BROADCASTS.com

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Never talk directly to clients about Cash Flow, and other secrets from the Cash Flow Queen | Martha Yasso

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Presenting, Storytelling and Communicating for Accountants | Alexandra Bond Burnett

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A Restaurant Solutionist Creating Magical ✨ Client Experiences | Kristen Nies Ciraldo

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Why an Accountant started a bookkeeping business | Meryl Johnston

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Accountants empowering their client base through podcasting | Tim Garth and Dan Osborne

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How hosting a podcast helped this bookkeeper develop active listening skills | Alexi Boyd

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Celebrating 100 episodes of the Cloud Stories podcast

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Building and Running a Highly Engaged Community | Catherine Walker aka OG

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Supporting Your Clients and Yourself Through Uncertainty | Dylan Burgess

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Building Communities, Influencer Marketing and Customer Experience 2️⃣.0️⃣ | Alison Ball

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Has a black swan event changed this Evangelists views on niching? | David Leary

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Sitting in the passenger seat with founders helping them achieve their dreams | Martin Zych

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Microsoft SharePoint for Accountants and Bookkeepers

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How to Build Culture While Working Remotely | Brian Walsh

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☁️A Cloud Integrator for the Construction Industry | Robert Hudman

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Building a multi-disciplinary professional services business | John Knight

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Bridging the People Advisory gap | Will Lopez

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What the future of banking can mean for accountants and bookkeepers| Yoseph West

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A chat about Insolvency and how advisors can help their clients through these difficult times| Jarvis Archer

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How Company Collapse and Embracing Disruption Led to ⛑️ XBert Helping Businesses Succeed | Troy Brown

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A marketing platform and content library purpose-built for the Accounting profession| Ian Christie

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At 14 Years Old Meet, the Youngest Xero Certified Advisor in the World! | Ollie Beale

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Accountants are like financial doctors and Covid19 is like all your patients are sick at once | Jamie Beresford

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Find opportunities for growth in your product career | Rosemary King

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A chance meeting with Rod Drury on her honeymoon, changed this female software engineer’s destiny | Shanu Mehta

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Accounting World Domination | Liz Mason

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How a modern future-focused firm scopes, selects and implements best of breed cloud solutions | Lee Duffield

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Unlocking your untapped capacity using cloud applications | Amy Holdsworth

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Common traits of successful modern accountants and bookkeepers | Luis Sanchez

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Living up to the critical role of ✅ “Recession-Proof Accountant”| Will Lopez

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Tackling the challenges Accounting Apps face navigating Covid 19 | Nick Houldsworth

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How to create a scalable modern firm that can sell | Ryan Lazanis

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Paul Murray – Playing the cloud game: how a computer game designer turned accountant built an app to transition his practice to the cloud

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How a computer game designer turned accountant built an app to transition his practice to the cloud | Paul Murray

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Decision Making: The art and science of finding value | Lance Rubin

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Lance Rubin – Decision Making: The art and science of finding value

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How she started a 100% cloud-based practice | Natalie Lennon

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Natalie Lennon – Starting and running a 100% cloud-based practice

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Natalie Lennon – How she started a 100% cloud-based practice

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A Serial Entrepreneur on Building Businesses, ⛵ Navigating Cultural Differences, and Always Learning | Michael Ly

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Michael Ly – A serial entrepreneur on building businesses, navigating cultural differences, and always learning

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Building a practice workflow solution that stops client work falling through the cracks | David Cristello

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David Cristello – Building a practice workflow solution that stops client work falling through the cracks

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People, Processes, Technology and Data: Essential Elements of a ♻️ Sustainable Business | Nick Sinclair

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Nick Sinclair – People, Processes, Technology, Data: Essential elements of a sustainable business

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Nick Sinclair – People, Processes, Technology and Data: Essential elements of a sustainable business

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Discover the secret sauce to writing killer content: Top Ten Tips | Brad Ewin

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Ep.67 Brad Ewin - B2B Content Writer + Strategist GoCardless

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Brad Ewin – Discover the secret sauce to writing killer content: Top Ten Tips

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An inventory nerd solving complex problems with simple solutions | Jeri Wambeek

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Ep.66 Jeri Wambeek co-founder Which Add On

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Jeri Wambeek – An inventory nerd solving complex problems with simple solutions

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On a mission to make humans as employable as possible | Ben Thompson

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Ep.65 Ben Thompson - CEO - Employment Hero

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Ben Thompson – On a mission to make humans as employable as possible

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Reducing Fraud ⚠️ and Improving Supplier Relationships Through Digital Approval Workflows | Martin Peirce

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Ep.64 Martin Peirce - CEO and Founder Zahara Software

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How Accountants can effectively scale Power BI analysis | Cameron Lynch

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Ep.63 Cameron Lynch - Founder Etani Business Platform

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How to Pick the Best Apps to Drive Your Business Advisory Service | Tim Hoopmann + Joseph Robins

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Accounting Business Expo 2019 with Tim Hoopmann + Jospeh Robins

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What are cloud-based app solutions?

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Ep.61 My interview on the Tax Wrap podcast.

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Current trends and opportunities in the Apps Advisory world | Jeffrey Atizado & Clinton Cowin

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Ep.60 Jeffrey Atizado & Clinton Cowin – Cloud Integrators – Current trends and opportunities in the Apps Advisory world

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World's First Accounting Futurist | Chris Hooper

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Ep.59 Chris Hooper – Founder, Accodex

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Flipping the Australian Accounting conference model on its head | Laura Venables

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Ep.58 Laura Venables - Event Director, Accounting Business Expo & Accountech.Live

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WCOA2018 Helen Brand - Association of Chartered Certified Accountants

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Building a cashflow forecasting solution that the business owners can rely on | Colin Hewitt

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Ep.57 Colin Hewitt - Float Cash Flow Forecasting

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Ep.56 Clayton Oates - QA Business Pty Ltd

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Mid August 2018 Update from Heather Smith

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Ep.55 Phong Le - Expensify

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What's Happening with Cloud Stories Podcast

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How To Get Clients Wanting You To Increase Their Fees | James Ashford

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Ep.54 James Ashford - Go Proposal

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Ep.53 David Barrett – Expensify

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Ep.52 Daniel Tramontana - BGL Corporate Solutions

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Ep.51 Trent McLaren – Practice Ignition

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Ep.50 Tracey Newman – Cloud Counting

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Benefits of teaming up with Cloud Integrators | Helen Goodman

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Ep.49 Helen Goodman – Invisible Business Solutions

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Ep.48 Lessons Learn at Xerocon 2016

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Ep.47 Sophie Hossack – Receipt Bank

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Ep.46 Andrew Van De Beek – illumin8

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Ep.45 Wayne Schmidt – Karbon

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Ep.44 Jacqui Jones – Way We Do

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Ep.43 Danetha Doe – Danetha Doe Consulting

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The Importance of Processes and Collaboration⚙️ in Building a Modern Practice | Greg Tuckwell

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Ep.42 Greg Tuckwell – Zerobooks & Poole Group

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Building a ☁️ Cloud Banking Solution From the Ground | Jessica Ellerm

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Ep.41 Jessica Ellerm – Tyro

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Ep.40 Matt Wilkinson – Bizink

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Ep.39 Richard Francis – Spotlight Reporting

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Ep.38 Lisa Martin – GoFi8ure

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Ep.37 Bernadette Schwerdt – Copy School

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Ep.36 Geni Whitehouse – Even A Nerd Can be Heard

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Cloud Accounting podcast host Blake Oliver shares his recommended apps for accountants and bookkeepers

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Ep.34 Dan Schmidt – The Emerging Business CFO

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Providing Businesses With a 1️⃣ Stop Shop| Jamie Davison

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Ep.33 Jamie Davison – Carbon Bookkeeping

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Ep.32 Mick Devine – Calxa

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8️⃣ Key Business Disciplines for Success | Peter Vessenes

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Ep.31 Peter Vessenes – Profit See

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Before From The Trenches Paul Meissner shared his origin Cloud Story

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From the Trenches Podcast Host Shares His Origin Story ✍️ | Paul Meissner

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Ep.30 Paul Meissner – 5ways Group Chartered Accountants

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Ep.29 Matt Flanagan – Blue Hub

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Ep.28 Guy Pearson – Practice Ignition

Questions

• ·         Who would you like to have coffee with and why?
• ·         What inspired you in September 2009 to founded Interactive Accounting?
• ·         Why do you think it’s important to differentiate your accounting practice by focusing on a niche?
• ·         Within your own firm you were focused on systemising your firm to achieve a greater ROI. How did you go about doing that? What platform did you do it on? Is this where you recognised the need for Practice Ignition?
• ·         Can you explain to our listeners what Practice Ignition does?
• ·         Can you write code? What code is it built on?
• ·         How does an old school practice move to the clouds, how do they adjust their business model, for such a major upheaval?
• ·         Would it be easier to just start again?
• ·         How long have you seen it take, and can you estimate how much they should budget for it?
• ·         You have had the opportunity to spend time abroad residing in Silicon Valley and roadshows in England and Canada – what’s your perception of the state of the global market and adoption of cloud?
• ·         Is there any future in a compliance only based accounting practice – that is one that only does tax work?
• ·         Your accounting practice has won numerous awards from Xero, and your solution Practice Ignition has received investment from one of the main investors in Xero, so it’s fair to say you’ve had a long term relationship with Xero – how do you navigate building relationships with other accounting software solutions?
• ·         The MD at Interactive Accounting Lisa Callaghan has recently written an article on linkedIN highlighting Capacity Planning and Staff Allocation are both unnecessary pain-points in today’s practices. And she estimates it is taking her $30K a year to achieve. What are your thoughts on this issue?

