The 2023 tech reckoning is here: is your business ready to deal with the change?
The last 12 months have been pretty tough for the world of tech, including for tradie platform hipages.
Let’s face it. The last 12 months have been pretty tough for the world of tech.
Rising costs, changing consumer habits and a global economic slowdown have resulted in companies of all sizes making big changes to stay ahead.
At hipages Group, we haven’t been immune to the local and global strains on the tech industry, and we’ve faced additional challenges specific to our core customer, Australian tradies, too.
Due to the nature of our work and its counter-cyclical design, we knew our sustainable business would bounce back with market balance, so it was essential that we continued to progress our strategies while tweaking to meet customer needs along the way.
The homeowner’s need for tradies never stops, and despite the relatively uncertain climate, our business has continued to grow during the past 12 months. In my mind, there are four key necessities that enabled this success and helped us pave the road forward.
Constant evolution and execution
The current ‘tech reckoning’ is making it challenging for businesses operating in this space to grow at the rates they previously have.
When it comes to scaling a business, there’s a concept called ‘The S Curve Theory’, which predicts that successful product performance doesn’t follow a linear trend, but instead takes the form of an S-shaped curve over time. Slowly gaining adopters in the early years, the product should see a dramatic increase in adopters and then plateau.
Back in the 1990s, when the concept was first created, an entire S-curve would take place over the course of many years, but now the market moves far more quickly. Businesses now need to be working on multiple S-curves at any one time to ensure they can maintain momentum and growth.
Despite the challenges we’ve faced in the past 12 months, at hipages Group we’ve made a concerted effort to continue evolving and executing our business strategy while planning for the next big thing. Transforming the business from a pure marketplace business into a platform business with multiple products and services is our key ambition. During the last year, we’ve not only finalised transferring all of our customers onto our subscription model, but also started working toward the next iteration of the business, including launching our SaaS product Tradiecore.
Uncertain times can make or break a company, so it’s essential that any businesses looking to lead within their field properly assess customer needs and whether the existing landscape caters for this, before improving or diversifying their offering where necessary, and then delivering strong innovations that keep customers coming back for more.
Innovate for customer stickiness
Introducing and improving services that cater to your customer’s needs not only builds brand loyalty, it creates more control points too. As a result, your products are one of the last they’ll consider removing when they have to adjust cost structures.
At hipages Group, we continue to run our strategies in parallel to ensure that we’re always innovating. Building Tradiecore while operating our existing business is the best example of this. By innovating and rolling out different services, we can increase the ‘stickiness’ of our customer. And, with greater stickiness comes with greater value.
The addition of more innovative services also creates better customer experiences. Platform solutions typically have very strong control points — and building services into your solution is likely to result in very low churn of customers. From my own experience of running a business, there’s a strong argument that by providing additional services the customer lifetime value is significantly improved.
Demonstrate the pathway to profitability
Tech, of course, isn’t the only environment that’s rapidly changing. Investors have also shifted their focus, from income streams and revenue to cash flow and profitability.
If there’s one thing that the past three years has taught us, it’s that investors are seeking businesses that can stand the test of time. Any businesses seeking investment will need to be able to explain how they plan to do this if they’re to unlock any funds.
Having weathered the economic storms of 2008 and 2022, hipages Group is thankfully well-versed at navigating turbulence. It’s due in part to the fact that we operate in a large and addressable market, have a product that works well for its core audience and has a commercial model behind it too.
This year it’s clear that cash is king, and the efficient use of capital is becoming more important than ever. Businesses have been heavily burning cash, and coupled with the higher cost of capital due to higher interest rates, this means that cash is becoming less available, in that the terms for that capital can be stomach churning for business owners.
We don’t believe in sitting still, and having recently completed our subscription model, we’re preparing for the next evolution of hipages and are confident that we can deliver a profitable, cash generating business that’s fit for the future and growing sustainably.
We’ve brought our investors along for the journey with us, and we’re clear about how we intend to achieve our ambitions with them.
Hire good people
Laying solid foundations is important for any business, and hiring good people will enable businesses to stay alive as we go through this inflationary cycle.
It’s the recruitment of creative, curious and competent people that will ensure your company thinks, acts and does things differently to its competitors and offers something unique in an increasingly competitive market.
While it’s not always easy to recruit with skills shortages rife across various sectors, at hipages Group we’ve been able to source and recruit talented people from 11 different countries, which has enhanced the diversity of our workplace. We also invest heavily in our people and culture, which has helped us retain our position as Australia’s second best place to work in the Best Place to Work Awards, and allows us to attract the industry’s best and brightest.
An optimist’s outlook
It might’ve been a challenging 12 months, but for hipages Group, we’ve entered a new shift. Our market is balancing — a necessity for a double-sided marketplace — and once again, our agility has enabled us to deliver what our customers need and more.
At a time when the global economy is slowing but the tech environment is rapidly changing, it’s essential that businesses operating in this space take action and fast. As with many things in life, there will inevitably be a tech rebound in the near future, and it’ll be the action taken now that separates businesses from being ahead of the pack to falling behind.
Roby Sharon-Zipser is the CEO and co-founder of hipages Group.
