The Future of SaaS, AI & Online Marketplaces

Cutting costs is actually not easy to do

but something you control

but you can control getting the growth is you're taking uh bets you're doing discovery experimentation trying to understand what products your customers need but the real growth happens when companies get uh a multi-product solution particularly in technology and then you can leverage the distribution to get the growth AI is going to destroy the world and it's destroyed valuations of technology companies and to some degree there's a little bit of risk in that. I I agree there's risk and I understand those risks but uh the shareholder value has been I feel like unfairly eroded

for companies like high pages in fact all tech companies running a business can feel lonely especially when the decisions get heavy welcome to CEO rispro by sor jane practical insights from the boardroom and the meditation cushion I'm sorry I've done 10,000 hours in three major parts of my life I spent 10,000 hours being a CEO10 10,000 hours being a board member and 10,000 hours meditating. What we're going to do in each episode is really unpack a real business challenge that a CEO is facing and see if we can work through it together. Enjoy. Hi, good day guys. Welcome to another episode of CEO Rispro. Today I've got Robbie from High Pages. Robbie, do you want to tell us a bit about yourself?

Hey S, thanks for having me today. Uh been a while, three years. Uh catching up on a walk on the cliffs of Watson's Bay.

Yes, that's right. Down to Bull Clues Watson's Bay. Uh so a little bit about myself. Uh obviously you married guy, got a couple kids. Uh been a CEO of High Pages Group for a little under 22 years. uh and uh you know if you want to go back into the history of time I uh I I did a BCOM m agent in accounting got recruited by PWC um worked there got qualified as an accountant uh worked at an investment bank Alco Finance Group not around anymore worked there for a couple of years um had another business before High Pages Group was a sort of a recovery uh service we we looked for double payments over payments we built a query It's all automated now in software, but back then it didn't exist.

And

uh we launched High Pages uh back in 2004.

Okay. Wow.

Yeah. So, it's been a while. Yeah. And I'm I'm the CEO of the group.

I gather we'll unpack High Pages in a little bit more detail shortly, but for those of you that haven't heard of it, it's Australia's largest marketplace and platform for home improvement services. Um, and uh, yeah, we we we have about 360 people, five offices, Australia and New Zealand's largest marketplace and platform. And uh, yeah, we're building tech for trades and home improvement businesses and for households to use. Got about just under 70% awareness in the market. I've been on shows like The Block, well-known brand. Yeah. So, and uh, people love using us.

Yeah. Brilliant. So, the way we run this podcast is we've talked through a business problem you're having right now. we kind of workshop that together. What's top of mind? What's causing you grief? What are you thinking about?

Yeah, it's funny you said earlier, it's always the thing that you say first, but uh I think the thing that um obviously is frustrating as an ASX listed company is the is the market capitalization valuation. We're considered what's called a small cap stock. uh the market has I mean you may have heard or people on the podcast might have heard about uh SASDon and AI is going to destroy the world and it's destroyed valuations of technology companies and to some degree there's a little bit of risk in that I I agree there's risk and I understand those risks but uh uh the the shareholder value has been I feel like unfairly eroded

for com companies like high pages in fact all tech companies have uh some might have been overvalued before. I I would say that and uh maybe there's a bit of a correction there, but it seems like it's just been like a blanket correction across the board. You're losing 30 to 50% market cap um in a very short period of time. Yeah. On technology that's, you know, on technology that's more fear than actually understanding the enablement, the power of that technology. And uh we've seen this all before. I'm just surprised of the the the the reaction to business valuations. And then the ball back on that is obviously it's not just me complaining about valuations. It's also about the fact that uh the the the growth is what drives sometimes valuation and achieving accelerated growth uh can be sometimes more difficult.

Uh cutting cost is actually not easy to do

but something you control

but you can control. getting the growth is you're taking uh bets, you're doing discovery, experimentation, trying to understand what products your customers need. And then often and you might often a lot of companies just have one hit. They don't get a second and a third or a fourth hit. But the real growth happens when companies get uh a multi-product solution particularly in technology and then you can leverage the distribution to get the growth and I think that's kind of like where it where it's getting really interesting. Uh value is also driven not only by growth as well. There's also perceived value. Um and there's a whole conversation on how value is driven and I think I think no one's actually seen the perceived value of what AI could do in our business in the high pages group business.

So, uh, be interesting to unpack that because there's lots of examples of what's going on externally on businesses that have no customers, no revenue, but are getting billion dollar value valuation for for

for an idea for an idea and concept. Um, yeah,

someone was telling me about what's the shoe company um in the US. Uh, they've just gone all AI. Um, what's the name of the company? I don't know. Dur.

Oh, there's a shoe company in the US. I'll come to me the name in a second. And uh, they've decided to go all AI. They manufacture shoes and they just increased their valuation.

They just put rubber and cloth together in a nice shape.

Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. So, we want to though narrow it down to what's something we can workshop together today. Yeah.

Is is the biggest thing the ASX valuation like how do I get people to understand my story

so I push the valuation up? Is that more

So, we obviously have investor relations and

is that the biggest problem to solve right now or is that already solved?

Uh, it's not solved because I'm finding it hard to convey it. But we do have investor relations and there's like you know there's an approach to uh you know getting perception improved. We just did an investor investor day uh yesterday which was highly successful and uh what we're doing is changing the narrative to be more around uh product technology innovation. Uh and also unfortunately the market is locked in on a perception of a metric that we provided when we listed five plus years ago. And for some reason you talk about an innovation and they want the benefits the next quarter but the metrics that you released from five years ago that build their models uh to develop their valuation.

They can't get they can't shake it. It's like it's it's it's a weird it's a weird scenario. But uh I think the way to do it is you just got to you got to draw a line in the sand and say hey no this is a new metric don't worry we'll do a transition phase with the old metrics so that you can do your reconciliations but we're now talking about the new innovation the execution of our strategy that that's coming to life these are the metrics that we're going to be talking more and more about and our strategy as it comes to life you'll see that and it all makes sense. So I think that is being taken care of.

uh you know we had a reasonable bump in the share price yesterday after a couple of announcements and that's tied into execution of strategy.

So I think there is a plan.

So that's path to recovery.

Well, I hope I hope it is.

Yeah. Is that what we're talking about? You think you're in a good plan?

I mean we can. I mean like I think like I'm like always my job is to like look at the problems and see if we can come up with solutions. So I'm going in 100% confident, but I'm happy to unpack those those points uh if that's what we we want to do. Um driving growth is tricky. I think you know growth is an interesting factor. You bring in new product to market. Um with new customers you can drive more yield out of your existing customers with that same new product or you just grow counts and sometimes there's a trade-off between all three that you got to the mechanics of that and the thinking around that could be something worth unpacking.

Um so

we need to pick one. So we got the ASA got the growth got the AI.

Yeah.

What's what's the most burning platform for you? Let's me put it that way.

What's going to give you the biggest bang for buck? What's going to give you the biggest uh

So I think I think you know the most relevant topic now is AI and how people are thinking about AI. So maybe we could go into that. Um we can talk about the layers of thinking and some of the unknowns there. So

uh in moving into a territory that I'm not 100% you know confident I know about

and what would the question be like what do you want to solve? What what do you want to get out of today and to figure it out? So the thing that's um I think the big challenge that businesses are having today is the zeroclick environment. So uh what do I mean by zero click? So you have a situation where you can go to a chat GPT which is what most uh mo most people are familiar with chat GPT maybe Gemini as the most B toC side sort of like in in lie of search um and then you historically would go to Google and type in uh a query it usually started short short um a shortterm query in Google and then became a longtail.

So short term is

plumber near me and then

plumber to fix that's that's a short term and then plumber to fix broken dishwasher that's connected to drain outside of the house uh in Bondi. Yep.

That would be like a very long tail term.

And uh that's where things started to progress over over the last couple of decades.