Resources

www.practiceigintion.com

https://www.facebook.com/PracticeIgnition

https://twitter.com/ignitionapp

https://www.linkedin.com/company/practice-ignition

https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/100124838410297066883/+Practiceignition/about

http://www.practiceignition.com/blog

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Ep.27 Sonia Cuff – Computer Trouble Shooters Aspley

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Ep.26 Marcus Wilson – Surgical Partners

·         Thinking outside the box: rather than create a cloud practice management system, Surgical Partners have created a conduit between Xero and numerous practice management systems enabling data to flow to a cloud business platform

·         Enabling doctors to see a timely view of their revenue split on their mobile phone

·         Receiving receivables in health care is not a problem, matching them is!

·         Dealing with the soft limits of Xero. 

Join the FaceBook Mastermind group https://www.facebook.com/groups/XeroMasterMind

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Building Teams and ⚡ Growing Businesses Fast | David New

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Ep.25 David New

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Ep.24 Special episode - Sophie Hossack - Receipt Bank

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Ep.23 Andrew Sims – The Full Suite

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Ep.22 Steven Shelley – Deputy

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Ep.21 David Tuck – Chaser

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Ep.20 Lisa Martin – GoFi8ure

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Cloud Accounting podcast host Blake Oliver - the early days of building a bookkeepeing practice!

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A Cloud Integrator Specialising in Modernising Café’s ☕ | Nick Hazel

·         Café Bookkeepers - http://www.cafebookkeepers.com.au/

·         Monocle Bookkeeping - http://www.monoclebookkeeping.com.au/

·         Deputy - http://www.deputy.com/

·         Receipt Bank - http://www.receipt-bank.com/

·         Asana - https://asana.com/

·         WorkflowMax - http://www.workflowmax.com/

·         Zendesk - https://www.zendesk.com/

·         Everhour - https://everhour.com/

·         CrunchBoards - http://crunchboards.com/

·         Beat the Q - https://www.beattheq.com/

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Ep.18 Nick Hazel – Café Bookkeepers

·         Café Bookkeepers - http://www.cafebookkeepers.com.au/

·         Monocle Bookkeeping - http://www.monoclebookkeeping.com.au/

·         Deputy - http://www.deputy.com/

·         Receipt Bank - http://www.receipt-bank.com/

·         Asana - https://asana.com/

·         WorkflowMax - http://www.workflowmax.com/

·         Zendesk - https://www.zendesk.com/

·         Everhour - https://everhour.com/

·         CrunchBoards - http://crunchboards.com/

·         Beat the Q - https://www.beattheq.com/

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Mastering Your Day with an Affordable Appointment Scheduling Solution | Ryan Baker

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Ep.17 Ryan Baker – Timely

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Ep.16 David Watson – Fathom

·         What you need in place to offer advisory services

·         How cloud technology is disrupting traditional business intelligence

·         Benchmarking for small business owners

·         How to maximise your time at conferences    

     Mentions

·         Fathom - http://www.fathomhq.com/

·         Xero - https://www.xero.com/

·         Vend - http://www.vendhq.com/

·         eWAY - https://www.eway.com.au/

Connect with Heather Smith

Click here to sign up to my newsletter http://bit.ly/SignUp4Newsletter

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 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

Add me to your circle on Google + https://plus.google.com/+HeatherSmithAU/posts

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Ep.15 Alex Falcon Huerta – Soaring Falcon Accountancy

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Ep.14 Saul Colt – Xero

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Ep.13 Steven Renwick – Satago

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Ep.12 Barry Dowling – TransferMate Global Payments

·        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/

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Ep.11 Tejasawi Raghurama – ZapStitch

·        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

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·        Freshdesk - http://Freshdesk.com

·        Intercom - https://www.Intercom.io

·        Bolder Band - http://www.bbolder.com

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Ep.10 Hannah McIntyre – Futrli

·         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 1^st 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

Listed in: Other

Ep.9 Cameron Priest – TradeGecko

·        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/  

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Listed in: Other

Ep.8 Peta Ellis – River City Labs

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Ep.7 Dan Fairbairn – Waypoint

·         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

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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/

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Listed in: Other

Ep.6 Chris Wheatley – Scope Accounting

·         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/

Listed in: Other

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

Listed in: Other

Ep.5 Tom Wallace – Re-Leased.

Listed in: Other

Time Tracking ⏱️, Inbox Zero, Internal Collaboration Tools | Jared Armstrong

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Ep.4 Jared Armstrong – MinuteDock & Conference Tips

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Running a virtual Xero bookkeeping, support and training business | Gayle Buchanan

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·         https://twitter.com/HeatherSmithAU/

·         https://www.facebook.com/HeatherSmithAU

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Ep.3 Gayle Buchanan – Number Nurses

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·         https://twitter.com/HeatherSmithAU/

·         https://www.facebook.com/HeatherSmithAU

·         http://www.linkedin.com/in/heathersmithau

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The impact on a business working with an investor | Colin Hewitt

·         The impact on the business of working with an investor

·         Experience of being part of the Xero add-on eco-system

·         Forming CodeBase a co-sharing space and the Edinburgh start-up scene

Note: After this interview was recorded Float won Xero Emerging Add-on Partner of the Year 2014

Transcript

Heather:        Welcome Colin to Cloud stories. We’re so pleased to have you here.

Colin:              Hi Heather, good to be here.

Heather:        What’s the weather like in Edinburgh at the moment?

Colin:              Well it’s a little bit cloudy at the moment. We had a good stretch probably about a week of good weather. It’s come to an end unfortunately today but we’re hoping that’s it’s just temporary.

Heather:        Sensational. So Colin, I’ll start with a really hard question upfront.

Who is your favourite superhero and why?

Colin:              My favourite superhero? Well, I’m not sure if you have the same superheroes as you do in Australia but I was always like a big Spiderman fan.

Heather:        Sensational, that’s Scottish Spiderman version.

Colin:              Scottish Spiderman, of course, yeah. I like the way he had a spider sense, you know, how the spider sense was tingling. That’s always a good line and sometimes I think have that as well.

Heather:        The spider sense. That’s a good heading for a story about you. Sensational, thank you for that Colin.

Can you share with us what your business [Float] does Colin?

Colin:              Yeah, so our business Float is a piece of software that we’ve designed to try to help business understand a bit more about their business. Really the main thing that we focus on is how much cash is in the business and what your bank account’s going to be at any point in the future. So we think that’s one of the most interesting or the more interesting parts of the business. You can get lots of insightful management reports but sometimes you just want to know, can I afford to pay for this and will there be enough cash at the end of the month to pay the salaries? That’s what we focus on at Float.

Why is it important to have a forecast or a cash management system in place?

Colin:              Yeah, I mean the story of where we got Float from is I used to have a web design agency, and we were always asking that question of, you know, is there going to be enough to do X or Y, and having to go back into a spreadsheet was a painful process because it was always out of date and we always felt well, hold on I can answer your question in a couple of hours when I’ve put in all the figures. So yeah, having a forecast is really … is definitely important but certainly it can be a bit of a pain to manage if you don’t have it updating automatically.

Heather:        I know that spreadsheet pain.

When did you start your business Colin? When did you start this business which is Float.

