU @GoFi8ure just for you Heather: sunnies, ginger beard, Tower of London and the Shard in one pic: pic.twitter.com/gZZw2WtCD9 — Satago (@satagonet) March 4, 2015   So in your journey of developing Satago, what obstacles have you met along the way? Steven:          Well, the first one was raising money. In that respect we’re a normal tech start up, not unlike Xero a few years ago itself, except this is my first company so I didn’t have previous successes with which to finance this one. We were actually quite fortunate in a way, that one of my classmates from the MBA, a year or two before me, actually founded a company in the UK called Seedrs which was basically the world’s first genuine crowd equity funding platform. Everybody will have heard of things like Kickstarter from the US where people crowd fund books or projects and stuff like that. Heather:        Yes. Steven:          Now the difference with Kickstarter is you’re basically just paying in advance for a product. You’re paying for a product to be developed, then you get the product. What’s different with the crowd equity funding is that people are actually buying a bit of your company, so they actually hold shares. When this platform launched I thought “Okay, I’ll put my idea for Satago on there and I’ll see if I can just raise £30,000 to build a prototype,” and it worked. Within two weeks I had 60 people had invested anything from £10 to £5,000. I had my £5,000 to go off and try and build version 1 of Satago. Heather:        Wow. So you’ve got multiple investors in the company? Steven:          Yes, I mean technically the way it works is that I actually only have one investor listed on my capital table because if I had 60, that would be a mess. So Seedrs actually manages it so that they’ve got like 60 investors in a special vehicle they have but technically Seedrs, the investment company, is the only investor in Satago. But really there are 60 different people who all have rights to the shares. Heather:        Okay, that’s really interesting. So Seedrs is still in existence? Steven:          Yes, it’s doing very well. Heather:        Okay. Steven:          They’re funding millions of pounds every month in companies throughout Europe. I think they’re just getting started in the US. And it’s an experience reflecting on it, that you took that route? Steven:          Yes, I’m very happy with it because what I think is very important about this crowd equity funding side of things is that it makes start-ups accessible to people. If you read the conventional guidance on how to do a start-up, the first thing they always say is, “You should raise your first bit of money from friends and family.” Now, I don’t know about everyone else’s friends and family but there’s no way I was going to manage to get £30,000 from my friends and family because they’re just not that wealthy. I think the people that make that suggestion perhaps do have the wealthy friends and family, and forget that 95% of people don’t have friends and family with £30,000 lying around. For me, it almost democratises doing start-ups a little bit, which I think makes it accessible to a broader range of people, which is very important. Yes, it was a great experience for me. There’s no other way I would have got that money so quickly. Heather:        Absolutely. That’s really exciting. I actually hadn’t heard of that company. I always watch the Kickstarters and the Indiegogo’s, etc. It’s always very interesting to watch. What is the most rewarding aspect of being involved in Satago Steven? Steven:          I guess the most rewarding bit is when you get positive feedback from your users. You’ll have people just sign up, and out of the blue, without you even having spoken to them at all, they’ll get in touch with you and say, “This is amazing. I’ve just sent my first batch of statements or reminders,” or something “and all these people promised to pay me.” That’s great. It’s real internet business. It’s complete strangers somewhere on the internet, somewhere in the world, emailing me to say this thing that you’ve been spending the last two years building has actually made a difference to them. That’s fantastic. Heather:        Absolutely. I signed up recently to the product to have a look inside the product and one of the things I really liked about it was that you have the option to set the emails and the reminder notices so they go out during the week rather than on the weekend. That’s always really important to me because I know that in this cloud based, automated world, people kind of … and I watch them and they’re just working 24/7, which is fine, however you need to have a life as well. To me, I don’t think there’s much of a point for the reminders to go out on the weekend - obviously different industries, etc. It is such a massive time saver for such a small amount of money, and it’s a massive relief to know that that’s actually working in the background. It sounds like you’ve actually got all of the different elements in place because a lot of small business owners just want to be passionately involved in their business and they want to passionately have this relationship with the client or the customer, and they don’t want to say, “Hey, by the way, you owe me money.” Because I think a lot of people would do it for free if they could do. Steven:          Yes, that’s the thing because we’ve always been saying people start businesses because they love what they’re doing and they’re very good at selling their product or their business. It’s what they love and what they’re excited about. But people often forget that about a third of your businesses function is probably doing credit control and just getting the money in at the end of the day. A lot of people don’t even realise that that’s ever going to be an issue and quite often they only do begin to realise when it’s almost too late. It’s really one of these things you need to get in place really early on. Heather:        Yes. Steven:          Using Satago just makes it easy, takes it out of their hands of having to think about it too much, and it’s all done professionally. Heather:        It is done professionally. As you said before, it is a bit of a no brainer because I always kind of equate the cost to how much is that in minutes of your own time. So over a month period, it’s like nothing at all. Plus it’s not nasty chasing. You can do it very politely and very professionally and still have that in place. I know that clients say to me after a while, “Oh, I actually wait for the reminder and then I pay you because I know it’s coming.” It’s almost like their payment cash flow system that they work on. Steven:          Yes. So how do you go about acquiring additional customers for your business? Steven:          Well, to be honest, as an early stage start-up, we’re still experimenting and finding out what the best way of acquiring users is. We work with a number of accounting firms and bookkeeping firms, a kind of partner programme similar to that which Xero has itself. That seems to be quite popular. Then to be honest, a lot of our users come direct through the website. I think a lot of them come from the Xero add-on store and I think our organic search engine rankings are quite decent. We have a lot of people signing up directly, direct end users, and what we have a lot of is people sign up wanting the full credit control service. They want somebody on the phone for them as well. When they do that, we refer them to one of the partners that we’ve got already, and they effectively become the outsourced credit management company for them. They will be doing full service, so they’ll manage their Satago account and they’ll be the one that decides who to phone, who needs to be chased through the courts, that sort of thing. Heather:        Fantastic, so they can just get on with running their business. Two questions come out of that for me. What has been Satago’s secret for generating enviable press coverage in the Guardian, Forbes, Independent, etc? You’ve done very well that way. Steven:          We put a big effort on that in the beginning of the year. We came up with some interesting stories. We did some research amongst our users and even people who weren’t users of Satago, just asking them what were the excuses they’d heard of for late payment. Heather:        So you shared funny stories of why people …? Steven:          Yes, kind of interesting stories about late payment because in the UK, it’s a very hot topic just now. It’s probably one of the … at least the top three concerns of small business owners is late payment, and the government has been very good about trying to do something about it. Barely a week goes by without there being some sort of story about late payment in the small business press. I just tried to help out with our own bits of research, what we’d found so far, and the journalist seemed to quite like it. They were all very willing to write about us. Heather:        Sensational. It’s actually really difficult in this whole ecosystem, that a lot of the subjects are quite dry, to find an angle that’s actually of interest and to exploit it. People love those stories of the dog ate my invoice, etc. But those stories certainly are of interest and your coverage is amazing. So people, if you are looking for exposure, go and take a look and read at the Satago media coverage that they’ve actually had. Now, I’ll also ask you, you talked about the partner programme. How does your partner programme work? Steven:          If you become a Satago partner, we will give you a free account for Satago … it’s for accountants and bookkeepers mostly. Heather:        Yes, and cloud integrators probably as well. Steven:          Yes, so we’ve got a few cloud integrators there as well. You get a free account to use yourself to chase your customers as much as you want. Then after you have a certain number of users … we have two different things we do. We will either give you revenue share which you can either take as revenue or pass on the savings onto your customers. But we’ve also partnered, or about to partner, with … Heather:        Is this exclusive news? Steven:          It is actually, yes. Heather:        Very good. Steven:          We haven’t actually started yet but there’s a charity called Buy One Give One (B1G1)    . Have you heard of that? Heather:        Well, you explain what yours is in case I explain something different. Steven:          So Buy One Give One (B1G1)    is I suppose a charity which encourages you to give away a little bit of your profits I guess, or a little bit of revenue for every time you sell something. Heather:        Oh okay. Steven:          It could be something as small as: every time you sell a cup of coffee, you give 10 pence to this charity. The idea is a large number of these relatively small donations add up to something quite significant. Heather:        Absolutely. Steven:          The chairman of Buy One Give One (B1G1)   is a gentleman called Paul Dunn who is quite famous in the accounting profession, I think particularly in the UK. He now lives in Singapore but he is a quite famous speaker. I saw him speak at an accounting industry event called 20/20 in the UK, and he kind of inspired us to get in touch with this charity and do this kind of partnership. We haven’t started it yet but what we’re going to do is give accountants and bookkeepers the options of either taking this revenue share or giving that revenue share to Buy One Give One (B1G1)  where it can have an impact on people around the world. Heather:        Absolutely, that’s a sensational idea. Excellent. Steven:          Thank you. Heather:        So this is my cave man question for not understanding how technology works, okay. Steven:          I’ll do my best. Heather:        Well, you should be the genius here and this is me not understanding it. Satago offers three different pricing levels which reflect the number of invoices that the solution will chase at each of the different pricing levels. In this automated world, how much extra effort is there in a solution to chase more than one invoice? Steven:          You mean from Satago’s point of view? Heather:        Yes. I didn’t understand … and you’re not alone in this but I didn’t understand if you’re chasing one invoice, why is it more effort … because in this automated world, why is it more difficult to chase two invoices than to chase 5,000 invoices? Steven:          Really from our point of view, there’s no difference in effort. There’s a slight difference in that we have these automated … we also send letters. We give you different number of letters you can send but that’s really by-the-by. I mean to be quite honest with you, it doesn’t make any difference … it doesn’t make much difference if we’re chasing 1,000 invoices or 10 invoices in a month. This is what you would call in your MBA class ‘price discrimination’. In an ideal world, we’ve got to make money. We would be charging each of our users £100 a month or something decent like that so we can make a lot of money from each of our users. But the reality is that the person that’s only sending 10 invoices a month is never going to pay £100 a month, whereas the person that is sending 1,000 invoices a month has a much greater need and is more willing to pay for it. It’s more of an economic discrimination rather than any kind of technical discrimination at all. Heather:        Very good, I feel like I’ve been professor'd by the Oxford scholar. Thank you for that. Steven:          Pleasure. So is Satago based in London? Steven:          We are based in London. That’s right. Heather:        Okay. You’re in Berlin at the moment. Satago is based in London. Steven:          I am today, yes. What’s the internet connection like in London then for you guys? Steven:          The internet connection? Heather:        Yes. Steven:          It’s okay. It seems pretty fast to me. Heather:        Is it? Okay. I don’t know whether it was going to be fast or not, so that’s sensational. Steven:          We often get told we’re lagging behind the rest of the world. I think our investment in infrastructure perhaps isn’t the best but we’re never going to be as fast as the Estonians or something like that, who seem to be all very wired up. Heather:        Yes. You recently featured on the cover of XU Magazine. What was the modelling experience like for you? Steven:          That was a great day, yes. I was with Colin from Float and Michael from Receipt Bank. Heather:        Michael from Receipt Bank, yes. Steven:          Yes, it was really cool. I guess that was inspired by the Xerocon down in Sydney where I think the three of us were wearing our kilts. We did a shoot … that was actually at the Receipt Bank offices, had a really great photographer along, and just trying to dream up what would actually make good photos. The Receipt Bank office is quite neat in that they had these airline seats there for some reason. Heather:        As you do. Steven:          As you do. Yes, we drew on some windows onto the chalkboard behind. You may have noticed the windows that were drawn on were square, which any airplane engineer will tell you is a terrible idea. Nevertheless, it made a decent photo, and yes it was a lot of fun. What effect did it have for you and your business at London Xerocon with your face all over the magazine being handed out to all the attendees and delegates? Steven:          I guess a lot of people did comment on it because I actually wore my kilt to Xerocon. Heather:        Yes, I saw. There were three of you in your kilts wasn’t there? Steven:          There was meant to be but we failed. I actually ordered some kilts to get delivered from Scotland down to London so my two colleagues, Adam and Florin, could also wear the kilts and we’d make a bit of a theme of it but the couriers completely stuffed up. I use the G-rated ‘stuffed up’ there. Heather:        Yes. Steven:          And completely failed to deliver them to us, so it was just me. But yes, it was great. It was really cool being on the cover. Funnily enough, I was standing next to the XU Magazine stand talking to someone and he says, “You look a bit like the guy on the front of the magazine but it’s not you is it?” I was standing right next to it wearing a kilt. It was like, “It really is me.” Heather:        In the exact same kilt? Steven:          In the exact same kilt, yes. Heather:        Goodness. Excellent. It’s always fun to be at those events when you’re such a star from the magazine. Steven:          It is indeed. It helps. So Satago was reviewed by the Institute of Certified Bookkeepers. They did a big review of your product, produced a very nice and detailed review of the product. What did that mean for you? Steven:          Well, it was just great to have an independent validation, a proper audit. All too often, companies of course will get launched and you’ll get a lot of noise but you won’t have anyone actually take a proper deep dive from anyone that’s properly independent. What was really good was that also shortly after that, we exhibited at the ICBs Bookkeepers Summit in London. That was like 300-400 bookkeepers turned up for this conference and we were literally mobbed for every minute of the two days we were there. Every time they had a break between sessions, we would have bookkeepers three or four deep at our stand, so it was quite phenomenal. Heather:        Excellent. Well, we’re having the Institute of Certified Bookkeepers annual conference in Brisbane this month. Steven:          Oh, I wish I could be there. Heather:        What a shame you didn’t make it out for that. Steven:          That would have been great. Heather:        Brisbane is far nicer than Sydney too. Steven:          Really, I’ll take your word for that. I’ve got relatives there as well I need to visit. Maybe I can pop round. Heather:        Tax deductable holiday to Brisbane. Steven:          Sure. So what does the future hold for Satago? Steven:          Well, we’ve got a lot more cool features coming out. Our main user interface is going to have a new dashboard on it fairly soon, a lot more on the reporting side of things. We’re going to make more use of the credit data. We’re going to start trying to be a bit more proactive on the sales and marketing side of things because we haven’t really … apart from going to the conferences, we haven’t actually spent on marketing yet. We’re going to start experimenting with that. We’ll also have to have a look at being a bit more proactive in the international side of things. To date we’ve mostly concentrated on the UK market, largely because we knew that the Experian data was only going to be valid in the UK. But if the demand is there, then I would really like to source data for the New Zealand and Australian markets, because they’re obviously where Xero is most strong, and see how that goes. Heather:        Yes, absolutely. I found when I went in and explored and worked my way round the Satago Solution, it was very clean and an easy to understand interface. Steven:          Thank you. Heather:        I do encourage anyone who’s listening, who’s interested in the product, to jump in and take a look. I reckon you’ll be up and running within about 8 minutes. Steven:          Yes, should be. Heather:        Time to boil a cup of tea and get it going. Steven, one final question for you, what advice would you have for your 18 year old self? Steven:          Ah, my 18 year old self. It’s a tricky one because I had this weird career path where I started off doing biochemistry. I did a PhD in genetics and now I’m working in internet businesses. Off the top, you might just say, “Skip the biochemistry and PhD bit and go straight into business because I’m not using the genetics anymore.” But the reality is that that path led me to where I am now, so I wouldn’t change anything about that. Maybe what I’d say is, “Start learning German in university because you’re going to end up living in Berlin and not have a clue what anyone is saying.” So there you go. “Learn a language.” Heather:        Didn’t I see you tweeting the other day that you wanted someone to subtitle a Finish programme or something like that? Steven:          Norwegian. My girlfriend is from Norway, so we quite often end up watching this chat show, this Norwegian chat show. When they have guests from English, it’s all in English but a lot of the time it’s in Norwegian or Swedish, and I just don’t have a clue what they’re talking about. Heather:        Absolutely. No, learning a language is very hard. With your genetics background, is any of it applicable? Is it the discipline that’s applicable or the knowledge applicable to what you’re doing now? Steven:          I think what I probably don’t appreciate enough is how it trains you to be inquisitive in the correct way. I don’t literally use any of the genetics or anything like that but it does help me, I think, to understand some of the technical side of what we’re doing and to ask the right questions. A lot of what you’re doing with a start-up business is constant experiments which is what PhD is. You’re testing out this new feature. You’re testing out this marketing channel. You’re testing if I change the headline from A to B, do I get 5% more signup? So it’s a little bit like doing a PhD except almost the stake is about 10 times higher. Heather:        Yes, I guess so. Absolutely. I guess you are … rather than assuming you know the answer, you’re testing it because it is really easy to sit there and go, “Everyone thinks the exact same as me. We should just do it this way,” rather than what you’re saying. Doing a PhD isn’t something you accidentally fall over, wake up one day and have done. That was a huge commitment to do, to then move into something else. But there does seem to be a few people out there who have done that. I just got an email that the head of Dell was a zoologist to start off … Dell Australia started off as a zoologist. I’m like, Okay …” Steven:          I’m in good company then. Heather:        You are. Thank you so much for sharing your time with us and sharing your insights about building your business and what it can do for people. I really, really appreciate it. Steven:          My pleasure Heather. Heather:        Thank you. End of Transcript Mentions Satago - https://www.Satago.co.uk/ Xero - https://www.Xero.com/ Experian - http://www.Experian.co.uk/ Dun and Bradstreet - http://www.dnb.com/ Seedrs - https://www.seedrs.com/ Kickstarter - https://www.kickstarter.com/ Indiegogo - https://www.indiegogo.com/ Buy One Give One - https://www.b1g1.com/buy1give1/ XU Magazine - http://xumagazine.com/ Float - http://floatapp.com/ Receipt Bank - http://www.receipt-bank.com/ Dell - http://www.dell.com/