And then you'd get a set of results. you'd click, click, click, click, make the inquiries like a bit of like a traditional classified approach or click around until you got what you needed. And it was like quite that that was an efficiency on on the short tail and then um and that was an and the short tail was a bigger efficiency on what was traditional classified ringing around a number in the and ringing people around, right? So, but now where it's gone is the next layer of efficiency is you're actually having a conversation with an LLM, a large language model or an agent of a large language model in this case chat GPT and uh it gives you and serves up all of the information that you need immediately and you don't click anywhere and there's this whole ecosystem over the last two decades that's been built up over generating revenue from clicks, clicks and then inquiries and then selling those inquiries or arbiting those inquiries.

ries um and and uh you know the big opportunity for businesses was to build a brand so that you could avoid and circumvent the the Google beast. Um in Australia it's primarily Google because it's 90% market share. Uh so you you end up build you end up starting there and then you build a brand and then you move away from that but you always still have a dependency on um there's whole industries there search engine optimization SEO industries and SEM industries but the challenge is is that now you've got a new technology that's come about that's not monetizing yet with advertising with clicks 100% it's too big a category I think it's like $250 billion of revenue for Google um there's going to be an advertising model.

Um I think uh chat GPT, OpenAI have announced that they're going to be doing um advertising. Uh Claude not so much, but it's more enterprise that's an enterprise sort of solution.

Uh so you know the big players are going to be doing in advertising. So it's coming. But the challenge know that's a lot of detail but just make sure everyone understands what I'm talking about. Not everyone's in tech.

But the challenge the challenge is is how do you get customers to come to your platforms, your properties, your websites? How do I get customers to come to my platform

without without um them clicking anything?

Um so that's an interesting one. And then you create as a platform unique technology that has modes around it, data modes, um distribution modes, um maybe the category you operate in is not going to be replicated yet by any AI or robotics for example, trade services in our case. So we've got quite a number of modes. But how do we stop say that data mo being handed over and being disintermediated by an LLM?

And that's an interesting topic and I think uh there's lots of um uh AI tools that will help businesses with productivity and we can talk about that but I think if you're not using it it's a no-brainer. Uh you can then talk about um new products that you're innovating and building as a company

and that's at your innovation product innovation layer. But at the top of the funnel at the the higher level is how do you stop being disintermediated and then actually that happening on another platform after you've invested you know years in our case decades on brand. So that's an interesting topic.

So how do I get people to come to my platform cuz you want to ensure relevance right?

Yeah

cuz what you did to the trading post and yellow pages you want to make sure someone does doesn't do to you.

That's right. That's right.

It's it's just the next challenge next game to make sure you're relevant.

Yeah. That's right. So it's an interesting interesting topic to unpack. uh and uh we could explore in bit more detail how we're thinking about it. I can be honest and say look you know some things we haven't got the answers to but yeah absolutely worth exploring.

Give us a bit of context. So to be a CEO of a tech company for 22 years I think besides Jensen you're probably the longest CEO I've ever met.

Really?

That's a good thing

cuz most CEOs have a half life of three to five years right?

Yeah. So soed CEOs from what I understand is typically max 5 years 3 to 5 years. So I'm actually probably at the end of the average cycle just for being as a listener, you know.

Yeah.

Uh yeah.

So tell us back like how did you start this? How did this all come to be?

Okay. So we'll go back to that detail. Yeah. So like the story goes that like in 2023 I proposed to my wife. Uh we uh had just prior just before

sorry 2003.

Yeah. Jeez. Yeah. I mean you skip 20 years.

Yeah. Just just delete 20 years. No. In 2003, um we got my wife, so we we got uh proposed. We we looked uh we bought a bought an a two-bedroom.

We scraped a couple of bucks together. Y

um from a bit of savings and we bought a two-bedroom apartment.

It was like a 1960s old apartment. And the experience of renovating that apartment uh cuz it needed to be renovated. It was like it was really old and done quite cheap. Um, and we uh we just found that pro I found the process horrible. I just didn't know if I needed to get strata approval uh to get the property uh renovated. So strata is the group the body corporate or the group that approves what you know if you knock a wall out can you do it because will the building collapse kind of thing.

Do you need council approval for that renovation?

Uh do you need the trades to be licensed? Who's project managing it? How do you know if they're any good? Uh how much do they cost? you know, these are like pretty standard things and like these problems still exist today. Now, I love to say and I know that we have for sure made a massive difference in that um experience for households and for um uh trade businesses as well. We've helped them as well, but I'll talk about that in a second. So, that's a big problem and we went about trying to solve that through creating content and then building a directory. But

you start off with a directory service.

Yeah. Yeah. So, we kicked off a directory and we decided to go specialized. So you know high pages was obviously a niche high stands for home improvement and it was a niche uh in one of the largest segments for the classified model at the time which was yellow pages and the u the outdoor sort of distributed couers and things like that.

Why did yours work right because yellow pages had online directories probably around that time 20001 they had sensors they were doing that

but how come you guys succeeded how come you guys got this right? Yeah. So I think uh there's a few reasons. Uh one of them being is we were a category specialist and we created unique content um around the category that then drove people into the directory. Uh yellow pages was a generalist. It was for every service and business in the country. So it was very difficult for them to create unique content. They later on tried but a generalist is very hard I think. Uh

so what do you mean by unique content? What's

so content like uh how how to how to get check licenses for a trade? Sure. how to project manage a trade. Do you need to project manage? How to deal with a strata? Um uh what what what a cost cost guides should look like for specific projects. So we go very very deep into rich content that at the time made a lot of sense because uh SEO was coming just really coming along and we we were sort of at the frontier of SEO, search engine optimization,

interaction through people.

We got picked up and and Google was really going crazy. It was going exponentially. Growth was going nuts. people were going online like crazy. the distribution of broadband and tech internet technology was increasing um like crazy and so you know we we created that content we start to get a lot of eyeballs digital eyeballs and we didn't have the hard cost um of printing and massive sales right we were using a lot of tech to you know at the time it's outdated tech now for that stuff because we've evolved significantly but

you weren't a tech guy what made you go into a tech guy

so my business partner to be fair was a tech guy who was a tech guy

I'm more of a operational finance guy. Um I've become a tech become the tech guy. Uh only took me a couple decades but yeah so I've become the tech guy. Uh but my business partner was um he was a um electrical engineer by trade. He did the engineering and did the coding.

The first version he coded himself did it all. And I was doing all the sales. I was doing all the

and you were selling to trades the business trades.

Yeah. Yeah. So just just just to close the gap on how it became a business model is what I also identified is is like I like any good accountant said hey before I do this thing I'm going to do a business plan. So I wrote a business plan and I did some research and I realized that the as the classified directory is like a precursor to a market kind of a marketplace but it wasn't like a proper sort of like real-time connection tool. Uh you need to speak to customers and typically with marketplaces one site subsidizes the other. uh one site's usually either free or very low in price charges to use and the other one's more expensive.

Uh I quickly realized the expectation because of the classified model was that the what they call the demand side which is people looking for trades or home business expected to be free.

Mhm.

And on the supply side uh they are used to paying

they always for 100 years people pay for classifiers the supply side which is the trades they would pay to have their advertising out there which is very logical makes sense. So, so we um I but I they actually are our customer. You both customers, but one is paying you. So, you got to speak to the guy that's paying you. And so, we speak to them.

And what was really interesting about that process was I learned that they actually had a lot of problems. Um trades are really uh street smart. They're smart around how um they solve problems. They're the guys that are in the ditch connecting the wire this way and that way, making it compliant and safe and getting that done. They get a lot of joy from that. They love that. Um and then and then what I would say is uh they get the joy of looking at their customer satisfaction that you've helped them deliver their dream or you've solved their problem or the thing that was causing them anxiety. They fix it. They love doing that. They're natural problem solvers and they get joy from other people's joy, which is great, but they don't like the administration.

They don't understand the technology as much.