Colin:              So Float … there was kind of an overlap period. We started as a side project while we were running the other business, so I think we started in about 2010. It was me and my co-founder. So he was working on it in his spare time. I had the idea, I had the spreadsheet and I said, “This is what I’m looking for,” and he thought it would take about three months. So four years later, we’re still working on it. It was a sort of gradual start but my co-founder came on board full time I think in around the beginning of 2011. Then I sold the web agency in the beginning of 2012. So we’ve probably had about just over two years being full time on Float.

Heather:        Sensational.

Did you come from a numbers background?

Colin:              Not at all. I actually flunked my Maths A level exam.

Heather:        You didn’t need to share that with us but it was interesting you said coming from a web design business into numbers which a …

Colin:              No, absolutely. I guess where I came from was I was the one who was having to deal with the numbers. We were using spreadsheets to run our business and I thought our spreadsheet was pretty darn good. I’d worked on it quite hard and it did everything that it needed to do. It just took so long and we actually started using cloud accounting software. We used a package initially called Free Agent which is great for our really small business, also another Edinburgh company, and then we just realised that it was amazing to have a lot of that stuff automated all of a sudden and in the cloud.

It took a lot of pressure off me but then it didn’t have the forecasting part that was really important to me, so we still had to use the spreadsheet for that. But yes, I wasn’t a numbers person naturally but I’d kind of come to this out of necessity. Then I found I kind of had a little bit of pleasure just about getting everything to match up to the penny but it probably took me a lot longer than it would for some other people. Yes, numbers weren’t my strong point. I had no background in accounting, and when we spoke to some accountants about forecasting and read about forecasting, it all seemed very complicated. We just thought, “Gosh, it’s got to be simpler than this.” Even some of the language, just clarifying, was a helpful starting point.

Yes, so we really approached it from a non-accounting point view and then tried to get back to some of the corporate language from accounting as we’ve gone on.

Heather:        That’s an interesting perspective to take it from certainly. I’m a great believer that everyone can get their numbers, so it’s exciting to hear someone coming from a different side but sort of coming to the numbers party.

Where did you get the name Float from?

Colin:              Good question. So what we really like … for me the concept of cash flow is like a wave, you know. Sometimes you’re up and sometimes you’re down and when we look at our cash flow graph, it is much more like a wave; we’d get high points in the month and then low points. It was always trying to make sure that the low points weren’t too low.

So we sort of have this nautical theme, you know, riding the waves of cash flow and making sure you don’t sink and all this kind of thing. We explored a lot of nautical themes, thinking about life boats, binoculars so you’re looking out over the horizon and all that kind of thing. So we really like the nautical concept of now beginning your way through the business. Yeah, we’d also liked concepts that were about flow, so it was flow, flow, flow. Then we sort of thought, “Float, that works, you know.” Then somebody pointed out that there is also a concept of cash float in a business, you know, you’ve got enough cash in a till to get you started at the beginning of the day. So it all came together pretty nicely for us.

Heather:        Serendipity.

Colin:              Yeah, we’ve played with the few different variants but Float was the one that stuck.

Heather:        So what are the waves off coast of Edinburgh?

Colin:              Well, unfortunately they’re not great for surfing because it’s sheltered but if you go up to the north of Scotland, I think you’ve got some of the best waves in the world. But yeah, for the Edinburghers’, it’s not a great … you don’t get a lot of great waves unfortunately.

Heather:        So you weren’t inspired by looking at your window and seeing the floating boats coming?

Colin:              Well, I also grew up with the North Coast of Ireland, so I was quite used to being in the sea.

Heather:        Yeah, I think it’s always good to have a name that has that connotation attached to it.

Colin:              When we started off the business, we actually had a lot other parts in the graphics. It was a lot more fun and we’ve kind of grown up a bit but we had light houses and sharks and all those kinds of stuff.

View the other Float logos here: http://blog.floatapp.com/2013/11/01/7-steps-to-our-new-logo.html

Heather:        I went and had a look at those.

Colin:              Did you? Yeah.

Heather:        So if listeners are listening, go and have a look at floatapp.com blog. I think if you just do a search for logos, there’s a list of all different logos that you’ve got there.

So you’re based in Edinburgh, what’s the internet connection like there?

Colin:              Yes, it’s great actually. Scotland seems to have … they’ve really invested in that. We’ve just moved into a new building with a lot of other start-ups called CodeBase in Edinburgh. It’s right next to the Edinburgh castle.

Heather:        Oh wow.

Colin:              We’ve got a fibre line directly into the building and we get about one hundred megabytes up and down which is incredible. It really makes a big difference just having that consistency.

Heather:        That’s amazing. That’s really good. So you’ve moved into Codebase, is that an incubator or a sharing spacing?

Colin:              Yeah, so it was interesting, I actually spent a bit of time over in Boston and went to see some incubators there, one called Techstars. Came back to Edinburgh and just said, “Look guys, there’s no point all being on our own. If we were in together, there’d be a lot of synergy, a lot more sharing of knowledge.” Just at that time a building came up and about fifteen start-ups all decided to move into it together. We worked on it, we painted it, we stripped out the carpet. It was a really good experience for the local sort of start-up community.

Heather:        Sounds like a reality TV show.

Colin:              Yeah, it was. It was a really interesting time just sort of getting the work together and the community forming. That was about two years ago. Then from that building, once there was enough start-ups in that building, we realised we could do with more space and we found this other building which is obviously huge. So there was lots of room to expand. There are about 300 people in here now.

Heather:        Oh my goodness.

Colin:              Yeah, they’re all working on sort of technology start-ups and a lot of shared talks at lunch time. It’s really … if you’ve got a problem with something or other, we can go and ask somebody else who’s an expert from another company. It’s great, we really love being in here.

Heather:        Sensational. So if someone is in the start-up innovation space and they’re visiting Edinburgh, should they pop down into Codebase?

Colin:              Definitely, yeah.

Heather:        Is that a sort of okay. There’s an open invitation, arrive at the door?

Colin:              Yeah, come and see us. You can come and work in our office if you need a desk for an afternoon. Yeah, Codebase is great. It’s really helped Edinburgh and sort of set us up as one of the main start-up hubs in Scotland. It makes such a difference to your business having all these around.

Heather:        No, it certainly does. I liaise with some of the ones locally to us and the people in there say that it moves them ahead so much faster than if they were at home doing it, which is interesting. It’s the ideas, I guess, and the connections that you’re making and the inspiration that you’re gathering. Sensational. Now, I have to ask, while this interview is taking place, the Glasgow Commonwealth Games are on at the moment, have you travelled across to them?

Colin:              You know what, I haven’t.

Heather:        You’ve got to go. You’ve got to go.

Colin:              I watched the opening ceremony on TV. That was probably the main investment that I’ve given in my time to the Commonwealth Games. Not that I don’t enjoy it but it’s just been such a busy couple of weeks. Yeah, and apparently it’s quite difficult to get tickets. Edinburgh and Glasgow are …

Heather:        Just go to the town. Enjoy it.

Colin:              Yeah, there’s a bit of a rivalry between Edinburgh and Glasgow.

Heather:        I know.

Colin:              They’re about 40 minutes away. I think it’s always a sort of thing of which one should really be the capital city of Scotland. Maybe we’ll go over for a day just to soak up the vibe.

Heather:        Soak it up.

Colin:              Yeah.

Heather:        I know that … I went to the Sydney Olympics Games which is slightly different but it was amazing. We just got the crappiest tickets to anything we could and we really, really enjoyed it but I digress. We enjoyed it and it created a lot of memories for us. It didn’t matter what it was, it was such a good vibe, and you can’t work all the time.

Colin:              I will take your wisdom and put it in my diary.

Heather:        Sensational. So Colin, late last year you received a significant investment of a £110,000 from Rob Dobson, the tech incubator. Now, Rob Dobson for the listeners, I hope I’m saying his name correctly, was the founder of a mobile phone software company. So with this investment;

What insights do you have to share with our listeners who may be keen on attracting a significant investment into their business? What insights do you have to share to them about that?

Colin:              That was a good time for us but it was also a very hard time because we’d been pitching for a while, probably about a year of trying to raise some funding. The first piece of advice was that we were probably initially pitching to the wrong audience. The investors that we were pitching to weren’t software based, that was not where they made their money. I think it’s difficult to always understand the software business if that’s not your background. So, when we spoke to Rob, it was a completely different kettle of fish. He really understood it, he really got the prospect, and having run a business himself he understood the pain points. So definitely aligning the investor with the story of your own business is really important and will save you a lot of time.

