Cameron Wall and Conrad Bates spotted an opportunity to create a business that would help other companies deal with the massive influx of data they are facing in the 21st century. C3 Business Solutions has now gone on to service clients including ANZ, Qantas and Australia Post, turning over about $11 million.
But the pair has spotted a new opportunity. While many businesses are fretting over the carbon tax, Wall and Bates have spied an opportunity – start marketing services that offer to calculate emissions easily so other businesses don’t have to do it themselves.
How has the business been going the past few years?
Cam: We’ve certainly been growing very fast.
Conrad: We doubled our rate of growth in the last year.
We also started a diversification strategy. Actually, it’s not so much diversification as it is just aligning our diversified lines. So we’re definitely focusing on the services business, and as a result we’ve started four new business lines.
We’ve gone into hosting solutions, which supports the services and products business. We also noted an industry training gap in skills, so we started an education business as well. On top of that, because of resource limitations in the market, we’ve started a placement services business focused on the industry sector.
Clients are not only asking us for services, but also support for placement of internal staff going forward.
So are you still focusing on business services mostly?
Cam: Services is still our core business, that’s the main breadwinner. Those other services we’ve been working on since we managed the business.
When did you start thinking about the carbon tax and the opportunity there?
Cam: As soon as they started talking about the requirement that was released in 2007. We know that it was going to be a big thing and we saw an opportunity there.
It just so happened that the product we had is suited to general data collection in business units. The problem is not unique, the solution is. We actually think this could work in a number of different sectors as well.
The main problem we see is in the data collection.
What sort of opportunity did you see there?
Cam: I think the unique value we have in this space is that we have an ability to adapt a data structure to whatever organisation that needs it. So if they buy a solution from us, there are hundreds of ways they can calculate emissions. There are others on the market, but they cover particular industries.
Was that a result of a response you saw from industry?
Cam: A lot of companies were getting interested in it, from how they would meet compliance reporting needs. Compliance reporting was getting bigger year on year, but now companies are really having to think about it.
You’re now having to approach the carbon side of your business as you would the financial side. You have to join all the bits and pieces together, and with new legislation that’s only going to make people more interested as time goes on.
What’s so attractive about your product?
Conrad: We’ve been recognised for innovation in our product, because it’s a key way of collecting carbon activity, carbon emissions and organisational activity information. We see carbon reporting as a type of analytics that your organisation would do on a day to day basis.
Our product is pretty unique, as it allows companies to collect data in a lot of different formats. You can collect that data and compile it in any way you like.
Is this where you think you’ll see the biggest growth?
Cam: We see our biggest growth in the collection of data. Whether it’s health reform, carbon, or the aging population, we’re doing activity in all of those major policy initiatives at federal and state levels, although we do activity in the corporate world as well.
There is so much movement about data now. Organisations are being faced with things like social networking, software, and so on. You look at the energy industry, which used to have a power meter read once every quarter, now smart metres send it at half hour intervals.
The increase in the amount of data is occurring exponentially. Companies need data, tools, techniques to summarise it. Businesses are using this data as tools to create new business plans and decisions, and that’s a big opportunity.
Does that mean you’ll change how your business runs?
Conrad: The core of our business is information management. We aim to show businesses how they can behave like an intelligent business while exploiting all this data to reduce cost structures and return higher profits.
Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