Funnily enough, they use technology in their day-to-day. In fact, they were the fastest adopters of the mobile phone technology. But when it came to beyond that sort of too hard now really changing we've seen that change in the last few years

generational change and also I think the macro conditions have forced a lot of change

but going back to that series I realized hey there's a much bigger opportunity than just advertising but to get our foot in the door with the few dollars that we had together to run the business we we um we kind of had to monetize and build scale and do that now it took us a long time to get there and there lots of competitors that replicated what we were doing. I just think we I don't know if our tech was the best tech, but we had some unique things in tech. We had some really good uh capabilities in our marketing, digital marketing, SEO, SEM, search engine marketing uh that was was superior to competitors and I think we just executed better.

I think we just executed. We we and we were persistent and we were deliberate and organized and without much money we we were using spreadsheets and tools but we boy we worked we worked hard 80 90 hour weeks like like like you like real any bounding starting story and we got scale

and then I think the next big successful thing for us was is that we were very effective at raising money. Uh I think David and I who's my co-founder business partner we were good at pitching y and because of our momentum and passion we were able to raise more money than others and I think we made a couple of slightly better decisions around commercial business models we took our time uh we didn't rush into some decisions and I think we leaprogged against competitors and then we became the market leader okay in the category so and then we've moved on since then but I've packed that

and and so how were you just a directory service for how many years did that So from 2004, so one July actually found the corporate certificate um just bit of nostalgia was looking at some paperwork that I was filing and I found the certificate of incorporation. So it was in July 2004. So the FY25 financial year FY 2005

I keep getting two decades there. I don't know why I'm doing that. 2005 and uh uh yeah so we were there we were a pure play directory till 2012 and then we modified to become like an ondemand marketplace. We rebranded uh from home improvement pages to high pages back then. And uh that on demand was effectively like a reverse auction system where the instead of you looking around and then calling and all of that looking for a business to help you uh you would tell us in a form what your parameters were very simple form and then Robbie was the matching algorithm of us binding trades and then connecting everyone and charging for that service.

And then we scaled that and that grew that grew exponentially.

And you charge the trades for that service.

Yeah, we charged pay per lead fee for that. So you got your directory and a pay per lead. Now we we we could see that that was the future. In 2012, Google Google launched Google. They launched in America 2010, Google local, but uh in 2012 um they sort of came to Australia. Things took a couple of years to come to Australia. Now it's like within 6 months, 3 months things that get tested and are working they they go global. But back then it was a couple of years and Google local really started to pick up and we saw our sort of revenue from our classified model start to decline. Um well not decline it was a growth rate decline but we plateaued as a revenue and we needed a new product.

So we

So that was your first disruption that you had to back against.

Yeah that's right. Yeah. So Google local came along. Um

is that still around? So I never used Google local. Yeah, Google local still around, but what's happened is is when you go to Google, the uh AI overlays usually are now at the top of the search results and then you've got Google lo you got uh Google local or ads Google ads and Google local interchange are tested but you maybe Google local then the ads and then SEO has now fallen below the fold. So what that means is is that if you look at your screen on your computer,

scroll down to get actual

you actually have to scroll down and the clicks that you generate from below the fold is significantly lower when they're above the fold. For anyone that's in digital marketing, they'll know exactly what I'm talking about. But it just makes sense. You have to you have to make you're making me work as a user. So you have to go down to I don't want to scroll.

Anyone wants to scroll to read that?

I think they said the last time I heard the statistics is our average attention span for anything is 15 seconds. I think scroll disruption ecos marketplace and uh that just went gang buster. So what we were in this interesting situation where we had to hold we had to hold the revenue from the class classified part of the business while there's a new that was declining but we had a new line item coming in. So when you look at the growth in that period of 2012 to 14 we grew nicely like 15 20% peranom maybe a bit more than that but we were coming off a back of you know 30 to 50% and in our earlier 100% growth 100 plus% growth

but what I find curious right is like um I was trying to say like what what made a CEO succeed in this scenario

so you had the exact same problem the trading post had the exact same problem yellow pages had

besides being smarter better looking and and and all that good stuff.

Like what about you allowed you to pivot that way and do something different cuz the other guys did it.

Look, I think uh I think one of the things that I feel um as as a CEO is uh numeracy, analytical capability, resilience, and also being not too conservative as you'd expect maybe from more traditional accountants.

So you're happy to take that

to have some experimentation and and risk taking.

I'm pretty sure like a large Tulsa census would not have taken a risk, right? that's not in their DNA.

Or they tried but they didn't execute well. Like they said, "Oh, look, we don't have it in our DNA to execute." So, they bought um they bought a a marketplace business and shut it down a few years later.

Yep. They bought it, destroyed it, and sold it

pretty much. Well, they just shut it down. They didn't even sell us. They couldn't get to sell it. So, like there are there were bigger players. I think

I think the thing is I believed in the solution. Uh and I put I put my own money behind it. So, I had the ability to get other people to back it, but it had to work because the shame of being bankrupt

was not tolerable. Like, and that's the thing that a lot of

Imagine telling your mom that.

Yeah. Well, your wife, you know, we were already married already for 10 years. You've been working at this thing for 10 years. I was like, I can't go bankrupt. Like, that's that's like that's like that's not going to happen. And

I think

that's another conver conversation day. I think we you know, the Australian market has a very low tolerance especially Australian market fork for Yeah. low tolerance for risk, tall poppy syndrome, and um and you know, failure is just not an option. And if you fail, you just go get a real job. Don't don't do this business stuff. I think that's that's a really it's a I still think that still exists today.

It totally does.

Can I suggest maybe you had something different?

Yeah.

I think let's just use yellow pages, right? That's an example. Anyone anyone over 35 probably knows.

Anyone below probably 20 has no idea what we're talking about. The directory that arrived in the mail.

Well, it's funny because I do induction with a lot of new people. I I meet every new person that joins

and you show them the yellow pages.

No, no. I talk about the yellow pages and often it's like 25 year olds that are starting and I say to them, "You guys don't even know what I'm talking about." Your parents probably use the book to hold your cot up if you had a chest infection. So the mucus would come down and they look at me what I'm like cuz I haven't had kids. I don't even know what I'm talking about.

Absolutely.

I'm finding it hard to find relevance. But uh

you got to go to a museum and buy a couple yellow pages. Get a couple yellow pages. Yeah.

Um, so I think the difference between perhaps you and like the yellow pages where you were very close to the problem.

Yeah.

Like you felt it every day.

But if I'm an exact four levels higher in TostRo, which I think probably by then they probably own Census.

Yeah.

Um, they were probably so removed from the actual problem.

Yeah.

That they didn't care. They didn't have the same incentive to fix it as you probably did.

Oh, I'm not sure if I agree with that. I think I think they cared. I think they absolutely cared. But

how come they didn't? How come they didn't succeed? So, so I think I think there's a guy there's a there's a really good book that I recommend people should read is a guy called Hamilton Helmer and he talks about the seven powers.

Y

and I think one of the powers that he talks about is a counter positioning. uh and I think the examples that come up in in um you know you know university sort of studies and also external studies and businesses that do strategy is what they say is that often organizations are in the cash flow in the rut of their dayto-day and to reinvent yourself which would mean destroying revenue cutting costs materially changing your whole business uh is very intolerable for boards and very difficult for a interim CEO that didn't have the connections to the business at its roots. Y

so best example is Kodak. So Kodak uh film Kodak Kodak film so Kodak if you those are familiar with Kodak. So Kodak had a phenomenal film business was the market leader had um patents and inventions uh for film but uh they didn't lead the market with digital photography. In fact, I think their paints invented it. They invented it, but they didn't deliver the product.

I think Fuji or one of the other other players, I remember getting the names wrong on that, but someone else came along and digital photography took off and Kodak, I think, went into administration and I think they're still around in a form where they live off the royalties off some of their old patents, but that business failed in the end effectively. And you can imagine you're top of the world Kodak selling film to you know tens hundreds of thousands of photography uh development studios um what what do they what do they call them back then? I forgot even now.

Photoshop photo development studios and uh you've got a business model that works and new CEO come along and say hey there's this new thing coming along it's going to disrupt us and kill us. Um we need to go there and the board will just say are you sure? How sure are you? Would you bet your whole career on that? No one's going to do that. The problem with the Kodaks and even like the yellow pages is all the evidence is almost to the contrary.

