Louise Schultze

What is the rationale behind getting more investment?

We are going overseas. We are launching in the US, Canada, UK and New Zealand as they have similar infrastructure to ours and also ethically I refuse to go to countries where they still haven’t established, like Africa, India and Asia. So we are selling licences to those countries and the finance we are raising will pay for an international legal team and roll out team, and the other half of the investment will pay for a major international ad campaign that we are embarking on.

In terms of your model, keeping the Australian site for Australian suppliers only, will you replicate that model overseas as well?

Yes. So it will stimulate each economy in its own right so it will stop things going over to print houses where that particular economy can’t compete. So we can’t compete with print houses in China, we can’t compete with telemarketers in India, but by bringing it back to Australia, making it affordable and making a decision here we hope that Australian businesses will stimulate the economy here.

What have been some of the big challenges in building the business?

Probably getting the right team together. It has taken us awhile to I guess get all the right heads at all the right times. Obviously it was me with an idea and I came across a guy by the name of Frank Hemmings who was the head of RMIT Engineering. He is a nuclear physicist and a very intelligent man, and he said I love this and he invested in it and took it to a designer who was a tech head, so from that it’s all grown organically, so all the way through to our accounts and our lawyers, now when we were capital raising all we had was one investment evening at the Rialto and all the major VC firms knocking on our doors. Prior to that, when we were raising our first round of cash, it was like pulling teeth, it was terrible. That was as a start up so we actually had to get into the market place and prove ourselves before anyone seriously would take note. So we found that very difficult. We have made mistakes, we have definitely made those having I guess the wrong people at the wrong time and that has helped us work out who the right people are.

Give us some insights from some of the questions that your consultants are frequently asked. What are some of the mistakes that SMEs make, or the areas that they really need the most help?

The main question that they ring up and ask is: I’ve started this business, I have been going at it for six months or a year and nothing seems to be happening. And when we go into it and look at it we find that they haven’t placed themselves well in the market place, so that is geographically and demographically, and they haven’t done any research as to who the actual clientele are. So the market research aspect really fails small business. And I think that once they get a really good understanding of how they research their market and put themselves in front of them, then they are off.

And what is a good cost-effective marketing tip, once they have done their research properly?

You have to give away something for free. You have to do something that is genuine for your clients to get them to really see who you are so they can turn around and say that is a really good offer, I am going to take that and then from there they can build the relationship. But they have to be genuine.

A lot of people do these two-for-one offers, they aren’t genuine, people can see through that now as really educated consumers.

For example, there was this guy who made candles. And he was just working out of his mum’s kitchen making these candles and he thought if he made them really arty people would like them but no one was buying them. And then one day he was watching Oprah and Nicole Kidman was on there saying that she was going back to Australia and shopping for a kids fairy party and she was looking at buying all these different things. So he spent weeks making really fancy fairy candles and boxed them up sent them off to her publicist – that is as far as he could get close to Nicole Kidman – and said ‘I want you to use these for free for your party’. She liked them that much that she used them and he became an international success basically overnight because all these celebrities were there and they loved the candles. So he had to make all these candles and give them away to a person who could actually afford them just to get his name out there.

So sometimes you have to genuinely giveaway something for free. And that is what we see with our education, by having genuine education for free that has had a 100% turn around for us in terms of them actually going back and using a paid service from us on iBidAM somewhere along the line.

Louise Schultz is speaking at COSBOA’s National Small Business Summit  at the Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre on 8 July.