Minimising Costs and Complexities Associated With Foreign Currency Payments 💰 With TransferMate | Barry Dowling

Ep.12 Barry Dowling – TransferMate Global Payments – Minimising costs and complexities associated with foreign currency payments seamlessly from with Xero Highlights of my conversation with Barry Dowling ·        Spending time to understand your client ·        Using client feedback to tweak the solution offered ·        Achieving the milestone of $5US billion in transfers ·        Using referral links as a marketing strategy Subscribe to Episode 12 of Cloud Stories on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/cloud-stories-heather-smith/id908333807 Transcript Heather:        Heather Smith here. Welcome to Cloud Stories. Today I’m talking with Barry Dowling. Barry Dowling is the cofounder of TransferMate Global Payments. He is dedicated to making the process of booking foreign currency payments seamless, easier, faster and cheaper. TransferMate Global Payments is a global Fintech company that provides integrated solutions enabling companies to seamlessly process international payments. They provide a 24 hour phone service and online systems to enable clients to seamlessly process their foreign currency payments. They sync with Xero, enabling Xero users to cut down on wasteful double entry and transaction costs when processing payments. Whether your business is based in Australia and looking to transfer funds to China or based in California and transferring to the U.K., TransferMate has the widest collection of payment licences worldwide, enabling their team to assist clients get a better deal than using their bank. I started by asking Barry who is his favourite super hero and why? Barry:             Who is my favourite? I really didn’t expect that question to be honest. I can’t help get Wonder Woman out of my head which is not saying too much but I’d have to stick with Wonder Woman. It’s the first thing that came into my head. Heather:        Sensational. You’re not into super heroes then? Barry:             Listen, I like them all to be honest with you. Wolverine, I’d be a big fan of Wolverine too but listen, to be honest with you, as a kid growing up in the 80s, Wonder Woman would have held most of our fascination, so I’ll have to stick with her. Heather:        This is going to timestamp this interview but you must be excited by the news, the Spiderman/Wolverine news that came out yesterday, that they’re now allowed to be in the same shows together. Barry:             Oh, I didn’t realise they were prohibited from that before, were they? Heather:        They were owned by different companies. The comics were owned by different … Barry:             Marvel and … Heather:        Sony. Something Sony, I’m not exactly sure of all the details but I know that now they can appear on shows together. Barry:             Well, all I know is whoever is behind the marketing of Lego is destroying our bank balance with our kids. Every superhero Lego character is there. Heather:        Cool. You’ll have to turn it into little videos for your products and then you can have it as a tax deduction. Yes, they always go viral those videos do. Barry:             That’s a very good idea. So Barry, you cofounded a business called TransferMate Global Payments. Is that the full name of it? Is that correct? Barry:             That’s right, yes. It’s generally referred to as TransferMate. As the name suggests, ultimately our core service is to help clients transferring money. At the moment, still about 90% of companies would use the bank. There’s a better way to do it. Quite often businesses get caught up with naturally running their own business and taking care of sales and dealing with inventory and everything that goes with that, and in terms of all the daily activities, making the payment is kind of the one that slots in as a once a fortnight, once a monthly activity. It doesn’t get as much attention but when you look at it, it’s quite apparent that the banks charge too much generally, as a general rule of thumb. Heather:        Absolutely. So you would probably be in agreement that businesses don’t think about the actual cost of the payment involved, it’s kind of like an afterthought. Barry:             Well, I think that it doesn’t help that the banks are less than transparent. Quite often if you do a transfer to the bank … we’ve checked with all the banks in Australia, and as a general rule of thumb, without naming banks, the fees are typically anything between $22 and $35. You can even look at let’s say … we’ve talked to Xero clients in the States and one in particular is paying their US bank $80 for no apparent reason, and it’s sometimes just rolled up in a monthly fee but typically $22 to $35. But that’s not really where the loss is. The loss can be seen in the exchange rate and the exchange rates can ultimately be beaten. Quite often what you’ll find is a company will say, “You know, I’m inclined to do …” if you’re a Xero partner and you have clients that do foreign currency payments and you speak with them, quite often the client will do what they’ve always done. The whole idea of cloud accounting broke that myth and has revolutionised accounting. In the same way, this should really do it for the client. I suppose all the client really needs to see is a comparison cost to really get themselves interested. Heather:        Yes, absolutely. So what you’re saying is there are two expenses involved: both the actual charge and then the exchange rate, and it’s understanding there are better alternatives out there.                         Go on, sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you off. Barry:             I was just going to say, technically there’s three: the exchange rate, the sender fee and the receiver fee. Heather:        Yes. Barry:             So if you’re an Australian business making a payment to the UK, the UK bank in addition charge a fee too because the beneficiary receives the payment and the bank says, “You know what, I’m going to charge you for receiving that.” Why? Because you can’t do anything better. Heather:        Yes. Barry:             So what we’ve created is a bank-to-bank network worldwide. We have bank accounts in 90 countries. When we make a payment to the UK from Australia, as one example, we pay out of our UK account. So we receive in Australia and pay out of the UK. Heather:        Okay. Barry:             That way it avoids all the international fees altogether. We’re effectively using our own clearing system. Heather:        Excellent, yes, and you are unaware of that. I know I’ve dealt with business and we’ve paid the business, and then they’ve said, “Yes but you owe us another $20 after you’ve paid them like $20,000,” and you’re like going, “Seriously? We paid everything we were supposed to pay there,” but we didn’t realise that was happening. What inspired you to start TransferMate Global Payments then? Barry:             I suppose we’ve been involved with a number of online businesses in the past. It’s only really when we got a chance to look deep down at the rates and the fees the banks were charging that we realised that there was a better way to do it. I suppose back in 2010/2011, we had quite a number of corporate clients that we felt needed a service that would beat the banks. At the time there was one licence required to operate this service. So we took about six months to get the licence and it was very much a … there wasn’t very much technically involved. We were basically dealing with the banks and we’d get a wholesale deal with the banks and we were able to … the same way a wholesaler gets better pricing for a product and can pass something on to the retailer, we had the same on our setup. Then I suppose over the years we advanced. We now transfer $5 billion US dollars on behalf of clients worldwide. Heather:        Wow. Barry:             The system that we built automatically prices up wholesale banks. A lot of the banks we would have traditionally bought currency off can’t give us the currency at the rates we buy it off. So we’re now buying it, in many cases, at the same rates the banks are buying it at. With the volume you buy, you can really go in and get the best possible deal. The systems that we built are all in-house and they’re bulletproof. We set them up in 2010 and it’s just getting better and better and better. I suppose a natural progression was to integrate into the likes of Xero to make the whole process much easier. Heather:        That’s really interesting. What have been the biggest challenges and obstacles that you’ve faced running this business and growing this business? Barry:             I guess a challenge is always getting the brand out there. I have to say, I guess it would be the case for a lot of services, it’s ultimately the idea of apathy. How do you convince a client what they’re doing today and have done for years … everyone knows a client – I wouldn’t say stubborn – but has run a successful business. They’re the boss. They’ve been doing something for 10 years and you walk in and you know where you stand with them in terms of accounts, “You do that but this is my business,” kind of way. It’s trying to convince him that there’s another way to do it without maybe telling the client, you know, any obligation.                         We win over clients but it does take time. I suppose it’s that time that it takes because when we contact clients, they typically don’t have a payment today. So the analogy I use is it’s kind of like approaching a client after coming out of a restaurant and saying, “We’ve got a nicer hamburger.” They’d say, “Great, I’ve already eaten.” So the timing isn’t quite good. It’s a case of timing really. Heather:        Yes, I know in situations where I’m dealing with businesses and they’re doing this, when they need to do the transfer, they have no time to actually think about doing it a better way, so they never have anything in place. They also just keep going through the same old process. I know I’m quite detailed in that I split out all the expenses related to exchange rate both movements and charges, and they really, really add up, and they’re just straight off the bottom line if you’re not monitoring them. Barry:             That’s kind of interesting. From a Xero perspective, and Xero handles foreign currency far better than most accounting packages out there … Heather:        Yes, love the way it manager multi-currency in Xero. Love it. Barry:             It’s brilliant. But nevertheless, if you have say 10 payments to make today, when it comes back to actually making those payments you have to go into your online banking, make each one individually, then you have to go back to your account software, change the exchange rate, account for the bank fees. Believe it or now, for each payment, it probably takes about five minutes. You can do it faster if you rush but it probably takes five minutes. With the add-on that we created, you can literally click a button, log in, it pulls 100 payments in for example, shows you the live rates, the fees are automatically 75% cheaper than the bank, you click one button and it does all the auto posting of the currency loss, gains, bank fees, and the payments directly into your account software. Heather:        Excellent. Barry:             It’s much, much more time efficient, and funnily enough, that’s the part the clients really like. Heather:        The time efficiency. Barry:             Yes, because the fee thing, they can kind of get over the $10 or the $15 or whatever they save in fees but what they see is the hassle gone. That’s what they really like. Heather:        Let’s jump ahead. Can you describe to our listeners … I’ve got Xero running and I want to integrate it to TransferMate, what does that look like and how quickly does it take me to set it up? Barry:             Okay, so it takes two minutes to register. All I need to do … there’s a special website for Xero add-on and it’s called TransferMateonline.com. Heather:        I’ll put that in the show notes for listeners. Barry:             Perfect, yes. There’s a special link also on your website obviously. We’ll make sure we fast track those but basically once they register on that website then they’ll have a one page, we call it an AML form, it’s like a signup form and we just need those details there for regulatory purposes. It’s nothing serious. It just says who are the shareholders, who are the directors, sign here, that’s really all. Then we take that to our compliance team and it’s set up usually either same day or within 24 hours, and then the client’s pretty much good to go.                         We provide all the help in terms of setting up the add-on but it’s really, really simple. They just simply add their bank account, add a few supplier background details, and they’re ready to go. Heather:        Excellent. Do you think the payment fees on your solution are less than if you’re paying say subscriptions via PayPal? Barry:             I’m not too sure what the subscriptions are to be honest with you but I do know that PayPal, the exchange rate, is basically 3-odd percent. So it’s definitely not … if you’re doing any payments of any consequence, it’s definitely cheaper to use our solution. Heather:        Excellent. Where about is your business based Barry? Barry:             We have an office in Sydney and we have offices in Chicago, London, Dublin, Madrid and Paris. They’re our main offices. Heather:        Excellent. So you’ve got quite a lot of offices then. Barry:             Yes, but mainly what we do is we wanted to provide a 24 hour solution for clients, so if you’re a client in Australia, for whatever reason you want to check a payment at 9 o’clock at night, you can pick up the phone and you’ll get through to our team in Europe. It’s the same as the CRM system. Everyone would be able to tell you what’s happening with your file. Equally if a client wants to call at 2 o’clock in the morning, they’re talking to our US office, and same again. We provide a 24 hour solution for clients worldwide. We have a big base of clients in the US and Europe and increasingly in Australia and New-Zealand. Heather:        Wow, so it’s 24/7 access to the solution and it’s operating globally, so all of Xero’s global customers can access your solution if they need to. Barry:             Absolutely. Heather:        Excellent. I was going to ask sort of what business industries does the solution suit but I’m guessing it’s anyone who is transferring money internationally. Barry:             Yes, you’d be amazed … well not amazed, you mentioned the Spiderman figures, I suppose as shocked as I was with the question and had no answers, if I told you exactly what sort of companies or the crazy stuff they’re doing, I’d probably bowl you over too but it’s really anything. I suppose, in my experience, it’s typically somebody who basically imports a product and then basically resells it. But you also have services, business that might … it’s really kind of anything. Like if you look at … I suppose 70-80% of the payments out of Australia, for example, are in US dollar. I’d hazard a guess that about 60-70% of those are to China and they are to buy products. Heather:        Yes, absolutely. Barry:             Right now it’s quite an interesting time because I saw in the Sydney Morning Herald today that the rate, the US dollar/Aussie rate is expected to go down to 0.68, so it’s quite an important time to be making sure you’re getting I suppose the best rate. Heather:        Absolutely, from an Australian perspective, yes. Barry:             I’m sorry. Equally I suppose there are pressures on all currencies against the US dollar at the moment but I suppose time has changed, while the US dollar is strong now it may not necessarily be but it’s forecast to have a lot of strength over the next year. Heather:        It just seems to be an ever growing roller coaster. I’d like to probably clarify for our listeners. Xero has various subscription levels, one which has multi-currency in it, however I believe your product will work even if you don’t have the multi-currency level in Xero. Is that correct? Barry:             Yes, in order to get the integration and the benefits, what the add-on does is it pulls in the invoices that are due and it pushes them back as paid. So it needs to know what currency they are to show you a rate but if you don’t have multi-currency enabled, you can use the standalone website which is just TransferMate.com/xero as opposed to TransferMateonline.com. The other part we’ve seen is despite the fact that the multi-currency is so easy to setup in the packet, some clients just say, “I don’t need to pay X for it. I don’t do enough payments.” But if you look at the savings you can make on a couple of payments, it warrants … and we’ve seen it, clients upgrading to the premier package, they can see the benefits of time saving. Even if they’re making a couple of payments a month, that in itself warrants even looking at maybe upgrading. Heather:        So upgrading their Xero package. Barry:             Exactly, yes. Heather:        I do find that a lot of people have this mentality that if something is online they shouldn’t pay for it. You explain to them, “But look at the time it’s saving you,” and it’s a real mindset that they’ve got, “Well, I can just spend that hour doing that.” Barry:             Totally. Heather:        It’s like, “Wouldn’t that hour be better off enjoying yourself on the beach or working with your customers, like not doing an administrative process that doesn’t need to be done. It can be completely automated.” Barry:             You could be playing with Spiderman and Batman on the beach. Heather:        You could be. You could be making little videos of Spiderman, turning your videos viral. Barry:             You’re totally right. Some people are inclined not to put a value on their time. I suppose really good business, like the Xero advisers, this whole kind of revolution … the whole era of the adviser level doesn’t really appear at all in the UK/Ireland, but it’s very, very … you can feel it’s very strong in the Australia/New Zealand, and it’s great for businesses to have that kind of crutch to lean on. I don’t think it exists in the UK/Ireland. Heather:        Yes, it’s interesting watching the wave spread across the world on social media and how people are kind of reacting to it and how the early adopters are reacting to it and how other people are like going, “No, I don’t want to do it that way. I don’t want to let anyone loose on our accounts,” and stuff like that. What have been some of the key milestones or successes in growing your business Barry? Barry:             Well, the way we look at it is every week we have clients coming onboard and asking, “You know what, this feature here, this is the way we want to do it.” There’s always a tweak that a client is going to put to the add-on because surprisingly enough it’s not simply just putting your payments and pushing them through. That’s a really good challenge for us because for me it’s important to make sure the Xero add-on is the best available. Our developers are great. They turn around change really quickly. So we want to make sure that it’s as good as it could ever be.                         