Yeah.

The evidence that a board level sees

actually suggests like Kodak went bankrupt 2 years after the best year ever.

Yeah. Yeah.

So all the evidence said no, nothing's changed. We're fine.

Yeah.

Um and I'd love to see what year yellow pages had the best year.

So that's been proven wrong so many times. and uh you know the counterposition element of the Hamilton Helmar uh book that um he's a he's a lecturer at one of the one of the Ivy League colleges in America and uh really really good read and anyone that's a CEO or in the board wants to um think about strategy it's it's it should be like you know there's three books that you should read that's one of the books that you absolutely have to read as a framework to develop strategy um if you're not reading it you're you're not knowing what's going on it's looking at the seven elements of power Back to the example that we're talking about, the counter position that Hype Pages came along to the market was is we're not printing.

We're not going to do digital print. We're not going to have field salespeople running around the country getting you to sign contracts.

Yep.

Uh everything is online. Um and we're not going to do TV ads and radio ads. That's what or or newspaper ads to promote our products. Uh we just don't have that kind of money. What we're going to do is we're going to use a new digital form that people are discovering and growing exponentially to get our get our um product in market which was at the time Google. And if you remember maybe people listening don't remember but there was a Tel Telster owned Yellow Pages at the time. There's a gentleman by the name of Soul. Uh

oh yeah Soul.

Soul guy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh

Spanish guy or something.

Yeah. Spanish a Spanish guy. Yeah. Salt. So he he he was famous and known for uh Google Schmoogle.

That's that was his line. Google Schmoogle. Um and boy was he wrong.

He had the arrogance of a large corporate.

That's right. We're making so much money. Like don't necessarily hold that against him. He was just like he like he he's four or fiveyear-old telco CEO.

Things don't change. But in this part of the business that was highly profitable was being disrupted. and we we we come along and say, "Hey, we're going to use Google Adwords uh you know, SEO, we charged instead of charging 2 $3,000, then this is where the counter positioning makes sense. Instead of charging $2 or $3,000 a year for a little black box in a printed document that was just moving to online that wasn't discoverable,

uh to open discoverable and for $89 for the whole year and send us as much color, as much content, as much information as you want. Um, in fact, you can use it as your own website and we'll do it. We if you have the time to send us a hundred photographs, I'll find someone to put those 100 photographs on your profile. That was impossible. It was unheard of. No one would have no one could even imagine that being possible at the time. And what did we do? We just had some uni students with some scanners. People physically sent their photo albums and we just scanned them paying peanuts and we could justify it. And then the word it went viral, went nuts and we grew

unbelievably uh in that time. And so that's a counter position and a change uh that disrupted many of the incumbents and we actually were able to go into the market. There were others that replicated us later on but we did that really well.

I mean I'm sure soul would have at the time been like oh we have a mode we have a brand

we have all those things that you know CEOs today you're all talking about.

No our SAS company's different. We have a brand. No no our SAS company's different. We've got customers. We've got a

mo data.

He probably had that exact argument back back in his kind of boardroom. Yeah. Well, maybe data. I don't think the sophistication around data

wouldn't have nothing like that would been custom.

Would had a database.

Yeah. It would have had Yeah.

So, that's the first disruption 2012. What was the next disruption for you guys that you have to overcome?

Yeah. So, um we we found uh in 2014 that the unit economics was a little bit challenging and uh the way the auction system was working was tricky. uh we ended up becoming a little bit quite quickly like a yellow pages where the largest provider ended up just winning all the work. Um and it and that happened very fast.

Is that because they paid more for

so they we were we were doing like an auction for the lead and so the average small handyman next door wanted work which was what we were about. We were local um we were the for the small business. um you ended up getting a massive consolidation event happening with the advertising where the businesses with the biggest buckets saw the opportunity and they just started plowing in and paying per lead. And so we'd end up with customers, you know, with5 $10,000 a month of leads. Now,

at the time, we we were a bit silly in the way we're doing. We had to we had to write off a lot of um those sales. We thought they were sales, but we didn't have a good mechanism to collect and charge for those services. And uh the problem problem was is that uh we ended up writing off a lot of debt too on the big guys. they sucked up all the work. Um there's high the industry is notorious for quite a lot of exits. Doesn't mean they're great. It's disappearing and they don't pay their bills. Sure.

And so we had this weird thing where we trusted everyone on accounts and so that was painful

and so what we had to do is we had to make it more like fair. And so we determined lead prices for certain categories on the

had set pricing

set pricing. So we developed operational price list for a cleaning job or a plumbing job and then we got a little bit more sophisticated and so we stopped this auction bidding system and we got customers to agree to a lead price and we put them on a contract and that that sort of solved a bit of a problem and stopped that bad debt problem happening. And then and then in 2014 we said hey some of these customers are really loyal. They're coming in and out too much. Why don't we introduce a subscription product? So that was a like that was we had a directory subscription. We had a transactional product and then we introduced a subscription and a subscription.

It got a bit complicated and then eventually we made a decision in 2000 I'm jumping ahead now but in 2019 we made a call to go 100% subscription.

Um because that tied into the next phase where we need to go

500 bucks a month and I get five leads or whatever whatever

you get depending if you're a builder you might get five. If you're a cleaner you might get 50 because the value there was different value for the

2019 we turned into a subscription model.

Yeah. So 2019 after 2018 almost going broke and y

burning lots of cash raising tons of money. We we said look this the unit economics uh the the cost um the cost to acquire a customer and the lifetime value of that customer did not equate to a profitable business. And so we had to we had to change the dynamics. And the only way to make it work is we had to go from a very transactional type business to 100% subscription. If if you were only supporting large organizations, they'd they'd want you forever cuz they always need more and more more jobs. But if you're supporting small local mom and dad, local trades,

once they build up a bit of a network, they'll just go direct, rather. They'll disin you.

So that's so that's you're you're highlighting that that has always been the challenge for any classifier director. We didn't invent that problem. It always exists. So what what you're saying is in like simple terms is I went on your marketplace and I found a plumber

and it was a good plumber

and uh that plumber um is now giving me I've had a personalized experience with them. I've got their card. I've added their number to my phone. I don't need that marketplace anymore. and your business model. It's like worse than it's like that. It's not it's not as bad as a dating platform where you get matched, you married a couple, you don't need anymore and the amount of value that probably unless you get divorced, the amount of value that's created is huge. You have children, you build a family, you build a life together, but they get like a few hundred bucks for that that small interaction when they actually created so much value. That's the most extreme example of that disintermediation of a platform.

In our case, it's not as bad because it is just the plumber at the end of the day. subscription is what kind of buffers against that.

So there's a bit of buffer but it still doesn't solve the whole problem but it's a gateway to solving the problem and I'll talk about that in a second but the the challenge that you have with this intermediation is that definitely that um so you you know you as a platform have to be really innovative and find other solutions to keep the customer being sticky.

Mh.

Um so where are we at timeline? I've talked about lots of different question for you though.

Yeah. Um so you've gone through like four major changes right you started off with the directory service 2012 you got into your um auction service 2014 you set self set pricing 2019 subscription model

who was with you along that journey to help you figure this stuff out or was it you by yourself? Oh, in the beginning it was uh just uh Dave and myself and a couple of other partners that we were like just sort of stumbling around trying to work it out. But we went silly like I mean like I I worked in account big accounting firm. I understood accounting and analytics and numeric. David and I both were very not to sound too egotistical but analytically and mathematically super strong um and business concepts which we grew up with family businesses we were quite comfortable with like we're both quite entrepreneurial uh growing up we had like you know car washing little businesses and market store businesses and David had other little side hustles and all that so we all had little

things before so we were little quite quite entre as as as you are um

we we we we had business sort of in the the

you had a really good kind background. Yeah. So co-founder working together. So that was the first three years and then

and then we we got some early stage like the VC money and that was done by a group of more mature business experienced business gentlemen. Um and so they were with us for about five or six years and then it we needed to raise more money. they exited and then we got the next round of early stage VC money and then obviously all the way to becoming um a listed company and but we've we we had a a direct we had directors from the beginning but proper board meetings board director governance structures reporting uh within three two to three years of starting

okay

um that that sounds like a long time

nowadays but back then things remember moved a lot slower

yeah plenty of time for that is then 2019 got subscription model what was your next disruption after that

yeah so the subscription model was really key. Uh, one of the things going back in time when I said I interviewed, you know, thousands and spoke to thousands and thousands if not 10,000 um, businesses is that that whole business admin burden. And um I I um David Juan from um from a fund in the US. He he wrote a um uh wrote an article about systems of record and explained that businesses with systems of record uh that sell systems of record to other businesses that have very high sticky clients. What is a system of record? It's like a CRM, ERP system, a database.