The other thing would probably be making sure you tell a good story. Sometimes it’s easy to kind of play … I find you can play yourself down and certainly in the UK, we don’t like to brag. We can kind of say our … you know, “The business is okay and we’re doing all right.” Actually, you need to tell the story in a way that’s going to caught their imagination and make them want to be a part of the story. Yeah, I’m really thinking a lot … we’re actually going into another funding round pretty soon and just thinking about how do we tell the story? It is a great story, you know, it’s something we’ve put our lives into and we’ve got a real passion about.

It’s all about telling that story and really painting the picture of the possibilities of the future. We want to grow a great company and think this product can be wide reaching and really make a difference in the lives of business owners. So yeah, it’s all about putting that compelling story together so that investor can get excited about it as well.

What tips do you have about sharing your story? Do you work through a process of that? Do you work with someone to help you do that? Does it just come to you while you’re drinking?

Colin:              Well, I think if you sit down and really think it through it terms of where did the idea come from, what really gets me excited about this, what’s my dream for this company, and you start really tapping into some of the bigger picture stuff first of all … especially for me, it’s easy to get bogged down in the details, you know, how you’re going to do something. Then that tends to become quite small picture, like we’re going to add this, we’re going to add this feature next month and then we’re going to hire one more member of staff, and then we’re … you’re thinking through a very specific plan whereas the story has to come from a much deeper place of the beginning of where the idea came from to the end of where you can go to. If that’s not an exciting enough story then it brings up a few questions as well.

One thing I find helpful is actually asking other people, to say, “How do you perceive the story of Float? What are you seeing?” Then sometimes they’ll say, “Well, I think this is incredible that you guys manage to go for so long without raising any money,” or “I think, you know, what you’ve achieved with a small team is amazing.” Then you sort of think, “Oh yes, that’s a good point, I didn’t realise that.” So having other people feed back to you what they perceive the story will help you understand things that are actually true but you’re missing or you’ve neglected to include.

Actually I had a breakfast with Rob yesterday and he was sort of saying, “I was getting prepared for this next funding rounds, here’s some of the ways that I see this, this product is innovative, the space is really hot right now and there’s all this activity happening, there’s more and more people moving into the market.” You know, just hearing him describe it makes you think, “Oh yeah, that’s true.” When you’re in it for four years, you sort of … it becomes you don’t get the same perspective, so having another perspective is really helpful.

Heather:        Is Rob Scottish or is he American or is he something else?

Colin:              Yes, he’s English.

Heather:        Oh he’s English, okay.

Colin:              So, unlike many good Englishmen, he’s moved to Edinburgh with his wife. There are so many people that I meet here who I ask them where they come and they say it was because of a woman or a man. So they moved up after he sold his business. You know there are some great schools up in Edinburgh and they have some family up here as well. They looked around and decided Edinburgh was the city. Yeah, it was good for us.

Heather:        Sensational.

So Rob Dobson has joined your firm as a director. Apart from the money and the investment, how has he impacted … how has he becoming a director impacted Float?

Colin:              I’m a big fan of Rob because I think … we spoke to a few other investor and they all have very different agendas. Rob manages to walk the line very well between pushing us and not interfering too much, so it doesn’t ever feel like we’re working for him but he really provides us sort of mentoring and just a constant push, you know, because sometimes it’s easy to kind of not have that when you’re running the business if you don’t have a board set up. So Rob really just pushes us, he was pushing me the other day about how much money we want to raise, how fast we want to grow.

It’s easy for me to think that the first step is about survival and the small picture, and he sort of lifts us out of that and says, “No, I think we can do more here. I think there’s more potential.” So Rob really brings a different perspective, especially because he’s been there before. He’s done it, he’s grown a business, he understands the process, and that gives him a lot of credibility in terms of if somebody else was saying that from he hasn’t been here before and done that, you don’t tend to listen to them the same way.  Yeah.

Heather:        Absolutely, yes. It’s interesting because the newspaper headline that ‘a small tech has received a large amount of funding’, you sometimes think, “Oh, that’s going to be good,” or “That’s going to be bad.” So it’s always good to get your insights in finding that right person and you obviously have done that and it’s working out really well for your business. When these people do it, the passion, which is their baby, their small business, is taken in another direction and it’s kind of heart breaking.

Colin:              I think that we looked at another investor at the same time as Rob and it was much … you can tell that the incentives were much different for the other investor because he was looking for board fees and consultancy fees. He was going to take a very active role. It’s a very different place when they’re seeing it as a monthly income, whereas Rob’s never taken anything from the business. He just really wants to see it succeed.

Heather:        That’s sensational. I hope we don’t get an influx of people going and harassing Rob after this. He sounds like the greatest man in the world.

Colin:              Yeah, he’s a good investor. I’ve definitely introduced a few people to him. He seems to manage to see everybody. He picks the ones that he likes but we need more people like Rob up here. Hopefully there are a few Edinburgh companies that are going to be having a few big exits soon. We’ve got a great company called SkyScanner here that are doing quite well, and everybody is hoping that they’re going to get their IPO away soon and make few people some money so they can go back and invest it into the start-ups here too.

Heather:        Sensational.

So your product, Float, integrates with Xero. What has your experience been as being a part of the Xero add on ecosystem?

Colin:              Yeah, it’s been amazing really. When we started building Float for Free Agent, we felt Free Agent was the best piece of software out there. We felt that Xero was nice but it was a bit bland. At the time, there were roughly about the same number of users in the UK but what Xero managed to do in terms of growth over the last three or four years has just been incredible, and we realised that at some point we have to get this integration with Xero built. That actually took us about a year to do. So it was really a big investment of our time and resources to rethink how Float was going to work because there’s such a larger … Xero has a lot of larger companies. Free Agent is typically freelance … freelance one or two people businesses, so the volume of transactions is quite small.

We moved to Xero. It was the big investment of our time but we really recognised that they were the ones that were leading the way. The degree I think about Xero is the support that they give to us and the encouragement and saying … that feeling of, “We’re going to help promote you. We want this to work, the add-ons Market page, the add-on support team. Yeah, everything has been really good there, and just a willingness to promote the add-on, that was really a step up for us. We probably saw about a ten times increase when we launched for Xero in terms of signups. It was a big step up for us.

Heather:        Sensational.

Did that affect your infrastructure then?

Colin:              Yeah, it did actually because we launched it in September at Xerocon in London …

Heather:        Oh, okay.

Colin:              Last year and basically we soon realised that a lot of the larger companies weren’t able to … we weren’t able to get all the information displayed in time before the browser timed out, we were trying to load everything in at once. So we had to then take another couple of months to rebuild Float in order to allow for these much more significant companies, some turning over upwards of a million dollars a month. It was a big change for us, so we have to rethink the whole thing.

In terms of hosting, we host it on the cloud and it’s really … that wasn’t such a big issue. We can scale that really easily now which is such an advantage for cloud businesses that were … you know, before we might have to have upgraded our servers and changed everything around, and now that’s really not been the problem. It’s more just been about how we build the software and how we handle the page load speeds and all that kind of stuff.

So if Xero releases an update, say it releases an update next Sunday, do you have to do something in your backend or is that okay? It’s just goes with the flow?

Colin:              Yeah, it’s fine. Nothing that Xero do on the actual Xero app should affect us because they have their API teams separately. It’s really only when they change something in the API that affects us. More often than not, the API is a little bit behind what the main office is doing, so we’ll only get access to certain data, you know, typically a couple of months later. There hasn’t been, touch wood, there hasn’t been problems yet in terms of Xero changing something, that we haven’t come across. Generally it has been changes for good so we get more and more information that we need.

Because that’s always been the thing with cash flow forecasting is it requires a vast amount of data to achieve it. That’s always been the thing, trying to get that in the right place.

Colin:              Yeah, there are a lot of transactions that we need … we actually forecast right down to the transaction level. So we’re building up a whole report based on your transactions. It’s not a report that we can just pull out of Xero. We have to only start from scratch and build out ourselves, so we put in a lot of information. As I said, that’s a challenge.

I know you use Xero in your business; do you use any of the add-ons from the Xero eco space in your business?