I just love, to be honest, talking to a client and seeing how quickly the changes go into play because quite often with the desktop software, people are used to not having to put up with whatever they get. Heather:        The annual update. Barry:             Yes. It’s just great when you have a client and you know you’re saving them time. Again, with the Xero software in particular, what I find really interesting is how open clients are to kind of looking at the add-ons in particular because they expect that kind of eco system which is great. Heather:        Yes, that is true because I’ve been on desktop software for a long time and I was just like complacent. I know the first time I heard Rod Drury speak about Xero, etc., I was astonished at how upset he was about desktop software and how frustrated he found it. I was like, “Wow, it’s not that bad,” but I kind of get it now. It took me a while to get onboard with that. I now find it frustrating. It’s like, “Why won’t it work,” but it’s the evolution of it. Barry:             Just on the back of that another milestone for us to hit I suppose it’s a really big number and one we’re proud of, $5 billion transfers … Heather:        Yes, that’s seriously big. Barry:             On the scale of things, it’s very, very small. In Australia alone there’s $200 billion in foreign currency payments taking place for small to medium business, and again, I think it’s $70 billion in New Zealand. US – you can imagine the size of the market. I suppose it’s great to know that when we see our numbers escalating like that, it just tells us that we’re doing something right. It’s great to see. Heather:        And someone is making a lot of money on the foreign exchange if that’s the number of foreign exchange transactions that are happening. The banks are – is what I’m saying, and they could be saving a lot of money using you. Barry:             Well, I think so. I suppose the great thing about the add-on is they don’t need to take our word for it. They can just quickly sign up and they can check themselves. Sometimes our clients will just pick up the phone and call us and get a rate quote. That’s I suppose the great thing about it: it’s an alternative but not an obligation. So they can get a rate quote without pushing through the money? Barry:             Yes, absolutely. Heather:        They can get a rate quote before the transaction happens. Barry:             You can pick up the phone 24 hours a day and say to the guys, “I heard about you. Give me a rate.” Heather:        Excellent. How many people do you have on your development team Barry? Barry:             About 12 including web developers and database developers. I suppose the system that we have in place is … we’re kind of unique in that we spent a long time getting regulated and we’re probably one of the more regulated businesses of our kind in the world. In the US along, you have to be regulated in each state. To give you an example, in California, it took 18 months to get regulation, and you have to have a million dollars in deposit. It’s not something that you can take lightly. Then you have to do monthly filings with each state. I don’t know where I was going with that. But in terms of our developers, our system has to be up online 99.999% of the time. We’ve got a huge investment in datacentres. All this terminology, I wasn’t really aware of it for … synchronous replication, so if the system goes down it comes back up again in 2 seconds on another site. We’re quite heavy in that respect but we’ve got the best, I think anyway … Heather:        My transcriber is going to love that word – synchronous replication. Where about are your datacentres based? Barry:             They’re based in the States and also in Europe. Heather:        Excellent. So you’ve just come home from London Xerocon. Can you share with us what your experience was like at London Xerocon? That’s 2015 for people listening in. Barry:             I’ve been to Xerocon in Sydney and it definitely had the same theme. The whole place was buzzing with energy. Heather:        Yes. Barry:             I think it was packed to capacity. Everyone seemed to kind of be buzzing off each other, the kind of family feel, it was just … yes, you literally could have closed your eyes and you would have thought you were in the Sydney one. Heather:        Oh really? There you go. There didn’t seem to be very many kilts hanging around when I saw in the photos there. It just seemed the Satago guys had come down with the kilts. Barry:             Yes, I think they were dominating the dress wearing. Did you have any revelations at the London Xerocon? Barry:             Not necessarily revelations. I just … having walked around talking to a number of accountants at the show, they all seemed … the common theme was ultimately they’ve got to catch up or they’ll be left behind. That’s a very powerful message to somebody who’s been doing the same thing or doing it the same way for years, to be told, “This is what we’ve seen,” because we’ve seen the evidence before. It’s a great way to have a room sit up alert. Heather:        Yes, we had a local Xero roadshow in Brisbane yesterday and I think it was like 50% of the attendees, if not more, it was the first time they’d been to a Xero roadshow. They were just walking around stunned at what was going on and what was being told at the actual sessions. It’s like, “My goodness, we need to get on this.” Barry:             I kind of look at it like … and again, I’m not probably representing it right but a lot of the advisers seem to be almost like MacGyver’s with all the add-ons and the functionality of the software. It was kind of like a big bullet belt or suitcase full of tricks that they can show clients that … Heather:        What do you mean by MacGyver sorry? Barry:             MacGyver, again, an 80s show. He used to have tricks and ways of getting out of situations … Heather:        Is he like Inspector Gadget? Barry:             Yes, kind of like that. So he could basically pick locks with a toothpick or a matchstick. I suppose ultimately the idea being that there wasn’t anything he couldn’t do with his box of tricks. I know this is going to be a 20 year old saying, “Who the hell is MacGyver?” Heather:        I know I was kind of going … I kind of vaguely knew who he was but wasn’t exactly sure how the reference was working in. But yes, Inspector Gadget, I get what you’re saying and definitely the bookkeepers that I’ve seen who have kind of moved to the cloud integrator space, they’re saying to businesses, “Okay, you’re a business, you need to get in this product, this receipt scanning product, this debt tracking product, this cash flow solution. Integrate it with Xero, and that’s the roll out, and you’re getting that. If anything else is happening then we can talk about it.” Barry:             Yes. Heather:        We’re seeing the education of the add-on solutions, which you probably don’t perceive yourself as an add-on solution, but for the people within the Xero community it’s like, “Okay, then this solution TransferMate, we need to add it to all of our companies who have it sitting there as an option for all of our companies who are doing international exchanges.” Barry:             Yes, and I’d be happy if you did. I suppose an interesting kind of feedback, we saw recently because someone asked us and we hadn’t really kind of looked at it before, was what’s the retention rate? What’s the repeat use rate? It’s over 90% which is phenomenal I think, which ultimately tells us that it’s working and clients like it. The main reason why the 10% aren’t mainly is because they don’t have payments [for tolls? 00:27:24]. Heather:        Yes, people evolve their business. Look, whenever I put in a new solution, I always evaluate the time cost and will drop it if it’s not beating that. But even if I’m using a solution, sometimes for 40 minutes a month, I know it’s saving me so much money in the actual use of it. I just keep adopting and plugging in more. Then people come and say to me, “How can you manage to do so much?” I’m like, “Well, all of my life is automated, so that’s how I manage to do it.” Barry:             Actually that was one of the take points from the show. I suppose one of the gold partners sat up on stage and he was asked, “What has it meant to him,” and he said, “Well, typically I have a big client, for example, that would normally take two staff, two days to do a return for him. Now it takes one staff, one day.” So he said it’s quite a simple way to break it down in terms of the cost saving. Heather:        Absolutely. Barry:             But even if you look at the add-ons, traditionally I would have seen old desktop software, and you have clients clambering around trying to find inventory, third party inventory, to slot in and their pieces don’t really fit in well. But it just seems to be the eco system here is quite unique in that the pieces have to work. Heather:        Yes, absolutely. I think the technology behind the open published API which I’m not pretending to understand exactly, everyone seems to say is like this phenomenal, “Click and it works, and the flow of data is what’s saving us all that time, that automation.” Barry:             Well, the great thing about it is the team in Xero, the developer team, can see that it works. You can’t build an add-on and say it works because they’ll say, “No, it doesn’t. We can see that.” Heather:        And everyone raves about the Xero developer team, so that’s good to know. To ask you a bit more about your business, what activities have been successful for TransferMate in generating leads for your business? Barry:             I suppose typically it’s going through and contacting accountants, letting them know how the service works. We do a little bit of social but ultimately it’s picking up the phone and calling companies. I suppose it’s ultimately getting to talk to clients, getting directly to a client is something we can measure a lot easier than necessarily going through a channel because I suppose we’re talking directly to the client, so we can know if we make X amount of calls today … it might sound like a funny way of doing things but that’s what we find has traditionally worked. But we’re more open to we now have a partner channel where we have the centres in place for the accounting partners to earn additional revenue stream by telling their clients about the service, and in doing so having the clients save money. That’s a more logical way to go for us and it’s something we really, really encourage. Heather:        Do you want to expand on your partner programme? Barry:             Yes, so in effect what we do is, if you’re a partner and you believe you’ve got clients or you may know of companies that make international payments, we provide a unique tracked web form and we simply give it to you to put on your website. If someone stumbles across it, they may not even be your own client, they may be a company down the road or somebody who has come across your website because you perform well in the search engines, as long as they see that link there in the website and they register, automatically we sign up the client and every time the client books payments, there is a referral fee split for the partner, and the partner can track that online in our online system. So the more clients transfer, they simply log in every [one? 00:31:26] and they can see exactly what’s been earned and how active their clients are, referrals are. So you’re effectively encouraging partners to assist in the selling process on your behalf? Barry:             I suppose what I’d liken it to is basically opening the door and letting our flyer in I guess to some degree. If you can imagine we’re in a neighbourhood, and there’s a roundabout in the middle, and there are eight houses around that roundabout, and all the doors are closed but there’s a party happening inside every house, we’re kind of just saying, “Open your door and let us in.” Heather:        Sensational. I’ve not heard it described that way but yes, it’s a warm introduction. Barry:             And to be honest with you, that’s why I guess the relationship that advisers have with clients is naturally a very strong one. It’s one of advice. It’s one of reliance to some degree, and because of that there is trust there that helps us move past, “Who are you,” to “Okay, I understand you’re a good company. What does your service do?” Heather:        Excellent. Yes, absolutely. On the technical side of that, I think you used a different term – referral link, but in terms of the referral link or the affiliate link, is it built in-house or did you use a commissioning programme to provide that? Barry:             We built it all in-house. Heather:        With your smart team of developers, sensational. Barry:             I guess to be honest with you, we’ve been involved in online businesses for I suppose the best part of 10 years. The one thing we’ve seen from day one, our referral programmes were like many which is basically, “Tell us a client and we’ll record all the details and sales and we’ll share Excel sheets.” It just doesn’t work. Partners shouldn’t need to have to second guess or figure out how it works. It should be very, very transparent.                         The way it works is quite simply if a client books a payment, signs up and books a payment today, within five minutes you’ll be able to login and see the details right through our system. That’s exactly the way it should be. Heather:        Excellent. It sounds like another solution you could sell to the cloud community … Barry:             Yes, we’ll have to get on it. Heather:        You could split of and sell. What have you learnt from running your business? Barry:             I suppose I’ve learned that power of the brand. So early days we would go out and we would tell clients about what we do and it shouldn’t really be about, in my opinion … I guess it’s nice to build a big brand out there but it’s also, in terms of scaling up, it’s nice to be able to lean on an existing brand whether that be an adviser brand or a Xero brand. I suppose clients, when they understand the association between Xero, as an example, it opens the door a lot easier. Heather:        Yes. Barry:             I understood very quickly that the cold call is a cold call. The warmer it can be obviously the quicker you can get to where you need to get to. Other than that, I suppose it’s the same principle for any business: you’ve got to say what you do. If you win a client it doesn’t mean they’re going to stay, particularly in the Xero community. If you don’t do what you’ll say you’ll do, it won’t go unnoticed. You have to basically stand by your service and I suppose take care of business. Heather:        I guess that’s actually when we’ve moved from desktop to cloud computing, we’ve also evolved into social media. So whenever something goes wrong, it’s just all across there and these grumpy people have these grumpy complaints about stuff, so you’ve got to be on the ball all the time with it, just monitoring it what’s going on with stuff. Barry:             It’s interesting though, while the Australian banks aren’t necessarily the best, they’re not the worst. Heather:        No. Barry:             We have clients … the French banks are charging up to 12% on foreign exchange to clients. Heather:        Wow. Barry:             I asked one of our clients before to ask their client three questions for a partner and the three questions were: who are you using? Question two was basically how do you find our service now? Three: would you recommend it? When it came to the third question after saying he used a particular bank in France, the answer from the client was, “Not only would I recommend you but when I told my bank the rate you gave me, they told me to use you too.” Heather:        That’s a great case study. Barry:             Yes. Heather:        So I’ve got one final question for you Barry. No, I’ve got two actually. First question is will we be seeing you at Auckland Xerocon? Barry:             I hope so. We have a team in Australia, so I hope to have one of our team in Auckland, absolutely. Heather:        Sensational. I’m planning to go so I’ll see someone there. My final question for you Barry is what advice would you have for your 18 year old self? Barry:             Ah, you hit me with another one. Don’t throw out the Superman figuruines. Heather:        Because you can make a lot of money. Barry:             Put away the Wonder Woman outfit. No, what would my advice for my 18 year old self … my advice would be I suppose from day one I’ve always wanted to be involved and working for myself in one of my own businesses. When I was 18 in school, I didn’t think … I was fully of ideas but I just didn’t think I was ready for it yet. I ducked into a master’s for a year and it gave me a lot of time to sit back and work on concepts and I suppose just ready myself, but like anything else, get out there and if you’re … I suppose it depends what you want to do. I’m from a family who like to sell things and ultimately that’s what we do. We’ve got that in us whether we do it well or not. I suppose it’s in our blood. It’s what we love to do. So do what you love to do and ideally keep on doing it. Heather:        Do you think that the master’s helped you or do you think it was just the time that helped you while you were doing the master’s? Barry:             I think … looking back on it now to be honest with you, I think … it seems to be more logical for someone to take a masters on after you’ve … so they may have gone through college, they may not have but they find themselves in the workforce and they may not be doing things particular right or there are processes they could be doing better. Then when they go to do a masters, they can understand, “Well, that’s what I should be doing.” It kind of puts a framework on top of it. I’m kind of glad. It sounds a bit square to do it so I’m kind of just glad I got it. I knew I had to do it straight away after I finished college because I knew as soon as I got out and started selling, I wasn’t going to want to go back to college. Heather:        Yes, absolutely. Barry:             Our best sales guys did not spend any time in college. I suppose if it’s … I know quite often in terms of candidates looking for work, they’re preoccupied with finding candidates that have college degrees but I suppose there is nothing better than finding somebody with a passion and being likeable. So I don’t really necessarily think that everybody should have one. Heather:        No, the education question I think is evolving very quickly as we speed up. I think concise learning is really important but this extended long learning is interesting, whether it’s still going to be relevant in many years to come. Barry:             I suppose cloud accounting wasn’t taught in college. It was probably learnt in the minds of creative thinkers. Heather:        Absolutely. I’m a professional accountant so I used to get up at 4 o’clock in the morning and study through till 11 o’clock in the evening for like four years while I completed my qualifications while working full time. I’m looking back on it, “Hmm, I’m not sure it was worth it.” But anyway, it’s done, box ticked. Barry:             I guess the accountant is different. Like it’s lovely to be able to have an actual skill, a passport that can say, “You know what, as a matter of fact, this is a tangible skill to have.” It’s a great thing to have. I suppose in the marketing/sales side of it, you have to rely on a little bit of luck, a little bit of ideas and timing, and [crosstalk 00:40:29] I guess. Heather:        Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for speaking to me today Barry. I really appreciate it and I’m sure the listeners will get a lot of information from this session as well as learning more about TransferMate Global Payments and also about how you grew your cloud business globally. Thank you very much. Barry:             Thank you very much for your time. Heather:        Cheers. Barry:             Take care. Talk to you soon. Bye-bye. Heather:        Thanks a lot Barry. Bye. Mentions ·        TransferMate Global Payments - http://www.TransferMate.com/ ·        Fintech - http://www.fintechinnovationlab.com/ ·        Xero - https://www.xero.com/ Click here to sign up to my newsletter http://bit.ly/SignUp4Newsletter (34.9% open rate – double industry averages) Listen to my podcast : http://cloud-stories.com/ (over 1300 downloads)  Read my latest blog post : http://www.heathersmithsmallbusiness.com/blog/ Visit my website : www.heathersmithsmallbusiness.com  Book time with me heathersmithau.gettimely.com/book    Subscribe to XU Magazine : http://www.xumagazine.com/ Subscribe to my YouTube channel : https://www.YouTube.com/ANISEConsulting (over 173 000 views, over 1000 subscribers) Follow me on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/HeatherSmithAU (over 8600 followers) Join my FaceBook page : https://www.facebook.com/HeatherSmithAU  (148 likes) Connect with me on LinkedIn : http://www.linkedin.com/in/HeatherSmithAU (over 2100 connections) Add me to your circle on Google + https://plus.google.com/+HeatherSmithAU/posts(over 55 000 views)      