Yeah. You keep you keep a record of your your business. Typically, they're the last things that a business will drop. And I was like, "Okay, well, we've got to get into that space." Like, we we've got we're selling marketing, but you don't have to have that on all the time, especially if you're a soul trader and you're busy. You come in and out. So, that results in churn. And also, they disintermediate.

Uh, but the reality is is even if they get that relationship with a with a household, they still need to uh process the invoice, do the quote, get,

get paid, process the payment. And I was like, well, we should be going into that that space. So, uh about I I talked about it 5 years ago. It took me a year or two to get the board to be convinced that we should either invest or buy something. So we

Why did it take so long?

Um I think I think

the way you explain it sounds quite obvious.

Yeah, it does. But uh you know, you've been doing something well. Um and uh it's all about cash. Like so we were running out of money and there you go, you've got a founder coming in.

I want to go spend money on something else.

Yeah, I want to spend something on something else. I got another other shiny thing that I want to play with. And it's like it's hard for a board that's got responsibility to um protect, preserve, protect um the capital of the business for then someone to come along and say, "Hey, I need to spend another million dollars when you're, you know, down to a few million or million dollars in the bank on something else that may or may not work." It's really difficult to do.

Uh so yeah, it sounded rational and logical, but um also remember a lot of businesses are not successful in acquisitions. They're not successful on the second product. M

so you know to be skeptical and writing business we had to I think we wrote three or four business plans before I got it approved

but we had to go into systems of record

but that's a complex pivot right to go from

marketplace auctioning leads subscriptions to now let me become a SAS company

yeah and and and we didn't and we didn't do it perfectly in the beginning so we went out and I bought a small we bought a small business

remember that being just 2019

about 2021

okay 21 years later Yeah, about 21. We bought a small business uh just to get the IP in the business instead of us trying to learn it ourselves. Had had like 20 customers uh like 100 200 grand in revenue. It was really small.

Okay.

Uh and we rebadged that

like a trades management.

Yeah, it was a trades management really good really good um entrepreneurial guy just hadn't got funding was doing it on his own on the side as a side hustle

and uh just uh met him and we just sort of said look let's

a counterpoint to that. So, so I'm on a whole bunch of tech boards.

Yeah.

Why didn't you buy something that was more like, you know, $10 million worth of revenue?

We did. We did. We did. You did that later on.

We did. We No, no, we didn't. We didn't do it later on. We did look at it. I just didn't have the money.

Oh, you couldn't fund it.

I couldn't fund it. I had

You could get away with script like the board said, "Yeah, you can do it, but you got like you got like 200 grand, 500 grand to do it with like what do I do?" So, I found a I went I went and spoke to the bigger players. Subsequently, some one of them sold for a lot of money. um would have been a great decision but it was very difficult to raise money at a low valuation and people come in at a higher valuation like it's just not wasn't possible

and you could have been and script would have been hard

I couldn't raise cash I couldn't raise the cash I didn't have the cash in the balance sheet I had a few hundred thousand I found I found a small player and I said okay we'll do it slow it meant slower a lot slower like it delayed us a year and a half so what we did is we bought something we we got it going put a little couple of people in the team to give it some resource

um made it fulltime we had a crack at it um we tried sell as a standalone product. It's called Trady Core.

Uh that's what we called it at the time. It's now called High Pages for Business and I'll explain that in a second. But

uh so we started with Trady Core and then uh Trady Core um got some traction I think at our peak with free clients and all that. We got it as a standalone,000 customers and then it fell back to 600 700 customers and we just couldn't grow it. It was stuck. I named I remember the chief product officer at the time. We were having coffee down our office is in the city in Hilton downstairs in Cafe Chino. And if anyone's familiar, it's like a Everyone knows Cafe.

Yeah, we've had coffee there ago. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So, we met down there. Oh, yeah. Back when you were in Urbanize, we were having a chat to see if we could do something with each other, right?

Um so, we were there and he goes to me and Robbie, I think we need to combine um the High Pages business application with the Trady Core application. it's going to delay us a year to do that integration. And I looked at him and I I looked for the nearest bin to vomit in.

Um because you know, you put your credibility and you talk about this momentum and this is all these dreams got to work to pivot and lose another year. And I was like far out what do we do?

Um but I knew he was right and we made the decision. We put it in our planning. I make it sound so simple when I talk about it now, but the anxiety of the the the stomach churning of this happening over that year was difficult.

What I'm fascinated about again just being on board like how did you sell that to the board? Uh

because I'm on the board I'm like oh okay

great difficulty

like I get something changed but like how did you

for me it's always comes out just the numbers I either show a leading a leading indicator a leading measure talk about the run rate and then talk about be and and be transparent and honest and also say hey look we tried this it's not working um and then I think the failure of founders is they live to live and cling on to the dream for too long instead of taking a good cold heart look in the mirror and saying to themselves hey

I don't know if this is actually going to work. Um,

but wasn't the dream even buying a SAS company? I mean,

it was, but it was low risk. Was low risk cuz at the end of the day, you know, your business turning over at the time, what $40 million and it's going to spend 200, $300,000. It's it's not it sounds for most people that's a lot of money. I get it. But when you're doing that kind of turnover and you got a couple of million in the bank and you need to innovate, couple hundred grand is insignificant. It's not going to make a difference. You can burn burn that.

I mean, for God's sake, we were burning at some stage in our history 3 to5 million a year in cash,

you know? So like couple hundred grand like this thing.

But why did you persist at this point with trading? I like I think I think I mentioned earlier I I totally believe in being a platform and I totally believe that we need to be um a have to have we've got this incredible distribution where we touch every year transactionally touch 50,000 businesses uh non-transactionally touch like as in people try our products out use a demo register their interest another 30,000 on top of that uh you know and they're all coming in specifically to look for a marketing solution. Whereas I fundamentally believe that if you have a platform that trades us as their system of record, you will get stickiness. Now, um I've seen that and and if you get a customer to use multiple products, their retention as a customer is better.

And the best examples are banks, right? So, if you just have a bank account, you can move bank accounts really quickly with open banking nowadays. It's not a problem. But if you have a credit card or if you have u a loan, a loan on top, like on top of a credit card like a mortgage or a car loan or an insurance product with a bank, you're stickier. Look at Apple. Apple's products aren't the best, but I have Apple TV. I've got an iPhone. Um I've got um what else have I got? I've got iTunes accounts. I've got, you know, like I've got I've got a Mac system.

Yeah, you're locked into the ecosystem. Like, you know, some of their products are really good and they look pretty and all that, but you're never going to leave. So those those concepts are not new. And I so fundamentally believe that if you can have a platform and you've got distribution and you get a customer that buys multiple products in that distribution, then the retention should improve. That's the hypothesis. And then you go into what we call correlation, statistical correlation. And then you go into causation. Um and so causation is the best because you you can say that this feature adoption or this product that's being bought is directly attributed to the retention benefit of that customer.

Uh and I so I fundamentally believe in that and the only way to do it is to get a platform. So taking that moment where I got told at cafe chino you're about to vomit vomit and he was like and then I said to him they said yes okay we'll amalgamated it but but it's now the platform this is the platform play everything is going to be rolled into one and it's now think of it as the cradle for our business ecosystem and all our customers now are subscribing not to a marketplace they're subscribing to a platform and job management is now bundled not to be sold as a standalone.