Colin:              Yeah, I’m a big fan of Receipt Bank. It’s something that … I met the guys a few times up in Edinburgh first actually. Didn’t really feel the need for a time, and I think I was chatting to Michael at Xerocon and just thought, “I’m going to give this a try,” and really haven’t looked back since then just in terms of processing all my expenses. Now, we’ve actually upgraded to the business version and we send our invoices as well. You know, it just saves me so much time. So we’re looking for a system … we’re looking for a complete system basically where we don’t have to have any much touch on the bookkeeping side of things. Receipt Bank is a big part of that and, you know, they’re improving all the time as well.

Heather:        Yes, they’re definitely evolving. Was Michael wearing his kilt at Xerocon?

Michael:         No, I haven’t seen that.

Heather:        Haven’t you? Every time he wears the kilt, he wins a prize. That’s the theory.

Colin:              Ah, I’ll have to bring my kilt over then to the Xerocon Australia.

Heather:        Yes, you will. Oh my goodness, if you turn on a kilt, you definitely win a prize.

Colin:              That’s it.

Heather:        That’s the rule.

Colin:              That’s the secret, okay.

Heather:        Michael’s obviously not sharing that secret.

Colin:              No, he hasn’t.

Heather:        There are many photos of him in a kilt at Xerocon.

Colin:              Okay. Yeah, so the other one we’ve been looking at is a new one that you probably won’t have heard of. It’s more in the UK but it’s called CreDec. What they do is they connect into … they set up a box payment system, so in Xero you can just mark all your bills as paid on a certain date and they’ll actually then set up a box run and it will just go automatically for you when you approve it. That’s quite a nice one to have when you go into your bank account and sort of do all the pay run and pay all the bills.

Heather:        So it kind of creates a bank file does it and then extracts the income and pays … extracts the money and then pays it?

Colin:              Yeah.

Heather:        Okay, and what was the name of that again?

Colin:              It’s called CreDec I think.

Heather:        Okay, sensational.

Colin:              They’re pretty new. They’re also Edinburgh based. I’m not sure if they’re just the UK at the moment but the concept of having that complete system is really great.

Heather:        Yes, it is. I don’t recall them being … hearing of them in Australia but I’ll check and I’ll include them in the notes for show listeners.

So, in your business, can you share with us any other useful tools you actually use in your business that other listeners may benefit from?

Colin:              As a product business, we feel that customer support and feedback are absolutely crucial. So we use a product called Intercom to do that. It’s a relatively new product but it’s absolutely fantastic in terms of it lets us send automatic messages to users, it does all our internal communications with the users, and we can send out newsletters. It makes building newsletters really easy as well and it also uses our support system, so anybody can write to us from within the app and we can assign that to one of our team and everyone can track their responses as well. It’s kind a like Zendesk from that point of view but also MailChimp.

Also it’s having the auto messages going on at fixed periods during the trial is a useful part of it as well. This can be in-app notifications that just pop up on the screen or they can be emails. It’s a great way just for us to say, “We pushed a new feature,” or “We’d love to get some feedback on this if you’re interested, get in touch,” that kind of thing. We really try to maintain a close relationship with our user and that’s a tool that I think is fantastic if you’re a product company. You’ve got a web based product. That’s one thing we use.

We use Evernote quite a bit just to track all our documents and keep little notes of things rather than trying to have a complex filing system where you have to dig around for a lot of things. Evernote seems to work pretty well. We use an app called Trello to do our product management and bug tracking. Have you heard of that one?

Heather:        Yes.

Colin:              It’s like a sort of card based thing, you can drive them around. That kind a keeps us organised. Those are kind of the main ones. I’m always looking for new tools to bring us up to the weekly integrating but it can be a bit of overkill as well.

Heather:        Yes, there can be and sometimes you have go and test one for a while to see whether it’s actually going to fit in with what you’re doing. You can see how it fits in for other people but the way you’re doing it, you either have to perhaps change your methods or sometimes they just fit right in. I have one last question for you Colin.

Colin, what would you say to a 17 year old about to leave school who wants to be the next Colin Hewitt? He wants to found a tech space, he wants to found a tech company, he wants to attract funding, and he wants to live the dream?  

Colin:              Wow, there are a couple of things. One is you need to discover what it is your passionate about and don’t try and fit yourself into some mould that isn’t you because that’s just not going to work. I think for me, I find … at 17, I would have said, you know, “Go to university if you can. Go and get some experience,” because I didn’t have a clue at 17 that I wanted to do a tech company.

It was actually after university that I worked freelance for a bit and then came up with that concept. “Spend a little bit of time in America,” I think because there’s a really … there’s a real sort of positive can do attitude you can pick up over there which is actually where I get the courage and the idea to start my first company.

Heather:        How old where you when you started your own company?

Colin:              21, 22, and it was just that can do Californian attitude, people saying, “Yes, go for it, why not.” I kind of came back to went, “Yeah.” That’s the attitude. It’s always about the level of passion and energy that you can muster because there will be hard times and you have to kind of be able to ride those out. The other thing I think is for us ending up with Float was something we found because we worked in a business. I’d say that it’s an evolution. If you do something you love then it’s often within that process you’ll actually find a real problem that needs solving.

That was the case for me but I think that often guys at 17, the apps that they come up with, the ideas that I’ve heard are all very much around something like you want to go out with your friends and you don’t know where they are so you want to be able to have an app that finds your friends. That’s just not … the chances of you solving that problem socially on a B-C level, is going to be really difficult. Whereas actually if you go and work in an industry, it’s much easier to solve a problem that there’s a niche of people that have rather than trying to be the next Twitter or Foursquare or something along this lines.

So I think at 17, you’re going to perceive a very different view of the world. Building up experience and working with good people and sort of learning what you like and what you don’t like about the way other businesses run is a good principle but also not to get sucked in. One of the things I was tempted to do is just go and get a job straight out of university with a big software company. I kind a resisted that and I’m glad I did because I think you can get sucked in for a quite long period of time when you get comfortable, and then you don’t want to try anything new. So if you’re not feeling it, sometimes holding off and just taking some time is a good option rather than jumping in.

Heather:        Excellent. Thank you so much for sharing your story with us here Colin today. We really appreciate it. It was really interesting.

Colin:              Yeah, pleasure.

Heather:        If people want to get in touch with you, they can go to your website at floatapp.com or they can go and knock on the door of CodeBase. You’ll be there with a cup of tea waiting for them.

Colin:              Yeah.

Heather:        Thank you so much.

Colin:              No worries Heather. Good to chat.

Mentions

·         Float website http://floatapp.com

·         Float logos http://blog.floatapp.com/2013/11/01/7-steps-to-our-new-logo.html

·         CodeBase http://www.thisiscodebase.com

·         Sky Scanner http://www.skyscanner.com

·         Receipt Bank http://www.receipt-bank.com

·         CreDec http://www.credec.com

·         Intercom https://www.intercom.io

·         Evernote https://evernote.com

·         Trello https://trello.com

Contact Heather Smith

http://www.heathersmithsmallbusiness.com/

https://twitter.com/HeatherSmithAU/

https://www.facebook.com/HeatherSmithAU

http://www.linkedin.com/in/heathersmithau

Listed in: Other

Ep.2 Colin Hewitt – Float

·         The impact on the business of working with an investor

·         Experience of being part of the Xero add-on eco-system

·         Forming CodeBase a co-sharing space and the Edinburgh start-up scene

Note: After this interview was recorded Float won Xero Emerging Add-on Partner of the Year 2014

Transcript

Heather:        Welcome Colin to Cloud stories. We’re so pleased to have you here.

Colin:              Hi Heather, good to be here.

Heather:        What’s the weather like in Edinburgh at the moment?

Colin:              Well it’s a little bit cloudy at the moment. We had a good stretch probably about a week of good weather. It’s come to an end unfortunately today but we’re hoping that’s it’s just temporary.

Heather:        Sensational. So Colin, I’ll start with a really hard question upfront.

Who is your favourite superhero and why?

Colin:              My favourite superhero? Well, I’m not sure if you have the same superheroes as you do in Australia but I was always like a big Spiderman fan.

Heather:        Sensational, that’s Scottish Spiderman version.

Colin:              Scottish Spiderman, of course, yeah. I like the way he had a spider sense, you know, how the spider sense was tingling. That’s always a good line and sometimes I think have that as well.

Heather:        The spider sense. That’s a good heading for a story about you. Sensational, thank you for that Colin.

Can you share with us what your business [Float] does Colin?

Colin:              Yeah, so our business Float is a piece of software that we’ve designed to try to help business understand a bit more about their business. Really the main thing that we focus on is how much cash is in the business and what your bank account’s going to be at any point in the future. So we think that’s one of the most interesting or the more interesting parts of the business. You can get lots of insightful management reports but sometimes you just want to know, can I afford to pay for this and will there be enough cash at the end of the month to pay the salaries? That’s what we focus on at Float.