📈 Growth Hacker Automating Accounting for eCommerce Stores | Tejasawi Raghurama

Highlights of my conversation with Tejasawi Raghurama Growth Save 300 administrative hours per month Automates accounting for ecommerce stores Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India Increasing monthly recurring revenue and reducing churn Transcript Heather:    Hello. It’s Heather Smith here. Thank you for joining me today. I hope you are doing well. Today I speak with Tejasawi Raghurama which I’ve probably pronounce incorrectly but I refer to him as Tej. Tej is a growth hacker at ZapStitch. ZapStitch is a data integration platform for small business to automate data flow across cloud business solutions. They are automating accounting for a thousand plus e-commerce business from North America, Australasia, Europe by integrating Shopify, Bigcommerce with Xero. ZapStitch automatically imports sales orders into your accounting application’s invoices. Discounts, taxes and shipping rates are sync’d seamlessly which is something he emphasises in the show. An average business using ZapStitch saves 300 plus hours every month spent in manual accounting, freeing up their time so they can spend it with the customer and family. ZapStitch is the number one ranked and rated accounting add-on in the Shopify app store. Tej believes no human should do a machine’s job and small businesses can grow huge with automation. He places part by educating and working with customers. When not learning from business, you’ll find him watching South Park. He joined ZapStitch in February 2014 as one of the first employees there. He was inspired by the vision of the founders, the fundamental impact the way businesses manage tedious processes. I started by asking Tej who was his favourite South Park character and why. Tejasawi:       Awesome. That’s a great question to start with. I think Cartman because I’m fascinated by climatic and realistic people. I always look at the world around me, “That is good.” “That is bad.” But there are people who actually recognise it and live through it. I would see Cartman in South Park as being the most pragmatic and he is who he is. He doesn’t mould himself according to the people around him and he has his originality intact. Yes, he is cruel, I don’t recognise that spirit but I think he’s on his own. Heather:        Sensational. I don’t watch South Park so I don’t know the character but I thought that our listeners might find that interesting. I know that my son watches South Park but I don’t. Tejasawi:       Okay. So Tej, can you tell me a little about ZapStitch. Tejasawi:       Sure. ZapStitch automates accounting in commerce stores. In simple English, what we do is we create platforms like Shopify and Bigcommerce with accounting apps like Xero, right? Heather:        Yes. Tejasawi:       ZapStitch enables seamless data syncing between those apps. We sync data for all the customers and anything related to the invoice and sales tax automation. What we enable at the end of the day is exponentially faster reporting in accounting and accurate data and peace of mind. I mean the most common feedback we get from our accountants and from business owners who use ZapStitch is peace of mind. At the end of the day, accounting shouldn’t be an intimidating step in the process, right? Heather:        Yes. Tejasawi:       That is one feedback we often get. At the company level, our vision is to automate business apps across verticals. When we were founded … we are a cloud integration platform, so our long term two year or three year future is to integrate at least 300-500 business apps on the cloud. Heather:        Oh okay. Tejasawi:       We are starting with e-commerce and accounting because we believe there are immediate gaps in between them, and we want to solve as many problems in accounting as possible, and go in depth in accounting automation. Who are your typical customers? Tejasawi:       Typical customers are twofold. One is an e-commerce business owner or the business team of a 10-man or 15-man e-commerce team. The second end user is the accountant who has multiple e-commerce tools as clients or is working part time as the bookkeeper. Those are two end users but our business is somebody that’s doing let’s say a $2 million dollar revenue per year and who actually feels the pain of data entry, right? A typical business of where we work with spends at least 500 hours in accounting per month. If we can solve that pain point, I think that’s where our end customer is. Heather:        That certainly makes … if you can resolve 500 hours at your price point, then that certainly is of benefit to the client. Tejasawi:       Exactly. Where about are you actually based? Tejasawi:       We are based out of Bangalore in India. It’s called the Silicon Valley of India, so it’s the Bangalore start-up hub in India, yes. Where about are your servers based? Where are the data for your company based … for the client data based? Tejasawi:       We are based … we built it on EWS, the server side across EWS in Singapore if I’m not wrong but I need to get some technical knowledge there. The servers are on EWS and we don’t locally store data. Heather:        Okay, so it’s not locally stored. It’s always a question that people ask us. Tejasawi:       Yes indeed. Heather:        It’s an unpleasant question I guess but the customer is always going, “Well, where is my data?” “Is it in the clouds?” “Where is it?” So it’s important to know. Tejasawi:       Yes, just to add to that point, ZapStitch believes in transparency, so we don’t store any local data on any server for that matter. We only move data from A to B. there will be apps and I’m sure you’ve interviewed and talked to some where they’re stored locally and in the app they show the data, right? We enable seamless syncing of data and not storing of data. Yes, that’s a belief we are in right now. Maybe going forward when we add features like reporting inside the app we will look at storing data but right now we are only moving data and storing metadata like number of orders … Heather:        I thought it might be like that. What’s your internet connection like in Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India? Tejasawi:       Internet connection is a problem maybe sporadically but we have good broadband speeds in Bangalore. We have a speed of let’s say 22/30mps. That serves our purpose and we haven’t felt the pain of internet speed at all. But sometimes the sporadic connection is due to the team load rather than the internet speed. When we grew as a start-up, there were logistical issues which were solved of course but yes, there is no problem with the internet. We are not consciously aware of the speed, yes. Heather:        Tej, you describe yourself as a Growth Hacker.  What does that mean? Tejasawi:       I mean that’s something I’m figuring out. Heather:        It sounds very impressive. I actually like that title, ‘The Growth Hacker’. Tejasawi:       Right, so how growth hacking works, it’s a term by an accounting marketer called Sean Ellis who is inbound marketeer and he has a start-up. What he says is like when you build a start-up, that is a predictable good … you can achieve. You can draw a straight line which is not a hockey stick but is like a 45 degree angle, right? What a growth hacker does or growth marketing is like it recognises certain bursts in the marketing cycle and exponentially recreates it. If the growth hacking is successful, you find an unconventional way of growing and you make it repeatable success. So that’s how you differentiate your start-up from the rest of the competition. You actually blow the competition off because you have tested and repeated success with an unconventional method. That’s what growth hacking, the term is coming from. Heather:        That’s interesting. I should mention in there … I’m guessing I’m right, you’re referring to grass hockey rather than ice hockey for our North American listeners which is … actually would he be referring to ice hockey rather than grass hockey? Tejasawi:       He’s an Australian guy so I don’t know. Heather:        Because they’re two very differently shaped sticks, I know that. Tejasawi:       Indeed. I think I get your point now because … Heather:        So I think it’s actually the ice hockey stick he’s referring to isn’t it because that’s the one with the 45 degree angle, whereas the grass hockey stick is actually quite … very, very short. Tejasawi:       I know it looked like that. Heather:        I’ll go and Google it and see if I can work it out afterward. You have, in the first year of launch, you managed to attain 250 paying customers with inbound marketing. How did you go about doing this? Tejasawi:       We have an install base of 1,000 stores but when the free trial ends, that’s how the paying customer starts. We are a SASS based B2B company, product company. At the beginning we were very clear that we were targeting certain markets where these platforms have good penetration. For example, US, Canada, Australia and UK, right, where the amalgamation or the integration can serve a purpose immediately. We targeted those and we founded the channels which were the app stores. As a company, we didn’t invest in a sales asset team. We didn’t hire any sales persons. We only invested in customer success. When I joined as a third team member in February of last year, I was straight away sent to customer support as a role. I didn’t go to marketing for the first four months. So what we learned from that is if you actually delight your customers from day one, they sell the app themselves. They write reviews. They talk about you. They recommend you to users and the Shopify system is pretty vital in that sense. People talk about their issues. So we actually focused on two things. One was the forums, community forums, across the business apps and the second is to actually get good reviews on the platform. People read reviews before they read features actually, often. Heather:        I completely agree with that, yes. Okay, let’s examine that a bit further. In terms of the forums you were looking at, what forums were you looking at? Was there a specific Spotify forum? Tejasawi:       Shopify and Bigcommerce … Heather:        Shopify sorry. I said Spotify. Shopify, yes. Tejasawi:       No, they’re very similar. Shopify has a very active business forum which is Shopify.com\forums. Even we actually got the business idea thanks to those forums because customers were talking about specific data, manual data problems, manual accounting problems. When you go to the forums, there will be these customers who talk about, “How do I move my data from Shopify to Xero?” “How do I manage accounting?” “What are the best practises of accounting?”                         We position ZapStitch as a thought leader in those forums saying, “We know your pain point and we know how accounting can be a pain sometimes and how our solution solves it.” So rather than out-selling, we out-educated our competition in the forum. That’s a philosophy we believe in is that if you related the pain point, we talked about how you can move data seamlessly between Shopify and Xero, and automate the reporting and just focus on business reports rather than actually entering data. The forums were a great place where people were actually talking about the problems and we just plugged in ourselves as somebody who knows what they’re talking about and we can solve it. Heather:        I think going on the forums is very smart. Also as well as it being authentic, I think it also probably gives you really good SEO because people go … I know I personally, I go in and search there, and I know people who have a high level of credibility and if they’re supporting a particular product I’ll go, “Okay, I don’t need to do extensive research on it because this person has said it’s okay, so I’m sure it will be okay.” Tejasawi:       Right. How did you encourage your clients to give you reviews? Tejasawi:       Yes, that’s a good question. Many companies, product companies especially, have a way of irritating the customer in terms of reviews. They keep bugging the customer saying, “Why don’t you write a review?” “Give a link,” all those things. What we did innately or subtly was have a live chat support in our app. When the on-boarding happens, and TradeGecko is a great example where the onboarding is seamless, but when we started as a company we didn’t have that leverage of a beautiful design, an amazing out of the box design. We focused on simple and subtle design, and when the onboarding happened, the user got delighted and our automatic chat would plugin, “How did you find the experience?” “Do you need any help?” “What is the next setting you want?” All those things. As the engagement happened in the live chat, we started to see the customers delighted and we can actually ask for review. It’s about instant gratification rather than sending them mail or calling them and saying, “How did you like the app?” The live chat client helped us a lot. I would recommend it to any product company starting out because that’s a great way to learn from customers on the spot and also solve the problems instantly and also, of course, write a review if the user is delighted. Heather:        Yes, it sometimes amazes me that some of the companies are not as receptive to talk to an individual person. They’re like, “If you’re not a partner, I’m not going to talk to you,” and you’re like going, “Well, I need to talk to you before I consider becoming a partner.” Now, in terms of reviews, it sounds like you’re not focused on getting reviews on other sites. I know that Xero has an add-on marketplace and actually encourages people to review there. Are you directing people to go and review there? Tejasawi:       Yes, so with Xero, we just launched that Heather. We want to get as many reviews there but it’s just two to three weeks old and we actually started getting paying customers as well from Xero. I mean review becomes a natural … Heather:        Progression in the cycle. Tejasawi:       Yes, by-product of success. We want to ensure product success with Xero first and then the review I’m sure will be there but we are not biased in any platform as such. Heather:        So for our listeners, we’ll just share with them that ZapStitch is now on the US Xero marketplace but you’re also looking for approval on the other country marketplaces. Is that correct? Tejasawi:       Yes. I should give credit to Xero because they are one of the most active developer support forums out there. They’re very transparent in how they deal with partners like us. Heather:        That’s sensational. Tejasawi:       So unless customers actually say that sales type automation works with ZapStitch, they will not approve it. We have seen other apps which you are aware of, where community is like … you like your app, the customers like your app, okay you’re globally approved. Here it’s more like every country has a specific use case and unless you actually meet them practically and the customer talks about it, you are not approved. We had beta customers from the US and UK, so we got approved and UK should be very soon right now, and we want beta customers from Australia and New Zealand which is the biggest Xero user base, to approve it as soon as possible. That’s our main focus in February. Heather:        Yes, sensational. How many customers does ZapStitch need to be successful? Tejasawi:       As a B2B company we are focused on two metrics, right? One is MRR  monthly recurring revenue, and second is to reduce churn. Rather than talking about the number of customers, we’re talking MMR in at least our philosophy, so we want to get to at least 100,000 MMR by end of year or by next year, early next year. That’s how we are growing and our month on month, at least to reach that, would be 35, we are at 38 this moment. We are going at a good speed but that’s how we look at our growth. Heather:        Excellent. You’ve targeted multiple markets to penetrate the cloud based software specifically in e-commerce and accounting, what have you observed through that and what have you learnt through that targeting of the different markets? Tejasawi:       Right, so when we actually launched the beta product in 2013 end which is like December or November if I’m not wrong, I was not onboard. The founding team had tested it with Indian customers. The problem with Indian cloud or cloud eco system is they’re not very progressive or they haven’t understood the impact a cloud app can bring to their business. We still are believing in manual bookkeeping or CD based software of accounting, Excel sheets. The penetration was getting harder and harder so we naturally went to the most progressive marketplace which is the US. They already know the pain points they have and they do actually look to build a multi-million dollar business within one or two years. The e-commerce stores there are built on Shopify or Bigcommerce were looking at, “How do I grow faster?” Accounting needs to be fast, needs to be painless. “How do I find the solution?” “Okay, ZapStitch is there.” We got our first paying customers from the US, then Canada, so we started progressing in those geographies first and then UK and then Australia. So in terms of progressive eco systems for cloud software, we thought and we have analysed that US is by far the leader. Heather:        Oh really? Tejasawi:       Yes. In terms of multiple processes … they don’t look at one process to automate, they actually want to automate the whole business and focus on customer success, focus on sales, marketing, and the data is a burden to them. Right? They look at multiple apps to automate multiple sites of their business. Australia was a close second to that and Canada is very close to Australia. Heather:        I would have thought from speaking to people, and I don’t have any stats behind me, it would have been New Zealand. Tejasawi:       Yes, in terms of user base I’m talking. Heather:        Okay, so in terms of user base, I completely agree because they’ve got such a bigger number. Tejasawi:       Indeed, yes. I appreciate that because I was talking not in philosophy of approach to the business but in terms … I meant that, yes. Heather:        The user base number, yes. As soon as you get the US buying into anything, you expand exponentially don’t you. Tejasawi:       Yes, and I’m sure with Xero, we would test the New Zealand market much better because with Shopify and the other accounting app, we didn’t have much user base in New Zealand so we couldn’t get real data measured with that. But I’m sure Xero … I have seen the data that Xero is more in Australia and New Zealand already so that should be good data to work with. Heather:        Yes. How can customer service be a differentiator for start-ups in a competitive market? Tejasawi:       When you look at cloud based business, there’s no geographical limitation. For example: we are an Indian company but working seamlessly for a US audience, right? We work in their time zones. Our support team works at US and UK time zones. When you come to a company … company to a marketplace, you have to find a differentiator. It cannot be price always. You can’t be the cheapest solution out there. That’s not a good business model to work with. Heather:        Absolutely. Tejasawi:       What you want to do is you want to delight your customers and if your app is not at the self-serving mode in the initial days, customer success or customer support is the easiest way to get that because as I said, businesses want to talk to a human at the end of the day. They don’t want to just write them email and get a response. They want to talk to a human. They want to relate to their problems. They want to talk about their problems. Our initial days or initial growth has to be credited to seamless customer support and of course a great product which enables delight.                         