It's bundled.

Bundled is it's it's bundled as part of the marketing. So whether they use it or not, it's irrelevant. It's there because it's the platform.

Y

and the platform is therefore now a gateway to introduce new services to the customer leveraging the data that's generated inside the platform.

Yeah.

And we can talk about where the story is going to go for to drive the growth.

I think that makes perfect sense cuz you know back in my urbanized days, we were a system of record. We were a poor accounting system. We try to manage some trades.

Yeah.

And we had like no churn.

Yeah. Like the only churn you'd get is when companies went bankrupt.

That's right. Yeah.

That's the only time. And you got like two or 3% a year. Like

And we remember we looked at each other's businesses in detail back in the day. And um the the difference with urbaniz is that um you're dealing with relatively large strata strata businesses, probably larger trade businesses that are familiar with. They weren't small. Whereas we're dealing with a mom and pop and they just generally do have a high exit rate. There's about an 18% exit rate every year in the trade space. It's really really high. um it's home improvement. So that's cleaners and gardeners coming in and out because

some of the some of the services you don't need to have high skill. And then also

if you think about trades in the economy, it's it's an interesting one because uh you've got large infrastructure projects. You've got large builders that get subcontractors to come in. And so the skills are inter interchangeable between infrastructure and large builds and subcontracting. So maybe if they're having too much of a hard it's not easy to run a small business. you swap in almost take it as a job somewhere else. Exactly. So, so there's a high exit rate in the category. It doesn't mean they fail. There is failure as of as any category but uh this one was interesting. Yeah.

So, what I find interesting is though then you're pivoting now to become a SAS company. Completely different set of competences.

Yeah.

Yet you seem to have executed it really well. How did you build up those competences?

Yeah. So, uh you know, we built we've now got a few teams in the business that are supporting the SAS part of our business. I mean, we've we we're an organization with 360 people.

But how did you even build the confidence to manage a SAS organization? How did you go through that?

Hire good people. I have no confidence. I'm not confident at all.

Just get people confident.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. I'll just get good people that understand it. And we've been been hiring for people that um understand how to build SAS and build SAS solutions. And we've been learning as well along the way. So, uh we've got some really competent people in the business to do that.

Uh yeah. So that's probably that's probably the best I can answer on that one.

Yeah.

And did you then put like a SAS exec on your executive team? Did you need to do that or on the board or?

No. Oh, we So we do we've enhanced so we've got an advisor that does work in marketplace and software and then we've also got uh like a dear shiffman um who runs his own podcast on the contrarians which you might be familiar with. Uh he's a director of high pages and is executive chair of um catapult sports. So, so he's obviously got a lot of experience there and so we listen to him and then we've got our own internal people. So, we sort of become very technologydriven organization and I would say if I look out into the crystal ball into the future, High Page is going to become even more of a technology organization. Um, I'm very much focused on AI um as as an organization to be able to sell AI technology and tools to small businesses.

no different to how we were uh you know 20 years ago, 10 years ago where we have these small businesses that didn't understand how to get online, didn't understand how to get Google ads to work for them, don't understand social media. Um they're good at they're good at their job. They're not good at the marketing and the admin and the back office. Effectively, where we're moving towards is inside the platform becoming a business in a box for those customers. So, we're going to be a business in a box for those trade businesses and everything they need to run their business end to end,

we will be there for them. And if it means we build it ourselves, we partner or we buy businesses like we just announced a purchase of a insurance company with a we we just bought um

like workers comp that kind of insurance

public liability and a whole bunch of other insuranceances that will go with it. It'll be embedded insurance and now inside our platform

trades can now not not today will be in the next couple they'll be able to double click and get their public liability. Now the power of the platform is is that we have the data on the business.

You can price it better. Can you?

Absolutely. Right. So we'll know um what their certificate of currency is. We can put a better product. We know what their business risk profile is. We can actually put a much better product to the 80,000 businesses that we touch which is a quarter of the Australian and New Zealand market every single year.

Okay. So then do we fast forward from SAS 2021 to today? Is that is that

pretty much it? Yeah. So yeah, that and and we just did an investor day like I said literally just yesterday and we made a bit of announcement. Yeah. So

uh we we we cracked about we have in Australia just a little under 33,000 customers. 32 and a half thousand subscribing customers. Remember we service 50,000 customers a year.

Yep.

But in our

other people come off and on as they need.

Yeah. Yeah. They come on and on and off and on and on and off whatever. Yeah. So they come in and out. Um but uh we just cracked 7,000 customers using our software.

Okay, cool.

Just under 7,000. And uh we've identified through a discovery process what are the things that these small businesses absolutely need as a system of record to run their businesses. And they want better estimating tools. They want better quoting tools. And we've embedded AI to help them estimate and quote better.

Coincidentally, there's been an amazing side benefit. the customer experience. So, the household experience has improved materially in the last uh the last few months. We're seeing NPS scores going through the roof. And the thing that people always complained about was reliability of uh quotes, reliability of the trades, the professionalism, and we by providing these tools to the trades uh and making them more professional. I think I think the thing that's worth mentioning is that back to the problem of why now? Why is this moving now? Why did it why they were so slow in adopting other technology? I think the macro environment, not just a generational change with technology, but the macro environment is forcing behavioral change.

It is really competitive out there. People generically say, "Oh, it's so hard to get a trading. It is a little bit difficult." But consumers tastes, expectations, speed of responsiveness, professionalism has all just elevated. And if they don't get what they want, they're online complaining about it. And so the trades are getting attuned. It's a bit slower and moving in in that there, but they're getting they're getting a breast of that. They understand that. And now they are lifting their game. And the way to lift their game is not through spreadsheets and word documents and clunky photocopying and emailing and typing stuff up.

It's through software systems that make that whole process so much more um efficient.

Can I just What's your revenue now? I'm public. So

yeah. Yeah. So it's public. So we we've targeted to the market that we'll do somewhere between 90 and 91 million this financial year.

Let's just call it 90 for simple maths.

You know the irony of it is if and I know this isn't the topic. It's not about SAS valuations.

Yeah.

But if you were just a SAS company with 7,000 customers and just say I don't know $25 million SAS revenue.

Yeah.

You would be a three $400 million business right now.

Yeah. I know right. Yeah.

I know it's it's a conversation for another day.

I don't know. It's like driving me crazy. I think I think the thing that's driving me even more crazy is that I'm like getting articles sent to me from Forbes and all my contacts. Oh, this company is doing AI virtual assistants for trades like doing they'll just all they do is answer the phone and do an appointment for you in your calendar and they're getting billion dollar valuation with no revenue, no customers. And I'm like, "Hey guys, we literally next quarter are going to be testing that very solution on our distribution and charging customers for that service

and I don't and we don't get any value for it." like nothing.

Let's talk about AI first and then we'll crap back into that.

I think there's two parts of AI that I think a SAS CEO should think about.

Yeah,

I'll call you like a SAS CEO rather than it's a third of your business,

technology CEO,

a tech CEO.

One is how do I put AI into my product? Make it better.

Um there three things, AI into my product. So, how do I make my customers more efficient? Yeah,

they've always thought there's a cost for the platform that's irrelevant. The cost is admin people doing on my platform. So let me get rid of all the admin people need to do.

Yeah,

that that is solvable. Totally. You've got your internal team. You'll totally do that.

Yeah.

Second one is how do I make my internal departments more efficient? How do I have agents doing stuff that people are moving files from here to here?

The third part I love to quiz you on is how do I stop AI from making me relevant? And I'll give you my example.

Yeah.

So I mentioned I went off to go meditate. Um so I was gone all the Jan Feb March. Um so when I left OpenClaw didn't exist. When I got out, OpenClaw existed.

Really? Okay.

Um, so I only had my first free weekend last weekend. So I hacked into OpenClaw and hacked around and built my little model.