Why is it important to have a forecast or a cash management system in place?

Colin:              Yeah, I mean the story of where we got Float from is I used to have a web design agency, and we were always asking that question of, you know, is there going to be enough to do X or Y, and having to go back into a spreadsheet was a painful process because it was always out of date and we always felt well, hold on I can answer your question in a couple of hours when I’ve put in all the figures. So yeah, having a forecast is really … is definitely important but certainly it can be a bit of a pain to manage if you don’t have it updating automatically.

Heather:        I know that spreadsheet pain.

When did you start your business Colin? When did you start this business which is Float.

Colin:              So Float … there was kind of an overlap period. We started as a side project while we were running the other business, so I think we started in about 2010. It was me and my co-founder. So he was working on it in his spare time. I had the idea, I had the spreadsheet and I said, “This is what I’m looking for,” and he thought it would take about three months. So four years later, we’re still working on it. It was a sort of gradual start but my co-founder came on board full time I think in around the beginning of 2011. Then I sold the web agency in the beginning of 2012. So we’ve probably had about just over two years being full time on Float.

Heather:        Sensational.

Did you come from a numbers background?

Colin:              Not at all. I actually flunked my Maths A level exam.

Heather:        You didn’t need to share that with us but it was interesting you said coming from a web design business into numbers which a …

Colin:              No, absolutely. I guess where I came from was I was the one who was having to deal with the numbers. We were using spreadsheets to run our business and I thought our spreadsheet was pretty darn good. I’d worked on it quite hard and it did everything that it needed to do. It just took so long and we actually started using cloud accounting software. We used a package initially called Free Agent which is great for our really small business, also another Edinburgh company, and then we just realised that it was amazing to have a lot of that stuff automated all of a sudden and in the cloud.

It took a lot of pressure off me but then it didn’t have the forecasting part that was really important to me, so we still had to use the spreadsheet for that. But yes, I wasn’t a numbers person naturally but I’d kind of come to this out of necessity. Then I found I kind of had a little bit of pleasure just about getting everything to match up to the penny but it probably took me a lot longer than it would for some other people. Yes, numbers weren’t my strong point. I had no background in accounting, and when we spoke to some accountants about forecasting and read about forecasting, it all seemed very complicated. We just thought, “Gosh, it’s got to be simpler than this.” Even some of the language, just clarifying, was a helpful starting point.

Yes, so we really approached it from a non-accounting point view and then tried to get back to some of the corporate language from accounting as we’ve gone on.

Heather:        That’s an interesting perspective to take it from certainly. I’m a great believer that everyone can get their numbers, so it’s exciting to hear someone coming from a different side but sort of coming to the numbers party.

Where did you get the name Float from?

Colin:              Good question. So what we really like … for me the concept of cash flow is like a wave, you know. Sometimes you’re up and sometimes you’re down and when we look at our cash flow graph, it is much more like a wave; we’d get high points in the month and then low points. It was always trying to make sure that the low points weren’t too low.

So we sort of have this nautical theme, you know, riding the waves of cash flow and making sure you don’t sink and all this kind of thing. We explored a lot of nautical themes, thinking about life boats, binoculars so you’re looking out over the horizon and all that kind of thing. So we really like the nautical concept of now beginning your way through the business. Yeah, we’d also liked concepts that were about flow, so it was flow, flow, flow. Then we sort of thought, “Float, that works, you know.” Then somebody pointed out that there is also a concept of cash float in a business, you know, you’ve got enough cash in a till to get you started at the beginning of the day. So it all came together pretty nicely for us.

Heather:        Serendipity.

Colin:              Yeah, we’ve played with the few different variants but Float was the one that stuck.

Heather:        So what are the waves off coast of Edinburgh?

Colin:              Well, unfortunately they’re not great for surfing because it’s sheltered but if you go up to the north of Scotland, I think you’ve got some of the best waves in the world. But yeah, for the Edinburghers’, it’s not a great … you don’t get a lot of great waves unfortunately.

Heather:        So you weren’t inspired by looking at your window and seeing the floating boats coming?

Colin:              Well, I also grew up with the North Coast of Ireland, so I was quite used to being in the sea.

Heather:        Yeah, I think it’s always good to have a name that has that connotation attached to it.

Colin:              When we started off the business, we actually had a lot other parts in the graphics. It was a lot more fun and we’ve kind of grown up a bit but we had light houses and sharks and all those kinds of stuff.

View the other Float logos here: http://blog.floatapp.com/2013/11/01/7-steps-to-our-new-logo.html

Heather:        I went and had a look at those.

Colin:              Did you? Yeah.

Heather:        So if listeners are listening, go and have a look at floatapp.com blog. I think if you just do a search for logos, there’s a list of all different logos that you’ve got there.

So you’re based in Edinburgh, what’s the internet connection like there?

Colin:              Yes, it’s great actually. Scotland seems to have … they’ve really invested in that. We’ve just moved into a new building with a lot of other start-ups called CodeBase in Edinburgh. It’s right next to the Edinburgh castle.

Heather:        Oh wow.

Colin:              We’ve got a fibre line directly into the building and we get about one hundred megabytes up and down which is incredible. It really makes a big difference just having that consistency.

Heather:        That’s amazing. That’s really good. So you’ve moved into Codebase, is that an incubator or a sharing spacing?

Colin:              Yeah, so it was interesting, I actually spent a bit of time over in Boston and went to see some incubators there, one called Techstars. Came back to Edinburgh and just said, “Look guys, there’s no point all being on our own. If we were in together, there’d be a lot of synergy, a lot more sharing of knowledge.” Just at that time a building came up and about fifteen start-ups all decided to move into it together. We worked on it, we painted it, we stripped out the carpet. It was a really good experience for the local sort of start-up community.

Heather:        Sounds like a reality TV show.

Colin:              Yeah, it was. It was a really interesting time just sort of getting the work together and the community forming. That was about two years ago. Then from that building, once there was enough start-ups in that building, we realised we could do with more space and we found this other building which is obviously huge. So there was lots of room to expand. There are about 300 people in here now.

Heather:        Oh my goodness.

Colin:              Yeah, they’re all working on sort of technology start-ups and a lot of shared talks at lunch time. It’s really … if you’ve got a problem with something or other, we can go and ask somebody else who’s an expert from another company. It’s great, we really love being in here.

Heather:        Sensational. So if someone is in the start-up innovation space and they’re visiting Edinburgh, should they pop down into Codebase?

Colin:              Definitely, yeah.

Heather:        Is that a sort of okay. There’s an open invitation, arrive at the door?

Colin:              Yeah, come and see us. You can come and work in our office if you need a desk for an afternoon. Yeah, Codebase is great. It’s really helped Edinburgh and sort of set us up as one of the main start-up hubs in Scotland. It makes such a difference to your business having all these around.

Heather:        No, it certainly does. I liaise with some of the ones locally to us and the people in there say that it moves them ahead so much faster than if they were at home doing it, which is interesting. It’s the ideas, I guess, and the connections that you’re making and the inspiration that you’re gathering. Sensational. Now, I have to ask, while this interview is taking place, the Glasgow Commonwealth Games are on at the moment, have you travelled across to them?

Colin:              You know what, I haven’t.

Heather:        You’ve got to go. You’ve got to go.

Colin:              I watched the opening ceremony on TV. That was probably the main investment that I’ve given in my time to the Commonwealth Games. Not that I don’t enjoy it but it’s just been such a busy couple of weeks. Yeah, and apparently it’s quite difficult to get tickets. Edinburgh and Glasgow are …

Heather:        Just go to the town. Enjoy it.

Colin:              Yeah, there’s a bit of a rivalry between Edinburgh and Glasgow.

Heather:        I know.

Colin:              They’re about 40 minutes away. I think it’s always a sort of thing of which one should really be the capital city of Scotland. Maybe we’ll go over for a day just to soak up the vibe.

Heather:        Soak it up.

Colin:              Yeah.

Heather:        I know that … I went to the Sydney Olympics Games which is slightly different but it was amazing. We just got the crappiest tickets to anything we could and we really, really enjoyed it but I digress. We enjoyed it and it created a lot of memories for us. It didn’t matter what it was, it was such a good vibe, and you can’t work all the time.

Colin:              I will take your wisdom and put it in my diary.