I think from our learnings we can safely say that if you actually put in place tools to automate customer support, to have things like live chat, email automation, and then actually have a product which is centric to the user and not to a developer. You don’t need to be a scientist to use an app. If you look at those three verticals as customer success, you are already in a good path to grow outwardly so that would be our learning in that space. What tool do you use for your live chat? Tejasawi:       We use Olark. We have been a huge fan of Olark. Heather:        Olark, okay. What email automation do you use? Tejasawi:       For customer support we have two things. One is the support which is on Freshdesk and for customer interactions we use Intercom. What Intercom does is it gives you the app usage of every user, you know, “Has he done a sync? What type of data did he sync? Is he actually happy with the product?” All those customer analytics. We use Intercom and we send trigger emails based on the actions inside the app. That’s how our customer support cycle works, onboarding works. If you’re dealing with people during business hours in the US, it sounds like you’re not getting much sleep over there. Tejasawi:       No, we don’t work 18 hours a day. How we divide this is like the marketing and product team works in Indian hours and the support and the customer success team works in US hours. Heather:        Okay. Tejasawi:       As we expand into markets, I’m sure the whole team will find a challenge in the one or two weeks but we are a global company so we should act like one. Heather:        Yes. Do you have staff outside of India? Tejasawi:       No, we are a 15 member team in Bangalore in India. Heather:        That’s really large. That’s a really large team. Do you attend any of the Xero roadshows or Xerocon events, the big Xero conferences? Tejasawi:       Yes, we would love to because there are these industry specific events. I know as you mentioned people like you hang out there but right now we are not focused on that. That’s one differentiator we have … Heather:        Your support is online rather than showing up at those events. Tejasawi:       Exactly, we don’t have a sales team. Yes. Heather:        Sensational. Can you share with us some of the businesses using your solution? Tejasawi:       Sure. One of the most successful businesses who was an early adopter of Zapstitch  is Bolder Band. They won the Shopify build a business competition last year. Do you know about the build a business competition? Heather:        No I don’t. Tejasawi:       Okay, sorry. I’ll give a brief … what they do is Shopify promotes businesses who grow to a million dollar business every year. Heather:        Oh, and of course they’d know wouldn’t they. Tejasawi:       Exactly. It’s like a cross promotional activity. Heather:        Yes. Tejasawi:       What the build a business does is like you need to sell as much as you can in year one of your business, after launching your business. So whoever sells the most in that calendar year becomes the winner. Bolder Band is a Shopify store who launched in late 2013. When they adopted us, we were just one month old. Heather:        Wow. Tejasawi:       They had at least 200 orders per day, right? We were like blown away. Okay, this is a great store. This is a large store. They also became our product evangelist and they gave active feedback how to make our product better. How they function is like they have a very niche segment of customers. They sell head bands for people, you know, gyming and sports personalities? Heather:        Okay, yes. Tejasawi:       Who like anything – jogging, hiking and everything. They sell headbands and they grew to a million … I think they are now $3-$5 million dollar business within one and a half years. Heather:        Wow, I didn’t know headbands had come back in … had made a comeback. Tejasawi:       Yes, so they were one of the most successful lead customers and then Pop Chart Lab is one of the most creative businesses we have. They create charts on any topic. For example: how did Nike involve their shoes? How did [Wine? 00:27:15] evolve from 1800 to 2000. Heather:        So people then buy the chart from them? Tejasawi:       Exactly. Heather:        Oh okay, that’s interesting. Tejasawi:       So these two were the most [ugliest? 00:27:29] and biggest customers. There are many but as customer successes, these are the first two that come up to my mind. Heather:        Did you find yourself in the developer stage reacting to their needs? Tejasawi:       No. Heather:        They said, “Okay, we need this,” and you were able to implement something like that? Tejasawi:       Yes, that’s a good question. As a product company building a cloud app, we necessarily don’t go by feedback from just customers. What we go by is data and market need. When we talk to let’s say five or six customers and they want sales tech automation, we build sales tech automation. But it’s not like building a customer solution for big clients or working with them over time to see what do they want and going in depth to their needs. We want to serve collectively as an ecosystem for Shopify users, Xero users rather than just a multi-million dollar business. Heather:        Yes. So if someone has your product in place, they’ve got Shopify, they’ve got Xero and they’ve got ZapStitch in place, what additional financial information can they attain through having that integration? Tejasawi:       Good question. How ZapStitch works is we don’t store any local data. We don’t generate reports in the app but what we do for example is let’s say … I think this is one of our differentiators is that the sales tax, the other apps, don’t go to specific sales tax and invoices. What these apps do is they have one sales tax rate and they apply it to all the invoices they sync. What ZapStitch does is it actually breaks down the taxes as is from the invoice and maps it to the Xero accounts for those sales taxes. That is automated and an accountant or a business owner just needs to go to the sales tax or account in Xero and just generate a report within a second. If you go to the manual side of things or non-automation, it would take at least five minutes to do for every invoice: entering the sales tax, mapping it to the right account and everything. So maybe one or two minutes is saved on every order. If you look at a growing business like let’s say Bolder Bands, they get 300 orders per day that would be 6,000 minutes, right? If you click a button, we can automate the data sync in ZapStitch, so they don’t even have to login sometimes. That happens seamlessly and the accountant just focuses on generating reports and accurate data and non-duplicated data. Heather:        Excellent. Tell me what the start-up scene is like in Bangalore. Tejasawi:       Bangalore is a hub of start-ups in India. It’s maybe the most popular city in India in terms of start-ups and of our national capital New Delhi is a close second if I’m not wrong. Heather:        Yes. Tejasawi:       How Bangalore works is a lot of product companies exist here. Product companies need investment early on, right? There’s a huge oversea and [internal? 00:30:58] investors community here that is eco systems like incubators and accelerators. We are still learning in the entrepreneurial eco system globally but in India at least, Bangalore is very progressive for start-ups and there are lesser challenges I would say. I’ll put it like that. Are venture capitalists coming from India or are they coming from overseas? Tejasawi:       Venture capital firm is mostly Indian who invest in Indian start-ups. They have global investors who are in contact with them and they actually scout talent but they don’t actually actively invest in Indian start-ups directly. As in an early investor but if a huge Indian venture capitalist has invested, then they see the talent, they scout it and the foreign investors come in. Heather:        Yes. I think you’ve told me this but I’ve forgotten. How old is your company? Tejasawi:       We launched our product of February 2014 and we launched our company in December or November if I’m not wrong. Heather:        So you’re coming up to your one year anniversary. Tejasawi:       Yes, my own and companies as well. Heather:        That’s amazing growth for a company that’s been around for a year. What have you learnt in that time of growing the start-up in India? Tejasawi:       One of the central things is if you want to build a fast growing or any growing start-up which doesn’t die in the first year, you need to focus on customers. One skewed emotion any start-ups have is they want to build a perfect product, right? What we had learned very early on thankfully is that if you actually build a minimum viable product for, let’s say, our market, actually the customer will do the rest of the thing. They will give it the requirements. The market will drive your product rather than you building the perfect solution. If you focus on customer success and actually giving a damn about them basically, they actually give you back and more than you actually ask for: so in terms of advocacy of the product, advocacy of your customer success, giving active feedback in terms of their product needs. I think that is one major learning and second challenge and learning is the marketing side of things. You want to build a repeatable engine of bringing customers, bringing progressive e-commerce businesses who want to try automation, who want to solve this problem. That has been one major challenge, you know, where do these guys hang out? Where do these guys talk about their problems? So building an inbound channel of customers is a challenge and we are still figuring it out but I think if we do our thing right, it’s just another start-up challenge. Heather:        That’s certainly interesting. I totally agree with you in what you’re saying in the focus on the customer. It does seem to be what a lot of people are saying these days is, “Focus on the customer.” I know sometimes I’m speaking with people, like I’m going into the start-up places and I’m like, “Have you sold this? Is anyone using this?” “No, no, I can’t show it to them until it’s perfect.” It’s like, “Aww, that looks like you’re putting a lot of money in that.” Tejasawi:       Also one thing is like no assumptions. We don’t assume that your customer is happy. You need data. You need customer interviews. You need everything to consolidate and, you know, actually generate actionable data rather than assuming you know customers are happy or you know they like this feature. Tools are important to measure everything actually inside the app. Heather:        Can you explain what some of those tools are that you’re using? Tejasawi:       Sure. For example, a classic case is Intercom. Intercom helps us analyse the product functionality: What is the customer actually doing inside the app? For example, let’s say our early customers came into the app, they set up the sync settings but they never ran the sync. If we see that the data shows that there is a time of login, there is a time of sync, and if their time between those two events is let’s say 15 minutes, we are on the wrong side of things. We want it to be less than 3 minutes or 4 minutes. He sets up that account and runs the sync.                         So the product team looks at the data and wants to change the design, and then the design team comes along and says, “Okay, this is the button that’s not very inherently …” Heather:        Intuitive. Tejasawi:       Yes. “So let’s make it intuitive. Let’s iterate on the design and make the onboarding time less than 3 minutes.” Heather:        That’s really smart. Tejasawi:       Also one thing it allows you to do … any such tool like Intercom, it triggers emails or contact touch points with events inside the app. For example, let’s say you have an error in the app, a chat will automatically come and say, “Okay, I saw you had an error in the app, how can I solve it? I am your customer success manager.” So rather than relying on the customer to get back to you, you have to be proactive in customer support. These apps let you do that because they can trigger events based on customer actions. Do the customers freak out that they think big brother is now watching them? You know, “Oh, I’ve made a mistake and then you’ve sent me an email telling me I’ve made a mistake.” Do they freak out about that? Tejasawi:       No. I mean it’s complete contrary. The most successful of our customers actually understand that we are thinking for them, right? Heather:        Yes. Tejasawi:       Because when you deal with data integration, it’s sensitive data. If something goes wrong, you have to fix it immediately. So they are happy to let us fix it immediately rather than worrying about transparency or how did they know about it? Our customers are actually surprised in a pleasant way that as soon as they get an error, they are figuring things out and we are right there the solution. Are you able to actually jump in to actual individual accounts and sort things out if necessary? Tejasawi:       No. we don’t log into any accounts. What we do is we look at the metadata. For example, let’s say in an order case, the order didn’t sync. The development team looks at the metadata and sees okay, this is the date the order came from, this is the shop the order came from, so let’s read on that sync. That’s all we do from the backend. Heather:        Sensational. That’s really interesting. I think people will find that really interesting to listen to. I completely agree that it’s good to have the automated identifying of errors. I just know that some people are like, “Oh my goodness, they’re in my data, they’re in my data,” and their freaking out. So it’s good to have that conversation and be open with them but like I say to a lot of my clients, I just say as part of the sign up, “I’m letting the company automatically access your data.” But it’s not accessing your data, it’s accessing … if there’s a problem it will get sorted out a lot quicker than if we actually have to go through that manual process of getting it out there. Tejasawi:       Yes, but the more ideal case would be like … and that is a very common case. An ideal case is, for example, let’s say you are selling in multi-channels. You have multiple sales taxes across different regions, so you don’t know which setting to have in the app. What you want to do is like you are figuring out settings and you can ask the live chat support saying, “Okay, how do I solve this business problem with integration?” That’s the automation we have built in rather than just error resolution because that’s a very common case. The support is more proactive in business cases, how to integrate for your business rather than just broadly integrate to apps. Heather:        Yes, sensational. What does the future hold for ZapStitch? Tejasawi:       We were born as an integration platform. Our vision is to build a cloud integration platform across business verticals. For example, the next logical would be CRM or marketplace automation, for example: Amazon and EBAY. We want to logically progress through the verticals and integrate the most progressive apps and the most popular apps in those verticals. In a two year, three year time line, we see integrating 200-300 business apps across email marketing, CRM accounting, e-commerce. Heather:        It would be interesting to see because I know some of them … like I know I’ve worked with Amazon and it kind of works in an interesting way in that 10 of the transactions are normal and then one kind of like is a summary transaction and it never comes across properly and you’re going … and the client sets it up themselves perhaps and they come to you and they’re like, “Wow, 90% of it looks fine but then 10% of it looks like it’s going to take me hours to fix up.” Tejasawi:       Exactly. You know, you’re coming to the exact problem which ZapStitch is solving, is the reconciling of data. When you have different types of invoices, reconciling becomes a pain. What ZapStitch wants to do with Xero is become one of the very few solution providers which actually enable faster reconciliation and not just data automation. When we talk to one of our biggest customers, he had an Amazon store as well. This was the first point that he brought out that, “Bring support for summary invoice when you build integration because that is one of the major use cases in Amazon.” Heather:        Yes, absolutely. As soon as you have something in place that makes it easy to sell, it means you can sell so much more. Tejasawi:       Exactly. Heather:        Like when I was dealing with this client, I was just like, “Stop selling stuff because this is a nightmare.” It was just like creating this bigger and bigger and bigger mess. Definitely installing a solution that simplifies the accounting process means you have the capacity to sell more which is exciting for the business. Tejasawi:       Yes, and we know one of the … I followed the name of the customer once, this guy sells iPhone batteries. Most of the successful businesses we have are niche businesses: iPhone batteries, headbands, wine collections. Heather:        That’s the joy of the internet, isn’t it, that someone can go out and go, “I think headbands should be brought back into fashion and I’m going to sell them.” Tejasawi:       Yes, so this guy told us that his accounting team is spending money on watching Netflix movies more than accounting. He was very happy that we solved this problem but he was pleasantly not happy that his accounting team is now having a lot of fun which is good but … Heather:        Oh okay, so they’re under capacity now. Tejasawi:       Yes, he was saying, “I don’t want to fire people but this is how our team is, they’re having fun, I’m spending more time with my family.” I think the data is just a part of the business end. It shouldn’t become the business. When you actually integrate well, your customer should do what he likes doing, selling, customer success, or spending time with the family. Heather:        I think this is part of the integration process when it goes in. I’m not sure whether … do you have cloud integrators come in and assist with the integration process or are you doing that yourself? Tejasawi:       We have partnered with Shopify and Xero, so their APIs allow us to pull in and integrate any data we want for our customers. There are limitations of course. There are API limitations in terms of business use cases. Heather:        But would a consultant like me come in and do the integration or would a consultant like me come in and watch you do the integration and just sort of sit in the background? Tejasawi:       Yes, that’s a good point actually. As a strategy of building the right product, we want to onboard experts and consultants but when you actually run the thing, use the app, it’s like the click of a button. But in the backend when we build features, for example summary invoice, we can’t know about the requirement unless I talk to somebody like you. We bring experts when building the product but not when using the product. The using is like click a button . Heather:        And they should be able to do it on their own. Yes, fair enough. Tejasawi:       Yes. Heather:        Thank you very much for speaking with me today Tej. I really appreciate it. Tejasawi:       My pleasure. Heather:        I’m sure our listeners have gained a lot from hearing you talk, especially if they have a Shopify client or are considering a Shopify client as something they’ll definitely look at. Now, I need to ask you before you go to see whether you know, what are the birds making all the noise in the background? Do you know what bird types they are? Tejasawi:       No, actually not. My mum is a bird enthusiast but I’m not. Heather:        They sound like seagulls but I didn’t want to be that bland and suggest that they would be seagulls. Are you near the water? Tejasawi:       No, so how Bangalore works, it’s a bustling city. Heather:        Okay, so it’s not going to be seagulls. You can send me an email sometime and let me know what the birds are. Tejasawi:       Sure. Heather:        It’s normally when I have these sessions my birds are noisier than anyone else’s birds. Tejasawi:       Yes, I think I heard in one part, yes. Heather:        My birds stayed quiet today and your birds went off on a racket. Thank you so very much for speaking with me today and I’ll leave links for how to get in contact with you in the show notes. I really appreciate it. Tejasawi:       My pleasure Heather. If I’m not pronouncing correct – Heather? Heather:        Heather. Tejasawi:       Great. I mean you are an inspiration. I want you to know that because when you maybe record and publish the podcast, very few people actually talk to you about it, right, I mean physically. So I wanted to thank you that you’re an inspiration to all of us and our team actually looks up to experts like you, your stories and the podcast is an inspiration. I wanted to make that very clear. Thanks a lot of taking the time out. Heather:        Thank you very much and hopefully it gives you an opportunity to hear the other add-ons and perhaps connect with them and learn from them and to move you from sort of cold to warm with these guys. Tejasawi:       Indeed. Heather:        Because we’re all in it together. Tejasawi:       Thanks a lot Heather. Heather:        Thank you. Cheers. Tejasawi:       I hope the seagulls were not too noisy. Heather:        No they weren’t. I like birds. They weren’t too noisy, I just wondered if you knew what they were. Tejasawi:       No, I’m sorry. I’ll get that. Thanks a lot Heather. Bye. Heather:        Thank you. Tejasawi:       Have a good day. Heather:        Same to you. Cheers Tej. End of Transcript Mentions ·        ZapStitch - http://www.ZapStitch.com ·        Bigcommerce - https://www.Bigcommerce.com ·        Xero - https://www.Xero.com ·        Shopify - https://www.Shopify.com ·        TradeGecko - http://www.TradeGecko.com ·        Sean Ellis http://www.startup-marketing.com/ ·        Emera ·        Olark - https://www.Olark.com ·        Freshdesk - http://Freshdesk.com ·        Intercom - https://www.Intercom.io ·        Bolder Band - http://www.bbolder.com   Contact Heather Smith Click here to sign up to my newsletter http://bit.ly/SignUp4Newsletter Listen to my podcast : http://cloud-stories.com/   Read my latest blog post : http://www.heathersmithsmallbusiness.com/blog/ Visit my website : www.heathersmithsmallbusiness.com  Book time with me heathersmithau.gettimely.com/book    Subscribe to XU Magazine : http://www.xumagazine.com/ Subscribe to my YouTube channel : https://www.YouTube.com/ANISEConsulting Follow me on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/HeatherSmithAU Join my FaceBook page : https://www.facebook.com/HeatherSmithAU  Connect with me on LinkedIn : http://www.linkedin.com/in/HeatherSmithAU    