Um, so I'm up to Brizzy next week to get my driveway fixed for one of my properties.

Yeah.

So a month ago, 3 months ago, I would have totally used High Pages.

Yeah.

But what I did now, we said, "Hey, Open Claw agent. Um, here's my address. Here's the specs of what I need. Here's a couple photos. Can you find me 10 tradies with more than four and a half Google star reviews in that local area? Yeah.

Message them through my iMes and try to book them in for that date.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So, 3 months ago, I would have totally use your platform to do that.

Yeah.

But I didn't.

Yeah.

And that took me like all of 30 seconds to build.

Yeah.

And it worked brilliantly.

Yeah.

It it was proper creepy AI.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, did the And

and and and as they reply, it picks it up. It's poppy.

Well, they thought they were replying to me. they replied back to my your replied via email or via messages

and now they're kind of booked into my calendar.

Yeah. Yeah.

And I'll just tell it, hey, the day before just send them a text to remind them.

Yeah.

So that's So what I've done in the last month I used to spend about a,000 bucks a month on SAS platforms just right. One for my emails, one for calendaring.

I probably reduce that by half

and I've up my open AI include spend to 300 bucks a month.

Yeah. Yeah.

I just spend all my money on the core utility tokens now, not on the SAS platforms. Yeah. So, so the headlines sound fantastic and it sounds like it was a good experience for you. Um, probably

and I'm probably an outlier in terms of techability.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, that's that's what I was that's that's my point. Yeah.

Uh so my point is um first of all uh how do you know that the trades that open claw product or I don't know what you want to call

yeah what you've had an output from running open core piece of something. Um how do you know that those businesses that you connected with actually passed through a vetting check?

I've got no I've got none of that. Right.

Absolutely right. Okay. So, I'm going to build to an answer to you here. I'm just But I'm going to unpack it

step by step the things that

you don't know yourself. Like I think

I think to be clear, you're an outlier. Absolutely. And uh

um that's a you know, you're an early adopter,

but

leading edge. Yeah.

I don't feel that that's a strong enough argument to counter to what you're talking about because

early adopters just means that they've become

cameras were early adopters.

Correct. Correct. Right. So that's not a strong argument

uh to come back to you and say you're an early adopter. All it does is it buys you time.

It buys you time. It buys you probably

couple years maybe.

I was going to say I was as I was speaking I was thinking if I say a year I think that's too soon. And I think if I say 3 years it's too long. So I think a couple of years too I think is is reasonable.

Uh so that all that does is buy you time. So it doesn't counter your argument to me about being disrupted. I think uh I think now we need to unlock what is the differentiation of what high pages does to what open claw does and I think it's very hard to replicate

and I I can tell you why because I understand the details behind it and then how do we

how do we uh what do we do in that time to to address that cuz we cuz all I've bought in this debate so far

is a couple of years of time y

agree with that

you got two years yeah got 207 28

208 probably 20 and 28 right we got a couple years of time. Okay. So,

this is not the first time it's happened to you. This is like the fifth time it's happened to you.

Yeah. It's fine. It's fine. And I think at the end of the day, even with an early adopter,

um like that's a risk. It's not two years. It's probably 5 years till you start to become into some sort of simplified mainstream. But I'm not buying myself. I'm not negotiating anymore with you. I've agreed two years. So, not just being done, deals. What are we doing? What are we doing?

What are we doing? So, so the question I have for you is do you know um the the the the um the vetting that was done by Open Claw on those trades and how confident are you? Now, you may not care and that's fine,

but I can tell you you run into a lot of risk particularly when it requires licensing.

What it's probably done is it's probably identified some review management, reputation, online scores. Well, I told I told to use Google. So, it's probably just people listed on Google.

So, here's another problem which is one of the things we're building is only 30% of home improvement businesses have an online review.

Really? Is that a thing?

It's absolutely a thing.

I would not have known that.

Absolutely a thing. So, when you So, you're you're not getting a broad universe. You're only getting the universe of some customers that are not vetted that are available on Google Local. Only 30%.

Okay. I don't understand it. It's been something that's been

very well just seemed

I'm fixing it. I'll tell you we're fixing it. I should say I we we when I say I we are use it collectively as a like a as a as a unified team.

Um

but uh I was shocked because I've been trying to get not only high pages reviews on a reputation on on a customer's profile, a trade business's profile, but also we embed in Google. and I' been trying to get them to see to if you're a new trade or you're new to us but you already have some online reputation while it's not verified by us we can still publish it and just say unverified by us and just say the source and that might be good enough so that builds some credibility

very difficult to get um online reputation uh stuff um uh businesses so you're only getting 30% of the ecosystem and you're not getting the trust element okay

the third thing is as well is um you have to be quite specific in describing your problem. Correct.

And you actually have to know kind of what trade you're looking for.

Yeah.

And uh that's something that not most people actually know unless you've had some experience working with with trades. And usually that comes after 10 or 15 years of living in a property. Most people don't know.

And I've worked for companies that manage trades. I've got a lot of confidence in that area.

So So you're again another outlier of an outlier

and I think it's starting to get into a little bit too hard basket. Now, if you have a problem and you've used an unverified trade or an unlicensed trade um you don't have a lot of recourse um and you lose and and and it's not little money. The average size of a job on high page is 2 and a half grand.

Mhm.

So trust is becoming quite a big thing, right? So what do we do to differentiate ourselves? First of all, instead of you going to claude and building something, just come to us. You don't have to build a thing. We've already got it for you. So the innovation of um searching and finding better trades um is is all happening right now. So we actually have live in in our product. You can say hey I got a problem with my driveways like these cracks on it. I think it needs to here's some photographs. I don't know who to use. I don't know what's required. Can you just help me scope this out? And um you can video that.

Voice it.

Yep.

Load a couple of photos. That's all you have. You you have to voice it. Just talk like I just did into into our um agent. um or just do a video call, load it up,

um or take a couple of photographs with a couple of comments and the agent takes care of everything for you. You don't have to be a coder. You don't have to be any expertise. And then you layer on our trust cuz we do that's what we do with our trust. So

we'll be having 100% ID checks, insurance checks, license checks. We check the 60 different authorities in Australia. Now to be fair, um core can um it can do the license checks. Uh it's very difficult because there's not really clear APIs

and it wasn't part of my prompt because I would not have thought to do that

but but yeah but then it's on us to message that clearly through our brand so that we avoid people uh coming through that type of sort of like that's a broader discovery question. We need to build continue enhance our trust elements and and show the ease of using our product so you don't have to be an engineer. You don't have to go and remove that. I can tell you now if you go to most people to talk about what you just did,

that would create anxiety. It's actually I don't know how to code myself,

but that would create me anxiety. I wouldn't know what to do. I would look at it. I'm like, I don't know what to click. I can't even use Canva. And I look at my kids and I

I can't I don't use Canva. I learn PowerPoint. I'm too old to learn.

No, no, I can't learn Canva. That's exactly right.

I just tell them, send me a send me the PowerPoint version.

So, the reality is is it's really more like 5 years. Um, now I'm going back to the original two years. I just It's 5 years. And I think in that time we need to continue to enhance our trust, continue to build our brand and just have those tools available so you don't have to build anything. It's all done taken care of you and you know you're getting the best and all those issues dealt with.

How do you know that you're not being like sold at Telra, right?

Sorry. Solve

like the ex CEO of Telster, right?

Oh, how do I know?

How do you know that you're not being like that? You're not being like the CEO of Kodak at the time.

So, I think I think the key is just to I think he wasn't in touch with what was going on on the ground. Like I don't know. It was almost like um his story was specific. He was like not Australian really. He didn't really care. He was probably here for a period of time. It'll be someone else's problem. And I don't think he was in touch with what was actually happening on the ground.

So I'll give you the context of of why I give that as an example. Like

he would have given probably the same set of arguments about Google, right?

Yeah.

He would have been like, "Oh, we're the trusted brand. We talk to these people. We make sure they're real. We do all that kind of vetting for you.

Um Google, anyone could put something on Google." Yeah,

he would have probably made a very similar argument to your making.