Heather:        Sensational. So Colin, late last year you received a significant investment of a £110,000 from Rob Dobson, the tech incubator. Now, Rob Dobson for the listeners, I hope I’m saying his name correctly, was the founder of a mobile phone software company. So with this investment;

What insights do you have to share with our listeners who may be keen on attracting a significant investment into their business? What insights do you have to share to them about that?

Colin:              That was a good time for us but it was also a very hard time because we’d been pitching for a while, probably about a year of trying to raise some funding. The first piece of advice was that we were probably initially pitching to the wrong audience. The investors that we were pitching to weren’t software based, that was not where they made their money. I think it’s difficult to always understand the software business if that’s not your background. So, when we spoke to Rob, it was a completely different kettle of fish. He really understood it, he really got the prospect, and having run a business himself he understood the pain points. So definitely aligning the investor with the story of your own business is really important and will save you a lot of time.

The other thing would probably be making sure you tell a good story. Sometimes it’s easy to kind of play … I find you can play yourself down and certainly in the UK, we don’t like to brag. We can kind of say our … you know, “The business is okay and we’re doing all right.” Actually, you need to tell the story in a way that’s going to caught their imagination and make them want to be a part of the story. Yeah, I’m really thinking a lot … we’re actually going into another funding round pretty soon and just thinking about how do we tell the story? It is a great story, you know, it’s something we’ve put our lives into and we’ve got a real passion about.

It’s all about telling that story and really painting the picture of the possibilities of the future. We want to grow a great company and think this product can be wide reaching and really make a difference in the lives of business owners. So yeah, it’s all about putting that compelling story together so that investor can get excited about it as well.

What tips do you have about sharing your story? Do you work through a process of that? Do you work with someone to help you do that? Does it just come to you while you’re drinking?

Colin:              Well, I think if you sit down and really think it through it terms of where did the idea come from, what really gets me excited about this, what’s my dream for this company, and you start really tapping into some of the bigger picture stuff first of all … especially for me, it’s easy to get bogged down in the details, you know, how you’re going to do something. Then that tends to become quite small picture, like we’re going to add this, we’re going to add this feature next month and then we’re going to hire one more member of staff, and then we’re … you’re thinking through a very specific plan whereas the story has to come from a much deeper place of the beginning of where the idea came from to the end of where you can go to. If that’s not an exciting enough story then it brings up a few questions as well.

One thing I find helpful is actually asking other people, to say, “How do you perceive the story of Float? What are you seeing?” Then sometimes they’ll say, “Well, I think this is incredible that you guys manage to go for so long without raising any money,” or “I think, you know, what you’ve achieved with a small team is amazing.” Then you sort of think, “Oh yes, that’s a good point, I didn’t realise that.” So having other people feed back to you what they perceive the story will help you understand things that are actually true but you’re missing or you’ve neglected to include.

Actually I had a breakfast with Rob yesterday and he was sort of saying, “I was getting prepared for this next funding rounds, here’s some of the ways that I see this, this product is innovative, the space is really hot right now and there’s all this activity happening, there’s more and more people moving into the market.” You know, just hearing him describe it makes you think, “Oh yeah, that’s true.” When you’re in it for four years, you sort of … it becomes you don’t get the same perspective, so having another perspective is really helpful.

Heather:        Is Rob Scottish or is he American or is he something else?

Colin:              Yes, he’s English.

Heather:        Oh he’s English, okay.

Colin:              So, unlike many good Englishmen, he’s moved to Edinburgh with his wife. There are so many people that I meet here who I ask them where they come and they say it was because of a woman or a man. So they moved up after he sold his business. You know there are some great schools up in Edinburgh and they have some family up here as well. They looked around and decided Edinburgh was the city. Yeah, it was good for us.

Heather:        Sensational.

So Rob Dobson has joined your firm as a director. Apart from the money and the investment, how has he impacted … how has he becoming a director impacted Float?

Colin:              I’m a big fan of Rob because I think … we spoke to a few other investor and they all have very different agendas. Rob manages to walk the line very well between pushing us and not interfering too much, so it doesn’t ever feel like we’re working for him but he really provides us sort of mentoring and just a constant push, you know, because sometimes it’s easy to kind of not have that when you’re running the business if you don’t have a board set up. So Rob really just pushes us, he was pushing me the other day about how much money we want to raise, how fast we want to grow.

It’s easy for me to think that the first step is about survival and the small picture, and he sort of lifts us out of that and says, “No, I think we can do more here. I think there’s more potential.” So Rob really brings a different perspective, especially because he’s been there before. He’s done it, he’s grown a business, he understands the process, and that gives him a lot of credibility in terms of if somebody else was saying that from he hasn’t been here before and done that, you don’t tend to listen to them the same way.  Yeah.

Heather:        Absolutely, yes. It’s interesting because the newspaper headline that ‘a small tech has received a large amount of funding’, you sometimes think, “Oh, that’s going to be good,” or “That’s going to be bad.” So it’s always good to get your insights in finding that right person and you obviously have done that and it’s working out really well for your business. When these people do it, the passion, which is their baby, their small business, is taken in another direction and it’s kind of heart breaking.

Colin:              I think that we looked at another investor at the same time as Rob and it was much … you can tell that the incentives were much different for the other investor because he was looking for board fees and consultancy fees. He was going to take a very active role. It’s a very different place when they’re seeing it as a monthly income, whereas Rob’s never taken anything from the business. He just really wants to see it succeed.

Heather:        That’s sensational. I hope we don’t get an influx of people going and harassing Rob after this. He sounds like the greatest man in the world.

Colin:              Yeah, he’s a good investor. I’ve definitely introduced a few people to him. He seems to manage to see everybody. He picks the ones that he likes but we need more people like Rob up here. Hopefully there are a few Edinburgh companies that are going to be having a few big exits soon. We’ve got a great company called SkyScanner here that are doing quite well, and everybody is hoping that they’re going to get their IPO away soon and make few people some money so they can go back and invest it into the start-ups here too.

Heather:        Sensational.

So your product, Float, integrates with Xero. What has your experience been as being a part of the Xero add on ecosystem?

Colin:              Yeah, it’s been amazing really. When we started building Float for Free Agent, we felt Free Agent was the best piece of software out there. We felt that Xero was nice but it was a bit bland. At the time, there were roughly about the same number of users in the UK but what Xero managed to do in terms of growth over the last three or four years has just been incredible, and we realised that at some point we have to get this integration with Xero built. That actually took us about a year to do. So it was really a big investment of our time and resources to rethink how Float was going to work because there’s such a larger … Xero has a lot of larger companies. Free Agent is typically freelance … freelance one or two people businesses, so the volume of transactions is quite small.

We moved to Xero. It was the big investment of our time but we really recognised that they were the ones that were leading the way. The degree I think about Xero is the support that they give to us and the encouragement and saying … that feeling of, “We’re going to help promote you. We want this to work, the add-ons Market page, the add-on support team. Yeah, everything has been really good there, and just a willingness to promote the add-on, that was really a step up for us. We probably saw about a ten times increase when we launched for Xero in terms of signups. It was a big step up for us.

Heather:        Sensational.

Did that affect your infrastructure then?

Colin:              Yeah, it did actually because we launched it in September at Xerocon in London …

Heather:        Oh, okay.

Colin:              Last year and basically we soon realised that a lot of the larger companies weren’t able to … we weren’t able to get all the information displayed in time before the browser timed out, we were trying to load everything in at once. So we had to then take another couple of months to rebuild Float in order to allow for these much more significant companies, some turning over upwards of a million dollars a month. It was a big change for us, so we have to rethink the whole thing.

In terms of hosting, we host it on the cloud and it’s really … that wasn’t such a big issue. We can scale that really easily now which is such an advantage for cloud businesses that were … you know, before we might have to have upgraded our servers and changed everything around, and now that’s really not been the problem. It’s more just been about how we build the software and how we handle the page load speeds and all that kind of stuff.

So if Xero releases an update, say it releases an update next Sunday, do you have to do something in your backend or is that okay? It’s just goes with the flow?

Colin:              Yeah, it’s fine. Nothing that Xero do on the actual Xero app should affect us because they have their API teams separately. It’s really only when they change something in the API that affects us. More often than not, the API is a little bit behind what the main office is doing, so we’ll only get access to certain data, you know, typically a couple of months later. There hasn’t been, touch wood, there hasn’t been problems yet in terms of Xero changing something, that we haven’t come across. Generally it has been changes for good so we get more and more information that we need.