💡 Inspiration for Launching BI Solution Futrli (Formerly Crunchboards) | Hannah McIntyre

Highlights of my conversation with Hannah McIntyre ·         Inspiration for launching Futrli formerly Crunchboards ·         The early design of Futrli ·         Working in a global community ··      Business support in Britain ·         Moving from compliance to value add   Transcript Hannah, what did you like to do when you were 12 years old? Hannah:        Oh my goodness. Probably take my sister into a room and beat her up.  No, that’s a ridiculous thing to say. What do I like to do? I lived in the middle of nowhere in the countryside in the north east of Scotland, so in the summer holidays which would be your winter, your version of your winter, our summer holidays … we did get some sun in the north east of Scotland, it would be a case of, “Right kids, we’ll see you at tea time and we’d be out on our bikes fishing and doing all this sort of Huckleberry Finn sorts of things. Yes, I was a bit of an outdoorsy girl. Heather:        Cool, you were out on the heather moors of Scotland? Hannah:        Well yes, something like that, or being thrown into the north sea with the beautiful beaches that we had. My mum going, “Get in there ya big Jessy.” “It’s ice cold mum and from the Baltic.” But it held no sway with her. We just had to man up and get in there. Heather:        Sensational. So Hannah, what inspired you to launch CrunchBoards? Hannah         Need actually. We had a … Amy and I had ourselves a company before CrunchBoard with a hospitality vertical, it was a back office system. We had that for a couple of years and had been using Xero, probably one of the first adopters of Xero in the UK, coming up for four years ago now. It changed my life completely as the one who does all the books for the business. I’d been using Sage desktop for a long, long time in a previous business that I had, manually exporting all the data, putting it into a spreadsheet for management accountancy information, future projections, all these things that the repetition and the inefficiencies that … and the headache quite frankly that that caused, was the inspiration for the original business, for the hospitality software. But whilst we were building that out, we were looking, or I was in particular, we were looking for a solution for ourselves. We were giving all these instant management accounts to the hospitality sector. I said, “Hold on a second. It would be great if I could have this functionality too.” So we went out, did a load of assessment and looked into the markets for the add-ons as they were, probably come out for a year and a half ago now. Obviously they’re vastly more in the market space now than they were then, and trialled all the solutions that were out there and none of them were a solution for us. I think primarily because they hadn’t been designed from the business owner up, they had been designed for the accountant down. That affords different problems. So guess what? I’d be pulling all the information out because they were putting it into a spreadsheet and back to square one again for the management information and future projections. So we did a load of interviews because if I was suffering in this way, then I’m sure a lot of other people were, and then that kind of led to the fact well then hold on a second, people started to mention, “Well my accountant this …” “My accountant that …” We started speaking to accountants too. This was a pretty big issue getting real time flexible, and that’s what spreadsheets do for you, they’re a blank canvas aren’t they? What do you want to build? Well, you build whatever you want. It’s your business. You know your metrics, your KPIs, you build what you need. That’s what we wanted to build with CrunchBoard. I spent a long time kind of designing it. Didn’t even tell Amy what I was doing in the background. Then we started to plan the design and started our first line of code actually was written 1st December last year. It’s been pretty fast. We’re coming up for our first code writing anniversary next week. Heather:        Definitely was very fast. You said you designed from the business owner up, which is a really interesting concept. I guess a lot of things are … it’s interesting where they’re being designed from. Who are you selling to, the accountant or the business owner? Hannah:        Absolutely both. From a commercial point of view, certainly the accountant because Xero realised that early doors that, “Yes, it’s for the business owner but actually there’s a complete avenue there to go down.” However, that for me has become really exciting because absolutely the core is to make … to demystify the numbers, to make analysis really, really super simple, easy, beautiful actually, you know, we take our inspiration from Xero strapline, “Well yes, actually I want to make my management information beautiful. I don’t ever want to have to create a pivot table again in my life. I don’t ever want to export data again.” So that’s kind of the core, however the journey that we’ve then gone on because of the accountant, for me particularly from the design side of things, has been really exciting because that then gives other solutions that you have to solve. On our board, on our CrunchBoards, you can view multiple clients side by side. It’s practise management and it’s a client experience too, and a lot of the reporting add-ons in particular are one or the other, they’re not often both, and that’s actually one thing that we’ve spoken about on Developer’s Day at Xerocon. It was nice to be able to say, “Well, actually, no, our product is definitely for both users.” The great thing is when the accountant actually shares a board with a client for the first time that they get this, “Oh my God, is that my business? Oh, and I can change that and I can change the date and I can view that the way I want to view it, not the way you think I want to view it.” So while we’re giving the accountant the tools, they are also then able to … and it’s a bit scary for them. I’m not going to lie. There’s some education happening around this but those who are adopting our product for their business are probably the early adopters in the bell curve that people talk about, and accountancy is changing. It’s not about compliance anymore and it certainly won’t be in five years’ time. Advisory is going to be huge, and those who are adopting tools like ours now are certainly ahead of the game in delivering an excellent client experience, and really empowering business owners with real time operational tools. It’s not a history lesson. It’s a live business plan to actually make your business better. Heather:        Absolutely. So you designed it in the early stages. What did that look like? What is you designing it in the early stages looking like? Hannah:        Okay, well as much as I bemoan excel, it does have its uses, doesn’t it? We’re still quite dev heavy actually, is our team, we’ve got seven developers. We’ve got a really big team which is amazing, which means that not only do we get to turn things around fairly quickly in development terms but also we’ve got a massive breadth of knowledge. Our design process is probably one of the most joyful parts of my life actually. I know it’s completely geeky isn’t it. It’s ridiculous. Honestly, if you had told Hannah McIntyre 10 years ago that I’d just say that, she’d probably just shake her head and go, “Who on earth are you?” But it’s a collaborative … it always starts with me and it’s a collaborative approach in as much as I’ll do the wire frames, the design, the rationale, the logic behind it, and then we’ll bring the team in to go, “Right, how can we make the user experience excellent? What can we do to make sure that from the beginning to the end of this process, it’s as few clicks as possible, it’s as effortless as possible?” So that’s the fun bit. Heather:        Cool. Are your team based there in …? Hannah:        They certainly are in Brighton. We have one in EastBourne but all the rest of them are in Brighton but we’re all got a pier that we can see, not from our windows, but fairly close. Heather:        Sensational. That’s actually quite unusual, especially for developers, they seem to be all over the place. Hannah:        Yes, so that’s important to me. I have to say that’s one thing that I’m really, really proud of is we are completely made in Britain. But it’s not just we’re local, we’re altogether we see each other regularly. They’re not all office based. Some of them work from home but we use software ourselves so that we’re all video streaming all the time and just click each other’s faces to start having a conversation. It just works. It works really, really well. Heather:        Absolutely. What’s been one of your biggest challenges along the way since launching CrunchBoards? Hannah:        I would probably say being taken … being so well received in Australia and New-Zealand, the antipodean region. It sounds a ridiculous thing to say that that’s a problem. It’s not been a problem. It’s a wonderful problem to solve but of course it’s meant … you met Amy my co-founder out there. She’s over doing a six week tour. Heather:        Absolutely. Hannah:        The time difference, it’s something that we’ve got to get around but luckily we don’t sleep. We are complete vampires, and that’s fine. We get the poly filler out in the morning and trowel it on and everything is good to go again. No, I mean it’s brilliant. It’s very exciting. We’re building an Australian team now which is super exciting, and in a million years, that was not part of the plan within the first year but it is now and that’s really exciting, but originally, a hurdle that we had to overcome with sound mind and some decent planning. Heather:        Yes, the time differences, which we can summarise that as, is a common thread I hear amongst the ad-on solutions. Hannah, you appeared on the cover of the inaugural addition of the XU Magazine, so I’ve got two questions for you. Tell us about the cover shoot and tell us about the impact the coverage had for your business. Hannah:        Oh that cover shoot where we are in mid-aid. I have to say we had the bonkers photographer. He said, “Just imagine that you’re jumping over a barrel.” I was like … well I don’t know why, maybe because I’m from the north east of Scotland but I said, “Can I imagine I’m jumping over a sheep?” which seems to work for me. Our New Zealand counterparts will probably like that. Yes, it was really good fun. We were there with the XU Magazine boys, and we just had a bit of a giggle with it all. That was good fun. What was the second question Heather, sorry? Heather:        What’s the impact the coverage has had for your business? Hannah:        Well, let’s use Xerocon Sydney as an example. People walked in, it was XU Magazine’s launch as well, great, we were on the cover. It absolutely helped with the fact that, you know, with who are these two in the double denim, what’s this? It was … of course it helped. Of course it helps and they’ve been incredibly supportive and continue to be so. Maybe it’s the British thing. Heather:        What I was interested in … I wasn’t trying to get a claim for XU Magazine. I was just interested in media coverage and stuff, and that’s great. Hannah:        Absolutely, it’s been … and actually, that wasn’t my response either. Seriously, it was really, really fantastic dovetailing. Before we went over there, when we got the phone call from Wes, it was just phenomenal, “Wow, we’re going over and we’re going to launch with a splash.” That was just brilliant. Heather:        Yes, it was massive. It made Xerocon Sydney fantastic. I’ve got quite a long question for you here. Doctor Gordon Patzer, who spent three decades researching physical attractiveness and says, “Human beings are hard wired to respond more favourably to attractive people,” to quote him, “Good looking men and women are generally regarded to be more talented, kind, honest and intelligent than their less attractive counterparts.” He contends that controlled studies show people go out of their way to help attractive people of the same sex and opposite sex because they want to be liked and accepted by good looking people. Do you see physical attractiveness more as something to be leveraged or your unfair advantage? Hannah:        Well, is that you giving me a sideways compliment Heather? Heather:        Yes, it was. Hannah:        That was a rather long way to do it. Thanks very much. Wow, okay, so this is one of those questions I have to think very carefully of how I answer I guess. No, I have two daughters and a stepson, and they are beautiful. Of course you always think your own children are beautiful. But I would say that it, wrongly probably, opens doors. However, if there’s no substance there behind it, then you’re dead in the water. Sometimes I actually think that perceived looks can hinder you because people make assessments about you before you’ve opened your mouth. I hope that Amy and I, as two females in the marketplace, are assessed on our product, what we’re bringing to the add-on eco system, and the way that we do business with integrity. Heather:        Absolutely. Hannah:        That’s all I guess I can say. I just hope that my kids embrace every opportunity they’ve got, and if they get given some more opportunities, then great but I’ll tell you what, they’ll have to work bloody hard to make a success of their life like their mum has to. Heather:        Absolutely. I know when you appeared on stage, the table I was with went silent, stunned, because you were a stunning, shining light there. Then you started speaking and one of them just went, “Bloody hell, she speaks English with an English accent as well!” They were, in a very loving way, amazed by you. How many customers does CrunchBoard need to be successful? Hannah:        Oh my goodness. We are meeting and exceeding our forecasts. I guess that’s a good thing. Heather:        Absolutely. Hannah:        We don’t need a set amount of customers I guess. It’s a case of building, you know, monthly recurring revenues as a business models is an interesting one, and maximising our potential in the antipodean region is absolutely what we’re focusing on at the moment. It’s lovely to see that we’ve got UKs signing up but actually we’re not pushing in the UK at the moment because we’ve got a focus there, and we’ve still got a small team. On the sales side of things we’re building that out now which is, again, another exciting step for us. We are thrilled with our progress. Heather:        That’s sensational. Hannah:        If we continue the way that we’re going then we’re in a really good place. Heather:        So it sounds like you’re a strong UK business with a heavy export focus. Are you getting assistance from the British export authorities – I don’t know what their name is – but the British export type authorities? Hannah:        It’s interesting actually because this week, the Daily Mail in the UK, there’s a focus that they’re doing all of that and actually we’ve been video interviewed for them, so that should be going out this week at some point. But on the export side of things, we are not getting any particular assistance, no. We’re working things out as we go along. I think the biggest challenge that we’ve got is getting the information about employing staff in Australia, New-Zealand, all of those things, because there’s pitfalls there and that, I guess, is our biggest challenge. Amy is going back over there in the New Year again, like I said, for the Australian roadshows. She’ll be doing a little bit more recywork but that’s progressing nicely. I guess it’s the legalities that you’re always a bit wary of. But we’ve got good accountants too. They’re helping us out which is great. Heather:        Sensational. What software do you use in your own business? Hannah:        Yes, I mean we run a SAAS business. We’ve got to use smart software ourselves don’t we otherwise we’re not really practising what we preach. So you’ll be happy to know that we run our business on CrunchBoards – Hurray! So building it from a selfish perspective worked. Heather:        Yes, sensational. Hannah:        I don’t know. So that’s brilliant. So from the development side of things, we’re massive fans of Trello. We use scrum methodology technology in our development plan. We use Trello for that which is fabulous. Absolutely love Trello. We are using things like Salesforce for our CRM. We’ve got some other cool tools like Squiggle that we use to collaborate with our development team, you know, those who are Eastbourne or who are working from home. I guess for me, the biggest one that we’re using is HipChat. We’ve got a room in HipChat which has got our conversation CrunchBoards room from the beginning of time. It’s brilliant because it feeds in with a different software, alerts and stuff that we’re using feeds into it to. That’s an essential tool for the dev side of things. Heather:        So HipChat is what you talked about when you said, “I just hit a button and talk to someone face to face?” Hannah:        No, that’s actually Squiggle. It’s constant video streaming. It’s brilliant. It’s really good. We’ve been using that since they launched it with their beta. They’ve been a few bugs which is fine. Heather:        You’re an early adopter, aren’t you, of everything? Hannah:        Yes, but you’ve got to remember as well, I’m working with geeky boys. It’s like, “Hannah, have you seen such and such?” “No I haven’t, I’ll check it out.” Things like Screen here, that’s quite good as well. I don’t know whether you’ve used that before. It’s kind of instant screen collaboration, and it’s absolutely brilliant. You’ve got both mouses there, you start typing, you’re on the other person’s screen. It’s phenomenal. From peer to peer dev side of things, that’s really cool too. Heather:        There seems to be a lot of screen adoption technologies come out recently because I know I’m still paying my $60 Go to Assist Citrix subscription which I think I need to drop and do one of those. Hannah:        We do use it. We’ve used others. I think that all of them, including Skype which we’re using at the moment, if that’s all you do really, it should be bloody good. Building an application that does a lot of things and making sure that they’re all good is hard work. If this is all you do, let’s get it going well. So I think screen technology is brilliant if it works, and we’ve all had issues where it doesn’t I guess. Heather:        Yes. How do you see the Xero ecosystem evolving? Hannah:        Well, it’s growing at a rate of knots isn’t it? Heather:        Absolutely, yes. Hannah:        Interesting, I’m not using many add-ons now myself. Heather:        No, it didn’t sound like it. Hannah:        We’re using our own because that’s what we needed to use. We are using things like Zapier Integrations which we use for our billing. We use Stripe for our billing, which is brilliant; it creates an invoice in Xero straight away, so that’s brilliant. I see us doing some interesting things next year with the ecosystem but I don’t want to speak too much about that because it’s ‘in the can’. Heather:        That’s okay. Hannah:        2015 is really excited with that. I think that Xero is really pushing the vertical add-ons, sometimes to the detriment of the horizontal add-ons that are out there. As much as Xero has given us all this opportunity in many cases, it is an accounting package. I think that if it loses focus on what actually is its core product, that it will actually create issues down the line with, “Well, what are you? Why build an ecosystem if you don’t want to actually help it flourish.” So I think the next year, in particular, will be very interesting. In particular when you look at Xero’s competitors and what they’re doing. We are purely Xero, certainly at the moment we are. We’ve made a decision despite the fact that we have got other integrations. I’m not going to name any names but we’ve got other integrations that we could turn on and we decided not to because they’ve been amazing. They’ve been very supportive of us. Heather:        Absolutely. You mentioned that you use Stripe billing with Zapier, does strike billing do your automatic subscriptions? Hannah:        Actually no, it doesn’t. Heather:        Okay. Hannah:        We built our … we could have and we did look at their … they’ve got great docs, they’ve got a great system but we’ve got kind of a variable billing system, so we actually built our own … one of our lovely boys went and built a custom one for us. Heather:        Oh, that’s good. That sounds like another little solution you could go and sell out there. Another one, “We built it because we needed it.” Hannah:        Yes, right. I think you’ve touched on this a bit but if you have anything to say, what changes are you seeing in the market moving from compliance to value add? I think you’ve said that you see it becoming … Hannah:        Look, you’re a CPA. Heather:        I’m FCCA. You actually know that. Hannah:        Absolutely. Heather:        People in Australia don’t know that. Hannah:        So previous life for me, I’ve had accountants beforehand who I’ve not seen for a whole year, and at the end of the year had gone, “Oh hi, it’s year end, we’ll get your accounts prepared and here’s a P&L and a balance sheet and here’s a bill for £2,000.” That was years ago. Years ago! Heather:        And that sounds really cheap. Hannah:        Yes, right, exactly. Well, it didn’t feel it but you’re just like, “What value am I getting here as a business owner?” So there’s that. We kind of parked that on one side but I think that business owners are kind of having … there’s some really entrepreneurial businesses out there. There’s still some huge business, fine, but yes I mean markets are traditionally time poor, on the ground, firefighting, all of those things, really hands on, and until you get to a point in your business where you can employ these things for you, you need input now and again. There was a great study, I can’t remember who commissioned it, that I read probably about a year and a half ago, that said that 84% of SME actually want their advisor to take on more of a CFO role, a remote FD role. Heather:        Yes. Hannah:        It’s hard doing it on your own. I may be wrong and I may be off here but I do think there will be a move that actually compliance will not be the thing that’s the billable. It’s actually  … actually I met a very interesting accountant in Brighton actually awhile back, actually last month, who she hasn’t got many clients but she does definitely perform that FD role for them and does not do compliance. They have another accountant for that. She’s not interested in it. It’s like, “I’m here to help you run your business and make you as successful as possible.” That’s exciting. Heather:        Yes. Hannah:        Compliance is a necessary evil. Tools are actually making that process a lot quicker, a lot easier than it was before, even for the single ledger it’s revolutionised a lot of these things. It’s a lot more streamlined, so where’s the value? What do we need an accountant for? Well, actually, you should have a hell of a lot of knowledge to help me run my business, so give me some. That’s where I see it going. Heather:        Absolutely. If you were talking to … and I’m asking you this because it’s specifically around your product, if you’re talking to a bookkeeper or accountant who’s never ventured into value add work, and there are a lot of people like that, what would you suggest is the easiest thing they can do, using your product, to help their client and value add? Hannah:        The first thing I’d say is how do you present data to your client? How do you give your client visualisation over their own business? First question. Often, there’s an um and an uh there, and a pause. Then the second point will be what we’ve just discussed, you know, the value add side of things, and what do business owners … we know this because we did the bloody interviews. We know it. We’re not making it up. Actually we’re one of those business owners, “Hi there, we’re one.” What we would then do is create … and we have, we have them already built out, but we’ve got sample boards that can get turned on and they work for every organisation because they’re a little bit more generic. That’s fine. It’s a great introduction to the visualisation side of things, the power of actually just being able to pull out one account, for instance, or income and see all of your sales streams side by side on a chart in seconds, and being able to change that data. Do you want to see it this week, this month? We’ve got a great client of ours that looks after cafés and restaurants and things. Great, so they’ve got one board. That’s a starting point, and then each business they’ll tailor it, of course, but for each vertical, we can get those things set up. The kind of point about it is we’ve created an engine, and it is an engine, it’s a platform that allows you to absolutely tailor and make bespoke in seconds, analysis: future, present and past. All of those things in one card, one of the cards that we’ve got on our board, can be flipped out into forecast data, again in seconds. It’s just that instant, effortless, and now you start doing this the conversation starts. That’s the point because the boards that we’ve built, you can then share with the client. They receive it. It gives them a mirror copy in their instance on their tablet, their phone, we designed it responsibly so it works on any device. It’s a case of right, we’re syncing with Xero automatically as well, about three times a day, three times every 24 hours, so that data just comes through. It’s being updated all the time. You build out your forecasting CrunchBoards as well. You’ve got that versus actual forecast. It’s how we compare it. Tracking is being released within the next week or so. They are looking amazing those cards at, and great plans for the future for consolidation of things at the beginning of next year. It just literally is, I know we say on our website, “Where Xero stops, CrunchBoard starts,” that really is the case. That’s what we’ve done. Heather:        Absolutely, and you seem to be evolving and bringing out new updates so quickly because I know that Amy said it almost looks completely different to the original version. Hannah:        It does. Again, I sneakily did version two while she was in Australia. I did it while she was away. It’s terrible. It’s like cheating on your wife. But the beauty of cloud, the beauty of … and that’s why we’re here isn’t it Heather, it’s all about cloud. The beauty of that and the whole point of it from an end user’s perspective is you don’t pay for a disk of some desktop software that you punch in to … plug into your machine, and then that’s it you’re done, and you hope that it doesn’t corrupt and you need to phone the support line. You get really an update for the same license fee. It just keeps giving. We’re just a gift that keeps giving. That’s the point of it all. Heather:        Absolutely, well you’re the frosting on the cake. Hannah:        The frosting on Xero’s cake, for sure. Heather:        So Hannah, I’ll leave you with one final question. What do you look forward to doing most? Hannah:        Oh my goodness. Seeing my kids more probably. I have mummy guilt quite a lot, so they’re seven, eight and twelve, and I think I’m really, really looking forward to Christmas this year. It’s been an insane 12 months, insane, and spending some family time with my kids and my amazing partner. He’s the rock. I couldn’t do it without him. I’m being a bit soppy now but that’s the truth. That’s the truth. Why do you do this? Why do you slog your guts out? For family. Are they looking like they’re going to go into computer sciences? Hannah:        It’s funny actually. My youngest, she’s a big crazy, that’s just an aside, that’s just a statement of fact, but she wanted to be a vet. She said to me the other day, “Mummy, if I don’t get to be a vet, I think I want to be a business woman like you.” I just thought, “Bless you darling,” because she sees the hours that Amy and I put in, and especially with Australia and New-Zealand of late. We start and 5 and tonight I’ll finish at 10:30. My day started at 5 today. Usually I’m drinking wine, today I’ve actually got water which is a big … I’m quite impressed with myself. So I hope that we’re an inspiration to the kids. I hope so. It would be nice. Heather:        Yes, I do think sometimes, and it may not work for you, but the cloud, it means you can actually be flexible around your children. Hannah:        At the end of the day, if I want to take a day off, I can do. If I need to work away, I can do. This year not so much because we’ve had so much to do but next year it will be different. We’re not going to take our foot off the pedal but we will be structuring things a little bit differently by taking on more staff, etc. Heather:        Absolutely. Thank you so much Hannah for speaking with us today. I’m sure our listeners will really appreciate everything that you’ve shared with us. Hope you have a wonderful evening. Hannah:        Thanks Heather. Heather:        Thank you. Cheers. Hannah:        Bye. End of Transcript Mentions ·        CrunchBoard http://crunchboards.com ·        Xero https://www.xero.com ·        Sage http://www.sage.com ·        XU Magazine http://xumagazine.com ·        Salesforce http://www.salesforce.com ·        Squiggle  https://squiggle.codeplex.com ·        HipChat https://hipchat.com ·        Zapier Integrations https://zapier.com ·        Stripe https://stripe.com   ·        Trello http://www.Trello.com

