So people really don’t care where the rubbish is from?
Not so much.
You’re based in Melbourne. Do you outsource most of your business?
We’ve got five full time staff and outsource bits and pieces of it. We do our core manufacturing and a lot of the cutting here, we’re in North Fitzroy and we’ve got a factory up in Ballarat that actually does a lot of the assembly for us. And we’ve got a couple of other factories that do other bits and pieces where they do welding and some other things for us.
We brought some things back in-house. We recently brought our web stuff back in-house which I guess goes a little bit against the trends but we had a few dramas with web developers.
I think that’s happening more and more. Web development is almost becoming a core business.
Reading some of your other interviews, there’s no surprise there. I’ve had a few interesting moments with the developers but you learn as you go on.
How do you market the business?
We’re probably a fairly early adopter of Twitter. Because we’re selling products, which I guess the cooler geek crowd like, it’s an obvious scenario. You’ve got guys running around on their Apple laptops and a lot of them are on Twitter. It’s an easy scenario so we’ve had a lot of bloggers talk about us and we’ve kind of engaged the community that way.
How have you actually set out to do that?
Hit and miss. I’d love to say it was really strategic but it really wasn’t. We literally searched for people that were kind of in and around the Apple space that were reviewing products and talking about them. So not a huge amount of high profile ones.
We’ve had Darren Rowse the ProBlogger and some of those guys, Cameron Riley the G’day World guy, podcaster out of Brisbane. Some of those guys in Australia have picked up on us. We’ve also received some reviews in the American Mac life magazines and they have come from bloggers in and around their space kind of talking about it online. Either directly reviewing or just mentioning the brand.
Do you hard sell on the social networking sites?
It’s pretty soft sell. We announce new products there, we use Twitter and Facebook and stuff to engage some of our customers and say ‘hey what do you think of this product?’ almost before we’ve launched it so we’re getting them to almost pre-review it.
We run little competitions on there to say ‘hey what do you think we should name these products?’ We’ve got a lot of kooky names to some of our stuff. A lot of it is just getting them to feel they are part of it before things even come into fruition and you get some really good feedback and I guess like a lot of those online communities if you give some stuff out there, you’ll get lots more back.
What’s worked best in social networking for you?
Concentrating on the people that are talking about our stuff and giving them products to review, but also just being a little bit more attentive to those guys. I guess it’s kind of classic 80/20 rule. We’re concentrating on the ones that are talking about us and kind of holding their hands a little bit more and that’s been quite good.
But also surprising people. When we get online orders we’ll find someone’s got a Twitter address and we’ll confirm their order via email or via text but also mention something on Twitter. And that’s definitely worked for us in terms of the Haul business.
We haven’t really started that with what we’re doing with the corporate stuff yet, as some of the companies we’re working with don’t want you to pre-announce you’re doing jobs for them.
One of the aspects of Riveting is that they want the story as much as the product and so we’re making little online videos for them to show the entire process.
This is your billboard up, this is it coming down, this is us cutting it, this is the manufacturing process and here’s the finished product. And for a lot of them they use the story in their in-house newsletters, etc.
We were fairly slow to really have the “penny drop” moment. A lot of stuff we do is event based, so if you’re a big company and you were sponsoring a conference, instead of getting the same old black satchel bag with the embroidered logo on the bottom of it, if you can make a bag that’s actually out of your own billboards they then sell that with all the conference paraphernalia and the collateral goes out.
Often some of those conferences still put things on USB sticks. So one of the things we’ve done for a couple of companies now is put the story as one of the last things on the USB sticks.
We’ve just done a big job for Jetstar, who will obviously talk about that in their in-flight magazine. A lot of them have Gen-Y staff and they want to see that if you’re saying somewhere in one of your mission statements that you want to recycle and be innovative, it’s not just a bunch of cold words that sits behind the reception, it’s actually there.
Now what are the hurdles to being green? How have you proved your credentials?
We’ve had an audit by an organisation called the Good Environmental Choice, which is like the good heart tick that went around on margarine and stuff a few years ago.
It’s the one credible body in Australia and we got that accreditation about four years ago and that’s been fantastic. It’s a tricky process: it’s a bit like having the tax department come in and turn your business upside down. They go through every process from back office stuff to the production to what happens to the waste bits of billboard that you don’t use. It’s fairly daunting but it’s definitely given us a key point of difference.
Do you get audited every year?
Every couple of years; we’re due for one.
Just remind them of that.
Yes, thanks for that.
Do you outsource your sales function?
No. With Haul we’ve got a couple of main sales channels. We sell online.
We’ve got an online store with anywhere between two and five thousand products online where the one you click on is the exact one that will show up.
So online has been key to us. We wholesale to retailers but a lot of those retailers find us online anyway.
So far for the corporate stuff, we’ve been relatively reactive in that people have found us through a really scattergun way. Now the big thing for us is to get out there and obviously go to a lot of companies and be proactive and drive sales.
You’re nearly 40 and you’ve worked very, very hard. These businesses are relentless. How do you keep coming in day after day? What are some of the tricks you’ve learnt?
At various points and times I’ve almost gone a bit loopy because you’re just so entrenched in it. You forget to have holidays, all the things that you know you should do but often don’t get around to doing. I guess maintaining fitness is a big thing. I’ve got a dog, so when you’re in the middle of the day and it’s all getting a bit heavy and you are going ‘what am I doing here?’, simple things like taking the dog to the park for a walk can often clear the head.
There’s no silver bullet answer there. Definitely having holidays is a big one and all the entrepreneurs that I talk to say when you come back you’re your previous holiday, book your next one because 18 months go by and you’ve kind of forgotten to take one and you don’t realise you’re burning out.
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