David Gold

What have you actually learnt about the product? Have you changed your product lines?

You learn a lot from feedback, seeing what other people are saying about you. So I regularly, at least everyday, go onto Twitter and do a search for Igloo Zoo and see what people are saying.

Now we’re not such a big business that we’re getting a lot of chatter about us but you get enough that you do get a sense. Similarly on Facebook we check almost daily on what people are saying about us. It enables us to really get on top of things quite quickly. Most of it has been very positive by far but there’s been the odd one where someone will say “went in today and got much less customer service than when I went in yesterday” and that enables us to go in and check who the staff member was and we know because of the immediacy, you can see who it is and deal with those kind of issues and nip them in the bud. It gives us quite a bit of power from that perspective.

Are you going to launch or add things, how are you going to expand from here?

We are planning to open more stores, we’re quite advanced in terms of that. At the moment we’re still deciding, we’re going through a review process with some external consultants at the moment on the best way to grow the business because it’s not an area that I’ve got a lot of expertise in and that’s sort of the franchise/non franchise, some kind of hybrid model.

Right at the moment everything we’re doing is company owned, which may continue, may not. We’re just trying to understand best practice in this space and understand the experiences of other people and obviously you’ve got to couple that with where the economy’s at and what makes the most sense. I mean there’s a lot of good people out there who may well make good franchisees at the moment, where as in stronger economic times, most of those people would be in more permanent jobs. So we’ve got to factor all that in and ultimately come to a decision on the best way to grow the business.

So how many shops do you think Australia can take? What is your aim?

I think around 40 is what we’re aiming at but the real aim isn’t for Australia. It’s really to take it beyond Australia. We’ve spent quite a bit of time looking at both China and India. In particular India because yoghurt is a staple food there, so to me those markets are significantly tidier and much greater.

I was at a brand new mall that just opened outside of Delhi late last year and they’re attracting 500,000 people a week into the mall. That’s a longer-term strategy, but I’ll see how long I keep my executive involvement in it because as I said it’s not experience, my skill set isn’t managing this kind of business but I’m willing to give it a shot.

So how have you set up your leadership team? Well I presume you’re not profitable yet?

We have stores that are profitable but as a business overall we’re not because three of the stores only opened here.

So what’s your revenue now?

We haven’t disclosed any revenue figures at the moment. It’s also a bit hard for us to even project revenue because as I said three of the stores, only one has been operating, the longest one has been operating just under 18 months and we’re about to go into the summer trading period.

In fact the warmth we’ve seen in both Sydney and Melbourne the last couple of weeks has seen significant growth in the business so it’s very weather and seasonally dependent, so we need to wait and see how we trade over the summer.

Now you’re also investing in technology companies. What are you looking for to invest in?

Generally I’ve been focused on early stage stuff because there are less people around doing that kind of stuff. I’ve got a couple of investments that are now sort of starting to get towards to fruition where the businesses have grown quite significantly that I invested in a few years ago.

Which ones are they?

Well the ones that have been publicly mentioned before are AconneX and Red Bubble and then there are a handful of smaller ones that are still early stage that I’ve been investing in. I’ve done a couple outside of Australia; I haven’t only been focused on Australian companies.

So how big is your portfolio, how many have you got in there?

There’s only about five at the moment.

And what’s your record like?

It’s too early to say. I mean AconneX has done incredibly well but there’s been no exit yet and until there’s an exit, one really can’t form a view. It’s a little too early to assess.

You’ve had some very experienced investors like Lloyd Williams in your businesses, what have you learnt from them that you’ve applied to investing in businesses?

I think it’s a range of things. I think the first thing is people and how important people are. As good as any business plan is, at the end of the day the real value is going to come through execution so that’s probably the most critical thing in anything one invests in. I mean you can have a great business plan and bad people and you won’t get anywhere.

I think the second thing is a well thought out strategy, both in relation to what you’re doing and what your competitors are doing in the space and really having a full understanding of some of the space you’re operating in. They’re the two key things I’ll look at and then obviously it comes down to the size of the market and the more fundamental sort of issues one looks at in any business.

And now you’re back working in a start-up again, do you have days where you regret it?

There were days early on that were really frustrating and you say not this again. And waiting on weeks on end for Telstra to put in phone lines when they keep committing that it’s going to happen and it doesn’t. It’s just bureaucratic things that you think, oh no not this again. A lot of the accounting decisions early on in the business can be quite tiresome, and involved a lot of thought, the way that various things are handled and the way that they can impact you later on. Then also the fundraising side, although I haven’t had that as much with this business because that can also be very draining.

What’s this business cost you to start?

To date we’ve invested I think all up about $2.5 million. So it’s quite a sizable investment.

Okay good luck, just one last thing. What’s your favourite technology, geeky little thing at the moment?

Probably the iPhone. Just the applications and the richness of the applications that are available for it. I’m constantly finding new things that I could do with my iPhone that I never thought I could do with it.

Thanks for talking David.