Kiwi Cloud Inventory Solution Calling Singapore Home 🏠 | Cameron Priest

Highlights of my conversation with Cameron Priest ·        Singaporean Government fostering a technology hub ·        Global adoption of add-ons ·        Setting up a start-up in Singapore ·        Growing a business with a multi-lingual support ·        Giving clients the “wow factor” during the on-boarding process ·        The Smart Enterprise Software Wave ·        Choosing a currency to price in ·        Blk 71 Ayer Rajah Cr– the hub for start-ups in Singapore Subscribe to Episode 9 of Cloud Stories on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/cloud-stories-heather-smith/id908333807 Read about it here: http://cloud-stories.com/ep-9-cameron-priest-tradegecko-kiwi-cloud-inventory-solution-calling-singapore-home/ TradeGecko is a world-class Inventory, Order and Supply Chain Management platform with a comprehensive suite of functionalities – packaged together in an intuitive, cloud-based interface, designed and structured ‘user-first’ from the ground-up. Expertly manage your inventory as you save time, eliminate errors and streamline your sales channels, synchronized across all your stakeholders in real-time. Transcript Heather:        Welcome, Cameron, to the show. Thank you very much for being here. Cameron, the first question I’d like to ask you is what did you like to do when you were twelve years old? Cameron:      Well, I grew up on a kiwifruit orchard in New Zealand, so a big part of my life was exploring and building go-carts with my brothers, building things with my father, so kind of creating things was a big part of being twelve and kind of exploring the property. Heather:        Wow. That’s amazing, growing up in a kiwifruit orchard. That sounds like the quintessential New Zealand dream doesn’t it? Cameron:      I feel like it’s the butt of every New Zealand joke because we had kiwifruit and we had sheep. Heather:        Did you? Oh, you mentioned the sheep. But that’s sensational. Was it like a big orchard? Cameron:      It was a large kiwifruit producing orchard. It’s not massive but my father’s full time job was managing the orchard, so it wasn’t insubstantial but he is still doing that today.   Heather:        Wow. That’s amazing. You have come so far from kiwifruits to this. I’m surprised your businesses name is not Kiwi Gecko or something like that or Kiwifruit Gecko. How did a guy from Auckland end up in Singapore as a CEO of TradeGecko? Cameron:      Yeah, well previously I’d had a business doing development of iPhone and web applications for third parties, so client based kind of web design agency, and we had some customers who were kind of having the issue that we now are trying to solve with TradeGecko which is managing the entire backend of their businesses, be they wholesale or retail businesses. I’d been searching and looking and kind of struggling to start a business that kind of ... I guess the theory was always a business that made money while you sleep. That’s always the end goal for everyone isn’t it? Heather:        Yes. Cameron:      So this to me was a great opportunity and the more I looked, the bigger the opportunity seemed. Yeah, I mean for us the move from Auckland to Singapore was just access to capital, access to international markets, and I guess just a shake-up. I mean it’s very easy to be very complacent in New Zealand. It’s beautiful and it’s slow and it’s easy to have a really good lifestyle but it kind of … a way to kick my own butt was getting out of my comfort zone. Heather:        That’s interesting. Are you the founder of TradeGecko? Cameron:      Yes, so there are three co-founders. There’s myself and Carl Thompson who moved over to Singapore, and then I actually poached my older brother who is a great engineer a couple of months later to head up our product team. Heather:        I did notice some other Priests on the ... Cameron:      We’ve actually recently hired the youngest Priest as well. He’s a great engineer. Heather:        Sensational, another ... it does seems a lot of the add-on solutions are a family entity or exercise, so that’s interesting. Cameron:      Yeah. How many staff do you have based in your Singaporean office? Cameron:      In Singapore, we’ve got 29. Heather:        Wow. That’s a lot. Do you have staff based elsewhere? Cameron:      Yes, we have a team in Manilla in the Philippines and we’ve just opened an office in San Francisco as well. Heather:        Wow, so you’re growing rapidly because the ... How old is the business? It’s only about two years old isn’t it? Cameron:      Yeah, just over two years. We’ve quadrupled since last November which is scary to be perfectly honest. Heather:        Yeah, it’s amazing. That’s amazing growth you’ve got there. So based on what you’re saying there, let me ask you ... let me just jump ahead and ask you another question. On your LinkedIn profile, you used the phrase, “We give the power of Walmart supply chain management to SME’s.” Where are your customers coming from and are you targeting the US market because obviously Australians don’t know Walmart. I’m presuming New Zealand doesn’t have Walmart, so it was a very American phrase for me sitting there in LinkedIn. Cameron:      You make a very good point. I hadn’t thought about that point of view. Yeah, we do target the US. To be honest, the US and Australia are our two largest markets. In terms of the Walmart phrase, there’s actually kind of a positioning statement we’ve used when raising fund raising. I guess I kind of internalise it and have been using it in market materials, and perhaps isn’t the most targeted for the Australian or New Zealand markets, but that was kind of theory. Yeah, Australia is a big market but US is now overtaking them as our largest market nowadays. Heather:        That’s sensational. How are you approaching the American markets because it’s such a huge market to crack? How you approaching that? Cameron:      With trepidation. I mean effectively … I mean with us and obviously part of this conversation is the partnership with Xero and Shopify were the first real partnerships that started getting us customers. So in Australia and New Zealand, we’ve really been able to grow to kind of ride the coat tails of Xero, and Xero obviously isn’t dominant in the US, although I’m sure we all hope and I’m sure Rod really hopes that it does become so in the future. Heather:        Yes. Cameron:      But it does mean that we’re kind of facing an uphill battle in terms of the way we kind of inch that market. Completely honestly, we don’t know everything about what our strategy is going to be to enter that market because it is such a different kettle of fish. It’s a work in progress. Heather:        Yes, it is. So are you seeing movement into the UK market? Cameron:      UK is our seventh biggest country. US is big, Australia, Canada, New Zealand of course, Singapore is surprisingly large for us being based here but it’s still it’s a surprisingly small country and surprisingly large number of customers. I guess your classic western English speaking markets are large markets but then we’re everywhere to the Republic of Congo, Mexico, South Africa, some very, very … you know, 86 countries. It’s crazy the places that are using our software. Heather:        It’s sensational. I imagine that … you have an inventory based software, I imagine, and correct me if I’m wrong, that compliance and legislation doesn’t necessarily affect you in that it would be same for inventory based software no matter where you are. Cameron:      Exactly. I mean there are always going to be little things. I mean the Alcohol Tax in Australia, the Wet Tax, is actually another difficult issue we’ve had to tackle and we’ve had other issues in other countries. To your point, the US still has very complicated sales tax regime that we need to kind of work with. Heather:        Okay, so that comes from within your solution rather than within the point of sales solution? Cameron:      Exactly. Heather:        Okay, that’s interesting. How would you describe the Asia Pacific, Singapore, South East Asia start-up seem? Cameron:      It’s burgeoning. I mean Singapore has had a lot of money inject into from the Singaporean government. In fact our first round of financing, our investors put in $89,000 and the government put half a million in. Heather:        Wow. Cameron:      You just don’t get that sort of thing in New Zealand and you have some similar schemes in Australia but they’re actually getting phased out not in. So we had this opportunity here which the Singaporean government has grasped to really invest, not ... I mean not substantial money but we’re still talking kind of $30-50 million dollars which to a government is very little but that’s a hundred different start-ups that can come to Singapore and start in Singapore. They’re really, really trying to foster a technology economy in Singapore. South-East Asia is growing as well but Singapore is definitely the hub. Are any of your founders, and excuse me you may have mentioned this, are any of your founders Singaporean nationals? Cameron:      We are all Kiwis. Heather:        Yes, you’re all Kiwis. Okay, that’s really interesting. Isn’t it? “I’m actually prepared to fund you so much coming over there.” That’s amazing. But I guess you have employed a lot of people there in Singapore. Cameron:      Definitely a lot of Singaporeans here as well. Heather:        Yeah. I know when I lived in Singapore, I was on a very nice salary there, and I never used to get taxed. I remember going down to the Singaporean Tax office and putting all my stuff out and I just said, “You’ve just got to tax me, there’s something wrong. You’ve got to tax me.” They looked at it and they said, “No, you don’t earn enough money.” Cameron:      It’s great. Isn’t it? Heather:        Yeah. I was just like going, “What’s going on here? This is crazy.” Yeah, but it’s an amazing place, amazing eco-system to live, so that’s really interesting. Do you think Asia is a market that other add-on solutions should be looking to move to and to base themselves there? Cameron:      I think it’s a premature step to take it too early. I mean effectively, the western markets: Australia, US, Canada, they adopt a lot faster. We see that. I mean we are here and we obviously have a big story about Asia, even saying that we’re still seeing the fastest adoption from the western markets.                         We are probably getting customers in the Philippines and Malaysia that we wouldn’t have otherwise and we have some very large customers, multi-thousand dollar a month clients that we wouldn’t have been able to capture if we weren’t here but I do not think that you need to be here for your first 10,000 customers. Heather:        Yeah but it’s something perhaps they can look at down the line because it wouldn’t be the first place I would have thought of setting up a head office there, unless I wanted some great food and great travel access points, which is what Singapore is very well known for. Cameron:      For us ... sorry, the one thing I would say is that Singapore and Hong Kong especially are just logistic hubs. For us, we’re very focused on the industries we work with. It’s got its own … we’ve got our own reasons for being here and those wouldn’t be true for a lot of other add-ons but they are true for us. Heather:        Fair enough. So Singapore has four official languages, English, Malay, Mandarin and Tamil, how do you deal with so many different languages in Asia both from a business perspective and from a software solution perspective? Cameron:      Well, firstly, we’re very luck that everyone in Singapore’s first language is English, so that’s never been an issue for us in that regard but obviously as you exist Singapore, there’s a lot less of that, there’s a lot of local languages. So to kind of work with that, we do have a very multi-cultural and a very ... what you’d think of as a melting pot in terms of our teams and in terms of the different languages. We Aussies and Kiwis are the odd ones out with our one language of English. Most countries in the world, they have 3, 4, 5 languages if they’re lucky. A lot of our team do speak multiple languages and as we’re growing our support our sales team around the region and around the globe, we are looking for multi-lingual support and sales people. I think that’s kind of the only way you can tackle it because while some of the people can speak English, they still like to spend their time, their days with what they’re comfortable with which is the language they grew up in. Heather:        Yeah, absolutely. How difficult is it for a software solution to overlay a different language across the solution? Cameron:      Technically not that difficult. The difficult part is the supporting and the documentation, it’s converting everything. But actually if you look at a piece of software like TradeGecko or Xero or any other add-on, we’re probably talking of a dictionary of less than a couple thousand words that need to be translated into a dozen different languages, and there are third party providers that will do that and maintain and keep that up to date for you for quite a low cost.                         But for us, that’s not the issue, it’s the selling, it’s the marketing, it’s the positioning, it’s the different brand images, it’s the different cultural disconnects that become quite difficult. Heather:        Okay, that’s interesting. TradeGecko has one of the best on-boarding platforms that I’ve ever used or seen. For the people listening, I’ve tried a lot of them out there. So what is it? How did you develop it? What are you using? Maybe just share with our audience what you’re happy to share about your on-boarding training. Cameron:      I think the one thing we really think about and we probably don’t think about enough is trying to really understand what is the “wow moment” for a new user. What we want to do is we want to get our customers to wow as soon as possible. I’m sure we don’t get that for everyone but we’re trying to get as many people to understand and see how good their business could be with our solution as fast as possible. That’s kind of driven our focus on really developing a really smooth on boarding, hopefully showing them the different pieces of what we do and how we can help them. I guess that’s just a really big focus of mine, and because it’s so important to me that obviously affects everyone in the organisation and we have some great designers who spend a lot of time thinking, interviewing customers, going out to visit customers, seeing what their day-to-day looks like, and really understanding and making sure that we are building the right thing effectively. Heather:        Yeah, so what I really liked was when I went into TradeGecko and started up, it seemed like sort of a slither or a pane came across and it told me to go in and setup a customer and suggested I went here and clicked on this and did that. Then another pane came across and they were all quite colourful, beautiful panes, and they came across and they just kept telling me how to do it. Was that something you inbuilt into the solution? Cameron:      Yeah, we developed that in-house. I mean effectively we believe the wow is important. The other thing is you want people to understand what we do and don’t do as fast possible just to … otherwise … so they can identify, “Is this for me or is this not for me?” That’s kind of why we built the beautiful kind of show them as much the product but not too much as fast as possible. Heather:        Yeah, absolutely. I always say to people, “Look, if you’ve got 90 minutes spare, go and sit down and go through that introduction process on TradeGecko because you just get a real good understanding on A) how an inventory solution should work and B) how your particular inventory solution works because for us as advisors, it’s so difficult to learn all these new solutions out there, especially I think we’re sort of hitting 300 out there and we don’t have the time to sit down. But when there’s something fast, easy, beautiful, and you could almost probably watch House of Cards while you’re doing it, like at the same time, it’s so simple to go through. It’s like a game I guess. I know that seems to be one of the things that some of the software developers are doing is building that sort of gaming type of thing into the solution. Cameron:      Yeah. What were the biggest challenges a Kiwi guys faces doing business in Singapore? Cameron:      The biggest issue that we’ve had is probably not being a Kiwi guy in Singapore. It’s being anyone that’s running a company that’s growing so fast. It’s kind of being introspective and being able to learn to work with a huge array of cultures, huge array of personalities and learning how to work with ... I mean it’s just something that you don’t get taught. I think unless you’ve had experience, you kind of have to make it up as you go. I think I’m very honest in saying that I don’t really know what I’m doing. I hope I know a little bit more than I did in a month ago and I definitely know a lot more than I did 12 months ago but I’m sure I’ll know a lot more in 12 months than I do right now. I think that’s probably the most important thing and the hardest thing for me has been understanding different temperaments, different cultures, different people. Heather:        That probably is more because you’re situated in Singapore perhaps then being in other places. Cameron:      Definitely. Heather:        When I was there, I found them, the Singaporeans, very welcoming of the expats. Do you find yourself very welcomed there? Cameron:      Very much so. I mean some of our best employees are obviously local guys and girls, and they’re just fantastic. They have a really good work ethic and they have a great education system here, so that really helps us obviously with our hires. Heather:        Yeah absolutely, completely agree. Five major trends have dominated the Silicon Valley recently in the last hundred years: electronic tools, semiconductors, enterprise, telecom and consumer. A sixth trend is emerging which venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale of Formation 8 has coined The Smart Enterprise. How would you describe the Smart Enterprise Software Wave that Lonsdale is referring to? Cameron:      Yeah. I guess this is exactly what we are trying to tackle and a lot of other cloud based solution providers are trying to tackle, and that’s the … today you can build online management software and that’s fine and that’s good and that’s pretty and that’s easy to use but what we really want to do is we want not to just give you tool to run your business, we want to give you the ability to make decisions and have insights. The Smart Enterprise Software Wave is kind of this discussion that as we kind of move everything online, there’s this huge amount of data. We don’t just process sales and manage inventory, we can also see things in our business and within our industries that can make us ... we can make decisions that can affect things like not just forecasting but global trends. That’s what the Smart Enterprise Software Wave gives us, it’s that big data access, the ability to make decisions to kind of couple, really easy to use, analytical software with smart people, to do things that previously could only have been done by team of scientists probably working in Excel for quite a few months, being able to bring that data and those insights to fray very easily at a click of a button. We’re not there yet globally but I think that in the next five to ten years, just the decision making power that a small business owner will have which previously you’d have to pay SAP a hundred million dollars to get, is just going to be fascinating. That’s really what we’re trying to help do. I think you’ve answered this but how can the other software development companies, listening in, leverage off this Smart Enterprise Software Wave. Should they be looking towards this analytical dashboard that you suggest? Cameron:      It’s very easy to think about as a dashboard but the way I try and think about is if you can imagine the life of your user, and in our case you probably have some guys in a warehouse, some guys in an office, maybe some sales rep on the road, the guy and the CEO and maybe the financial controller, there are all these different people and they have all these really important decisions to make every day.                         Instead of them having to think, “What do I need to do to do my job?” As a software provider, we can actually bring to the surface the right information that they need to make a decision and to actually tell them … maybe not make the decision for them but to at least kind of really point them in the right direction. I think you can only work that out by really understanding the day-to-day life of each of your products users and really thinking about what really impacts their day-to-day, their weeks, their months, their planning for the year. I guess that’s kind of what we really try and do. I’m not saying we’re perfect at that but really thinking holistically about your customers. I mean best case scenario you go and work in a customer’s work for a couple of days, immerse yourself in their life, truly understand where you can help them with data. Heather:        Yeah, it’s very difficult I imagine because your solution, while is inventory, is probably being used by so many vastly different bespoke companies, trying to adapt to everything that’s out there that’s using you. Cameron:      Exactly but you can probably think no company wants to sell this product. No company wants to have worse relationships with their suppliers. You can kind of go, “Okay, every company in the world would like more customers, would like better relationships, they’d like more advanced forecasting, they’d like to know more clearly what their profit margins are.” So I think there are some kind of general rules you can probably make which you can really help these guys answer in a way that the CEO that used to have to sit down for two weeks to do kind of Excel spreadsheets to understand the last 12 months of his business, he doesn’t have to do that anymore. He can press a button. As long as we understand what the right questions those people should be asking, I think we can really help these guys grow their businesses and of course grow our own businesses by doing that for them. Heather:        That’s really interesting. Thank you for that Cameron. So TradeGecko’s pricing is in US dollars, why did you make this decision? Cameron:      Again, it’s the Singapore thing. Being in Singapore, we had to choose a currency, it didn’t make sense to do it in Singapore dollars. Ultimately there was also a bit of technical decision there because we couldn’t do it in too many currencies, and so US dollars was just kind of the same default and the global software as a service space, in the future we may do regional pricing. To be honest, to do that, we will need to change the way that we bill but at this stage, again, I was just thinking globally, US dollar is identifiable by everyone, yeah, that was the thought. Heather:        Fair enough. So how many customers do you need to look at or do you need to on-board to generate one million dollars US a year? What sort of you looking at for that? Cameron:      Each additional million dollars … so we would be looking at ... if we look at our current revenue, every kind of 600 customers would give us US dollars a million in revenue at this stage. We’re actually in very nice position at stage. We’re actually reducing the number of customers we need as we start to bring on larger and larger clients. Heather:        That’s interesting. That’s exciting for you. Cameron:      Yes, very much so. If you’re bringing on these larger clients, how many transactions, maximum transactions, can you deal with a month? Cameron:      In terms of these, so we work with some very interesting clients, so the biggest automotive parts supplier in Europe, Oscar, and they’re doing somewhere upwards of 1800 sales a day through our systems. Heather:        Oh okay, that’s amazing. Cameron:      Admittedly they have done some customer integration into their customer e-commerce store, so they’re not taking advantage of every piece of what we do but nothing really limits us there. I think in our opinion, the limitations then becomes the workflow, it becomes very difficult to pack 1800 items. You’re talking about having a proper warehouse management system. That’s something we’re really trying to improve at all times is to cater to these bigger guys doing these larger numbers. Heather:        Excellent. That’s really interesting. Thank you for sharing that. So what are of being some of the key successes of TradeGecko? Cameron:      So really important, that first customer that wasn’t a friend or family member, so that was really, really good for us. I don’t know why, there’s just something about that first order. How many friends and family members did you have that needed an inventory solution? Cameron:      Well, because one of our co-founders was in the fashion industry, it wasn’t insignificant. I think we had our first kind of 11 customers, seven of which were friends and family, but that’s kind of changed now obviously. So what other significant milestones? I mean getting to where we are today, I don’t know why but each ... how we make it, it’s significant to us because this is another person who is depending on you for their livelihood. Heather:        Absolutely. Cameron:      So that’s a big one. Opening up the team in Philippines was big because we hired some really high quality people there to help us with products and sales. When you’re hiring people that have kids and you have got stable jobs and they’re joining you, you realise the responsibility, so that was a big one personally for myself. Heather:        Yeah, amazing. So one of the things that you released, probably maybe it was about six or eight weeks ago, was a beautiful infographic of inventory workflow, how was that received? Cameron:      Surprisingly well. To be completely honest, I wasn’t that involved with it. We have a great ... one of our marketing team members, Clara, was kind of running the show on that one. Heather:        Clara Lu, was that right? Clara Lu. Cameron:      Yes, surprisingly well. So it’s been picked up by a lot of different people and it’s kind of formented some really interesting discussions especially with some of our customers. It’s great when you have a customer come on board who says they saw that inventory thing, they finally understood something, and then they started to think, “Well, if this is what you can do to help us, then I want him,” which I’ll be honest, I was little bit sceptical about but they proved me wrong which I’m always happy to be proven wrong. Heather:        Yeah, some people only think visually. It’s interesting because some people are like, “I didn’t get that until you drew a picture of it.” I’ll include the infographic in the show notes for people to have a look at and the concept is you actually share it, isn’t it? That’s the concept? Cameron:      Of course, that’s the concept, yeah. Heather:        I noticed that when you shared it … so other people whom I have seen having infographics, they actually have it all linking back to your site and I noticed you didn’t have a direct link back to your site with the sharing of it but maybe that was just because it was for the first time. Cameron:      We’ve had some people linking back to it. I know some people can be very aggressive about that. I mean end of the day, if someone doesn’t want to link back to us and they want to share, I don’t have any problem with that. If we were doing everything just to get link backs, we’d be kind of probably creating quite sad material and output. Heather:        No, I certainly think an infographic as a marketing tool is very … can be very useful, and for business advisors being able to say, “Hey, have a look at this. This is what TradeGecko does.” Again, it makes our life a little bit easier and it is an infographic out there for anyone to use. I actually ... because you know I’m involved with XU Magazine, I told Wes we need to put in the next edition. So if you were 17 years old again, I don’t think you’re actually very old because from looking at your LinkedIn profile, but if you were 17 years old again and wanted to become the next Cameron Priest, what’s the quickest route to get there? Cameron:      Well firstly, I’m 27, so ten years ago. I think the biggest thing for me was just starting. I know it sounds very trite but it’s very ... I mean I can remember when I first learnt how to build software. The way I learned was finally ... I oversold my abilities and I got a project from a client, and then I had to quickly learn, I actually roped my older brother because he’s lot smarter than I am, to help me build something. I guess it’s very easy to talk about wanting to do something and very easy to kind of read everything and watch all the videos, but actually kind of committing yourself. There’s a very famous quote about this but I won’t quote it now because it’s quite long but it’s about just starting and when you start, providence moves, everything just kind of falls into pieces, everyone starts to help you, things just align. Things don’t always align in the right way but nothing helps you learn how to start except starting. Heather:        Absolutely. Do you think that your university qualification helped you to get to that position? Cameron:      Not at all. If you were 17 years old again, would you do that again? Cameron:      At 17, I still needed to grow up a bit, so probably yes. But I mean I tried to start businesses when I was 17, they weren’t in the technology space. I tried all sorts of different things, so I don’t begrudge that but I feel like starting is one thing and then also being exposed to people who have done it because some people are very lucky in which their parents are quite successful. Hence, they understand that the ability to create a business is not that hard. You don’t need to be super smart. You don’t need a 160 IQ. You just need to do it but I think for a lot of us, being exposed to people just like us who are successful makes you realise that it’s just about hard work. Again, that sounds very trite but being exposed to those sorts of people as young as possible, I think is very valuable. Where were you exposed to these sorts of people? Cameron:      So definitely after I moved to Singapore but before this my father is an entrepreneur. I can’t say he was a super successful one. He was a great Kiwi inventor, not a great businessman. I think that definitely exposed me to the ups and the downs of business but I do see friends who were kind of exposed to very successful business people, very young, and to them the idea of starting business has always been an obvious and relatively easy endeavour, whereas I think that majority of the population, it’s kind of something that’s always been a bit out of reach but it doesn’t need to be. Heather:        Okay, thank you. I’m just throwing one more question out there because you might have the answer, if you don’t know, no worries. If a business person was to go over to Singapore, are there any start-up hubs that they should visit that you know of? Cameron:      Yes, there’s one big one. Again, another government organisation has put it together which is a place called Blk 71 and there are probably 400-500 different start-ups there now and a bunch of investor capitalists. So it’s just Blk 71, and that’s just the name of the area and that’s the name of the building, it’s blk 71. That’s where all the technology companies, especially the younger ones, that’s where you start in Singapore. Heather:        Oh okay, that’s good. I’ll search that up and put that up in show notes. What suburb is that based in? Cameron:      That’s in Ayer Rajah, I can bring you the actual address for it afterwards. Heather:        Sensational. So, thank you so much for speaking with us today Cameron. I really enjoyed listening to you and hearing all of your insights about Asia and about TradeGecko, and I’m sure the listeners gained a lot of information from hearing from you as well. Cameron:      It was my pleasure Heather. Thank you very much. Mentions ·         TradeGeckohttp://www.TradeGecko.com    ·         https://www.facebook.com/cameronpriest ·         https://twitter.com/cameronpriest ·         http://www.linkedin.com/in/cameronpriest ·         http://cameronpriest.com/ ·         Xerohttps://www.Xero.com ·         Shopifyhttp://www.Shopify.com ·         Joe Lonsdale http://formation8.com/team/joe-lonsdale ·         Formation 8 http://www.formation8.com ·         Smart Enterprise Software Wave http://formation8.com/resources/the-smart-enterprise-wave ·         SAP http://www.sap.com/index.html ·         XU Magazine http://xumagazine.com ·         Block 71 http://www2.blk71.com Contact Details for Heather Smith ·         Click here to sign up to my newsletter http://bit.ly/SignUp4Newsletter ·         Listen to my podcast : http://cloud-stories.com/   ·         Read my latest blog post : http://www.heathersmithsmallbusiness.com/blog/ ·         Visit my website : www.heathersmithsmallbusiness.com  ·         Book time with me heathersmithau.gettimely.com/book    ·         Subscribe to XU Magazine : http://www.xumagazine.com/ ·         Subscribe to my YouTube channel : https://www.YouTube.com/ANISEConsulting ·         Follow me on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/HeatherSmithAU ·         Join my FaceBook page : https://www.facebook.com/HeatherSmithAU  ·         Connect with me on LinkedIn : http://www.linkedin.com/in/HeatherSmithAU    