Because that’s always been the thing with cash flow forecasting is it requires a vast amount of data to achieve it. That’s always been the thing, trying to get that in the right place.

Colin:              Yeah, there are a lot of transactions that we need … we actually forecast right down to the transaction level. So we’re building up a whole report based on your transactions. It’s not a report that we can just pull out of Xero. We have to only start from scratch and build out ourselves, so we put in a lot of information. As I said, that’s a challenge.

I know you use Xero in your business; do you use any of the add-ons from the Xero eco space in your business?

Colin:              Yeah, I’m a big fan of Receipt Bank. It’s something that … I met the guys a few times up in Edinburgh first actually. Didn’t really feel the need for a time, and I think I was chatting to Michael at Xerocon and just thought, “I’m going to give this a try,” and really haven’t looked back since then just in terms of processing all my expenses. Now, we’ve actually upgraded to the business version and we send our invoices as well. You know, it just saves me so much time. So we’re looking for a system … we’re looking for a complete system basically where we don’t have to have any much touch on the bookkeeping side of things. Receipt Bank is a big part of that and, you know, they’re improving all the time as well.

Heather:        Yes, they’re definitely evolving. Was Michael wearing his kilt at Xerocon?

Michael:         No, I haven’t seen that.

Heather:        Haven’t you? Every time he wears the kilt, he wins a prize. That’s the theory.

Colin:              Ah, I’ll have to bring my kilt over then to the Xerocon Australia.

Heather:        Yes, you will. Oh my goodness, if you turn on a kilt, you definitely win a prize.

Colin:              That’s it.

Heather:        That’s the rule.

Colin:              That’s the secret, okay.

Heather:        Michael’s obviously not sharing that secret.

Colin:              No, he hasn’t.

Heather:        There are many photos of him in a kilt at Xerocon.

Colin:              Okay. Yeah, so the other one we’ve been looking at is a new one that you probably won’t have heard of. It’s more in the UK but it’s called CreDec. What they do is they connect into … they set up a box payment system, so in Xero you can just mark all your bills as paid on a certain date and they’ll actually then set up a box run and it will just go automatically for you when you approve it. That’s quite a nice one to have when you go into your bank account and sort of do all the pay run and pay all the bills.

Heather:        So it kind of creates a bank file does it and then extracts the income and pays … extracts the money and then pays it?

Colin:              Yeah.

Heather:        Okay, and what was the name of that again?

Colin:              It’s called CreDec I think.

Heather:        Okay, sensational.

Colin:              They’re pretty new. They’re also Edinburgh based. I’m not sure if they’re just the UK at the moment but the concept of having that complete system is really great.

Heather:        Yes, it is. I don’t recall them being … hearing of them in Australia but I’ll check and I’ll include them in the notes for show listeners.

So, in your business, can you share with us any other useful tools you actually use in your business that other listeners may benefit from?

Colin:              As a product business, we feel that customer support and feedback are absolutely crucial. So we use a product called Intercom to do that. It’s a relatively new product but it’s absolutely fantastic in terms of it lets us send automatic messages to users, it does all our internal communications with the users, and we can send out newsletters. It makes building newsletters really easy as well and it also uses our support system, so anybody can write to us from within the app and we can assign that to one of our team and everyone can track their responses as well. It’s kind a like Zendesk from that point of view but also MailChimp.

Also it’s having the auto messages going on at fixed periods during the trial is a useful part of it as well. This can be in-app notifications that just pop up on the screen or they can be emails. It’s a great way just for us to say, “We pushed a new feature,” or “We’d love to get some feedback on this if you’re interested, get in touch,” that kind of thing. We really try to maintain a close relationship with our user and that’s a tool that I think is fantastic if you’re a product company. You’ve got a web based product. That’s one thing we use.

We use Evernote quite a bit just to track all our documents and keep little notes of things rather than trying to have a complex filing system where you have to dig around for a lot of things. Evernote seems to work pretty well. We use an app called Trello to do our product management and bug tracking. Have you heard of that one?

Heather:        Yes.

Colin:              It’s like a sort of card based thing, you can drive them around. That kind a keeps us organised. Those are kind of the main ones. I’m always looking for new tools to bring us up to the weekly integrating but it can be a bit of overkill as well.

Heather:        Yes, there can be and sometimes you have go and test one for a while to see whether it’s actually going to fit in with what you’re doing. You can see how it fits in for other people but the way you’re doing it, you either have to perhaps change your methods or sometimes they just fit right in. I have one last question for you Colin.

Colin, what would you say to a 17 year old about to leave school who wants to be the next Colin Hewitt? He wants to found a tech space, he wants to found a tech company, he wants to attract funding, and he wants to live the dream?  

Colin:              Wow, there are a couple of things. One is you need to discover what it is your passionate about and don’t try and fit yourself into some mould that isn’t you because that’s just not going to work. I think for me, I find … at 17, I would have said, you know, “Go to university if you can. Go and get some experience,” because I didn’t have a clue at 17 that I wanted to do a tech company.

It was actually after university that I worked freelance for a bit and then came up with that concept. “Spend a little bit of time in America,” I think because there’s a really … there’s a real sort of positive can do attitude you can pick up over there which is actually where I get the courage and the idea to start my first company.

Heather:        How old where you when you started your own company?

Colin:              21, 22, and it was just that can do Californian attitude, people saying, “Yes, go for it, why not.” I kind of came back to went, “Yeah.” That’s the attitude. It’s always about the level of passion and energy that you can muster because there will be hard times and you have to kind of be able to ride those out. The other thing I think is for us ending up with Float was something we found because we worked in a business. I’d say that it’s an evolution. If you do something you love then it’s often within that process you’ll actually find a real problem that needs solving.

That was the case for me but I think that often guys at 17, the apps that they come up with, the ideas that I’ve heard are all very much around something like you want to go out with your friends and you don’t know where they are so you want to be able to have an app that finds your friends. That’s just not … the chances of you solving that problem socially on a B-C level, is going to be really difficult. Whereas actually if you go and work in an industry, it’s much easier to solve a problem that there’s a niche of people that have rather than trying to be the next Twitter or Foursquare or something along this lines.

So I think at 17, you’re going to perceive a very different view of the world. Building up experience and working with good people and sort of learning what you like and what you don’t like about the way other businesses run is a good principle but also not to get sucked in. One of the things I was tempted to do is just go and get a job straight out of university with a big software company. I kind a resisted that and I’m glad I did because I think you can get sucked in for a quite long period of time when you get comfortable, and then you don’t want to try anything new. So if you’re not feeling it, sometimes holding off and just taking some time is a good option rather than jumping in.

Heather:        Excellent. Thank you so much for sharing your story with us here Colin today. We really appreciate it. It was really interesting.

Colin:              Yeah, pleasure.

Heather:        If people want to get in touch with you, they can go to your website at floatapp.com or they can go and knock on the door of CodeBase. You’ll be there with a cup of tea waiting for them.

Colin:              Yeah.

Heather:        Thank you so much.

Colin:              No worries Heather. Good to chat.

Mentions

·         Float website http://floatapp.com

·         Float logos http://blog.floatapp.com/2013/11/01/7-steps-to-our-new-logo.html

·         CodeBase http://www.thisiscodebase.com

·         Sky Scanner http://www.skyscanner.com

·         Receipt Bank http://www.receipt-bank.com

·         CreDec http://www.credec.com

·         Intercom https://www.intercom.io

·         Evernote https://evernote.com

·         Trello https://trello.com

Contact Heather Smith

http://www.heathersmithsmallbusiness.com/

https://twitter.com/HeatherSmithAU/

https://www.facebook.com/HeatherSmithAU

http://www.linkedin.com/in/heathersmithau

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Identifying your passion and turning it into a business success | Valerie Khoo

Contact Valerie Khoo

Australian Writers’ Centre http://www.writerscentre.com.au

https://twitter.com/ValerieKhoo

https://twitter.com/WritersCentreAU

Contact Heather Smith

http://www.heathersmithsmallbusiness.com/

https://twitter.com/HeatherSmithAU/

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http://www.linkedin.com/in/heathersmithau

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Ep.1 Valerie Khoo – Australian Writers' Centre

Contact Valerie Khoo

Australian Writers’ Centre http://www.writerscentre.com.au

https://twitter.com/ValerieKhoo

https://twitter.com/WritersCentreAU

Contact Heather Smith

http://www.heathersmithsmallbusiness.com/

https://twitter.com/HeatherSmithAU/

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