Start-up Community 🚀 and Coworking Space in Brisbane | Peta Ellis

Highlights of my conversation with Peta Ellis Benefits of working in a co-working space Brisbane tech Start-ups successes Various events held at River City Labs   Mentions River City Labs http://www.rivercitylabs.net/ River City Labs Events / Start-up weekend http://www.rivercitylabs.net/events/ Rails Girls http://railsgirls.com/ Uber https://www.Uber.com/cities/brisbane Ollo Mobile http://ollowearables.com/ Mothers Groupie https://mothersgroupie.com/ Right Pedal Studios http://rightpedalstudios.com/ SydStart http://sydstart.com/                                      Today I am speaking with Peta Ellis the General Manager at River City Labs: Brisbane's premiere Startup Community and Co-working space. Peta has been described as the “hub of the Brisbane start-up community" and was ranked 6 in the Top 50 Global Lean Evangelists, and StartUp Daily listed Peta as a Brisbane mentor all start-ups should get to know. Questions asked: Who is your favourite super hero and why? What is the purpose of River City Labs? What is the catalyst that started River City Labs ? What sort of business does it suit? How will a business benefit from being in a co-working space? When does a business know it is ready to join a co-working space? And where are they coming from? How does the rent a desk concept work, and if we have people listening in from overseas is the rent a desk option open to them too? You run a lot of events at River City Labs: what events have worked really well? And what events unexpectedly bombed? How can someone get in touch with you if they are interested in running an event at River City Labs? What have been some key successes for River City Labs? What have been some obstacles’ the co-working space has faced along the road? How strong is the start-up community in Brisbane? What have you learnt from managing River City Labs?   To get in touch with Peta Ellis http://www.rivercitylabs.net/ Events http://www.rivercitylabs.net/events/   To get in touch with the host of Cloud Stories Heather Smith http://www.heathersmithsmallbusiness.com http://www.twitter.com/heathersmithau http://www.FaceBook.com/heathersmithau   http://www.LinkedIN.com/in/heathersmithau

Secret Confessions 🗣️ of a Xero Cloud Integrator | Dan Fairbairn

Dan Fairbairn Secret confessions of a Cloud Integrator Highlights of our conversation ·         Pricing bespoke projects ·         Overview of Vend and SimPro ·         Mapping out client workflows and requirements Mentions    Waypoint formerly Ocius Digital http://www.wearewaypoint.com/ simPRO Software http://simpro.com.au/ WorkFlowMax http://www.workflowmax.com/ Xero http://www.xero.com/ Vend http://www.vendhq.com/   Deputy http://www.deputy.com Ocius Digital Technical, yet approachable. Professional, yet personable. Casual, yet dependable. Our clients choose Ocius Digital because our depth of experience and our unrelenting commitment to solving the most challenging business problems. We understand the obstacles and opportunities that small businesses balance each day including the seemingly never-ending demands on the directors, finding the time to work ‘on’ the business and not just ‘in’ the business, and constantly seeking ways to minimise the administrative overheads. www.ociusdigital.com.au www.facebook.com/ociusdigital @ociusdigital au.linkedin.com/in/danieljfairbairn/ To connect with Heather Smith Click here to sign up to my newsletter http://bit.ly/SignUp4Newsletter Listen to my podcast : http://cloud-stories.com/   Read my latest blog post : http://www.heathersmithsmallbusiness.com/blog/ Visit my website : www.heathersmithsmallbusiness.com  Book time with me heathersmithau.gettimely.com/book    Subscribe to XU Magazine : http://www.xumagazine.com/ Subscribe to my YouTube channel : https://www.YouTube.com/ANISEConsulting Follow me on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/HeatherSmithAU Join my FaceBook page : https://www.facebook.com/HeatherSmithAU    Connect with me on LinkedIn : http://www.linkedin.com/in/HeatherSmithAU    

Challenges of Starting a Modern Cloud Accounting Practice 🤹 | Chris Wheatley

Today I am speaking with Chris Wheatley founder of Scope Accounting. Chris Wheatley is the founder and CEO of Scope Accounting a full service accounting business launched 8 weeks ago! Highlights of our conversation ·         Challenges of starting a new business ·         The thought process of choosing a business name ·         How Chris is using Sharesight and WorkFlowMax in his business Other solutions mentioned in this episode include: http://www.sharesight.com.au/ http://www.workflowmax.com/   Contact Chris Wheatley at https://www.facebook.com/scopeaccounting Contact Heather Smith at http://www.heathersmithsmallbusiness.com/

Coffee With Rod Drury ☕ Inspired the Birth of Re-Leased: Residential Property Management and Trust Accounting | Tom Wallace

 Today I am speaking with Tom Wallace founder of Re-Leased. Tom Wallace is the founder and CEO of Re-Leased a cloud-based, property management software designed to automate and simplify the management of your property management portfolio. Highlights of our talk: Coffee with Rod Drury -> Founding Re-Leased -> #Xerocon Start-Up Alley -> Winner of Xero NZ 2014 Emerging add-on of the year-> what next? Why New Zealand is leading the way in technology development. New developments of Re-Leased: residential property management and trust accounting Other solutions mentioned in this episode include: https://trello.com/ http://www.timely.com/ http://2012.redjungle.com/xero   Contact Tom Wallace at http://www.re-leased.com/ Contact Heather Smith at http://www.heathersmithsmallbusiness.com/