I don't know. I don't know. I think I'm arguing it differently. So, differently. I'm not I I I openly said I I'm not I'm not saying um claw more.

I'm saying I'm openly saying

it's a risk. Like absolutely. I said I said earlier in the maybe maybe you know it was pre pre-recording I was saying to you I think the thing that um I don't know the answers to is I think

I think organizations and you covered it nicely and we don't need to unpack it because if you're not doing anything with agents or LLMs or um anything with AI to improve productivity improve customers you're going to get broke right like it's like you've got to do that's just a given it's just every every good company does that every tool like we've got agents now doing debt collection for us. We'll soon have sales and service agents to enhance and augment our current opposition and augment as in like making it available 24/7. Multiple agents at the same time, agents checking other agents and doing like all of that from engineering to service to customerf facing stuff. That's a layer of all happening in the business.

And then there's another layer that I think above it which is product development. So we're having that virtual assistant in our software solution. We're building that that's happening two quarters. It's coming to life. Um

I had before I went to meditate, I had three EAs.

Now I've gotten rid of all of them

cuz I just use open floor as my EA.

There you go.

So you'll have an EA for every single person, right?

Pretty much. Yeah. And it's like Yeah, it's fine. Um and that's that and that's and that's going to happen. Um and we and we'll make we might not need as many, but we'll be having more productive people as well.

See, like that's a trivial problem to solve.

No, no, no. But I'm going to I know I'm building up but take a long time to get together question but uh I I did say that uh the distance and mediation of the zero click world is a problem and I'm aware of that.

I think also just the the the experience the the core thing that you built

the products that we are building inside high pages are exactly that. So we're actually making our product. We already have 68 70% brand awareness and that will continue to go up. We just got to get that out to the customer and say don't bother doing all this stuff. Just use

just just use us and certainly and and and we and we'll do it better than what you would do on your own because we've thought about all of the issues.

I've only given you a few of the issues

because there's also who how did you do a solveny check on it?

Nothing.

It wasn't part of my problem. I would not do that.

Did you do a um social not just a social media check but um what they call a scam watch check?

No. The only the only vet I had was more than four and a half star Google reviews. That's the only vet I had. None of

that. But remember, it's a limited market and you still don't know all of the other things cuz they could be going broke and still have four and a half star reviews. You don't

I don't know that we do that, right? So, so we've got to find out

how to turn that negative bit but into a positive conversation. Say, hey, feel trust assured,

solvent, licensed, all of that stuff. And that needs to be and you just don't have to just use us and it's this easy. Tell us what you need. Bomb. And that's, you know, and that's and that's happening.

So there's, you know, so there's two two options you have. So what you're saying makes perfect sense. Yeah.

And every great SAS tech company, directory company will would do that. And

I can totally see that succeeding.

The other option you have is um if you wanted to go super high risk, high return. Have you heard of MCPS?

Uh so it's it's where you can actually connect your data set to a public model.

Okay.

So you can literally go to Claude and say here's the entire high pages data set.

Super high risk.

Yeah. and be like anyone who's using Claude or Chat GBT or Gemini, they can come through your protocol and pick up trades and pick up that info.

Yeah.

So, basically, you're giving up your entire user interface to a chat window.

Yeah. So, maybe that's where you're going with um going with uh totally disrupting your entire business model and going and opening

that is insanely disruptive and it's a high risk. I'm not suggesting that's the case. And that's a that's that in your argument, I would say that what you just said is where um the counterpositioning of doing what you think is normal

uh could be. Um I and and and if you think about a board environment, I would not be able to get that through.

That would be so hard.

Me being on a board, I'd be like that's a crazy idea.

Yeah, that's right. Well, you director of half a dozen, right? Would you? No, it wouldn't happen. But there is always a but I wouldn't say never on anything. If there is a commercially viable way of making that

you got to monetize it. You got to monetize it otherwise

and you could find a pathway. I don't say no to stuff I often will say let me think about it and if I get stuck I'll say look let's put a pin on it. It's not a bad idea. Um I just don't know how to make it work now. And sometimes I find just in my own uh executive career is I don't necessarily I I'd like to be the guy that knows the answer straight away and I generally am pretty good but sometimes it's a good idea. I don't know how to do it yet. Let's put a pin on it. Put in the park.

Yeah. Fester

and something may something here and something there that might bring it together that will allow us to say let's bring this to life. Not in the form that maybe you said but 90%.

Yep. And I don't know what that is yet. And I think the reality is I wouldn't be too quick to making a decision right now because I'm not seeing anything yet disrupting the model. But what I would say

don't have evidence yet to evidence. But what I keep your eye close to seeing the model being disrupted. But then also

uh the space is moving. You you were in a meditation retreat what for 40 45 days and something was everything changed in 45 days, right? So what's in the next 45 days? What's in the next 90? What's the next 180 days? what's coming out that's the next thing and I'm like we would have already locked and loaded a position into something whereas in 45 days it's moved on and it's reinvented itself three times over. So I'm a bit nervous to just I like I I find that whenever I've made really quick too quick a decision and not turned out the best. I think there's an opportunity just like let's just watch what's happening for the next 3 to 6 months and see where people find their feet.

We didn't invent classifides. We didn't invent a trading marketplace. There were others well before us and uh we came along and picked the eyes and eyes and did a little bit of our own secret sauce and did a better job of it. So

what I found is the guys that actually went ahead and did something faster too quick it be a rash decision cuz the customers were complaining or someone was saying this to them

they end up failing fail. So

not suggesting speed necessarily because this might be like a threeear thing to figure out how this actually works.

Yeah. But um the macro thing which I've only thought about this for a couple of weeks I' only been out for a couple of weeks is I just

it's like you locked yourself up in meditation.

I want to go back again.

Um is I wonder if the whole era of apps and SAS applications

in a in a 100 years they'll be like yeah that was a 20-y year period or that was a 30-year period

probably.

And in 5 years 10 years I don't know the time scale

the thing of SAS will be like oh that was a thing my my grandparents did

probably. Yeah, I don't know, five years, but I think uh

I I I would 100% agree. I think I think uh

I think it'll be different. I mean, very different.

And when you said, you know, why why does this other company have a zillion dollar valuation with no revenue?

Yeah.

Is I reckon they're playing on that string.

Yeah.

They're playing on the string that we we are the posts world.

Yeah. Yeah.

And we're going to dominate and we can do this and we can do that.

Yeah. You know, it could be. It could be. I think uh I have to deal I have to get up every morning coming to work day job and we've got still things to do and I think I dream up I've got fortunately I'm in a position where I've got a very strong executive team that gives us some capacity to think about these things and I've got some very uh healthy advisers and people around us that can challenge and throw things and so we're thinking of these things.

Uh one thing I would say is that organizations definitely have to be more adaptable and subject to and and resilient to change. Uh and uh yeah, so we'll if we see movement, we'll change. Absolutely. Yeah.

And I mean, and what you've evidenced in your history is you've got the ability to actually go place the bet and you can execute really well.

Yeah. Yeah.

Um you just need the next couple of years figure out like what that bet is.

Yeah.

And I got no idea cuz like you said in 45 days might be something completely different.

Yeah.

But something's happening.

Yeah. Definitely

something's happening. I've got no idea what it is and where it's going to end.

Yeah. But then how do you because you will plan 12 month cycles, right?

Yeah.

How do you think about that as you go through your planning?

Yeah. So I think like we're doing a board strategy session next week for example and we've been working on our strategic planning with the team for the last couple of months and I think it goes back to my point where we

um we we haven't been rushing um looking at what's happening and like just as an example just sort of speaking too generally some good just use a real example. So how are organizations uh uh introducing agents and AI technology into their business?

And uh there's probably three regarded methods to do that as an organization. One method is um let functional and crossunctional teams run around in their agents themselves.

Um another one is create a whole brand new division uh in the business to go out and reinvent itself.

Yep. And a third one is create a cross functional team in the business

and that supports the rest of the supports the rest of the functional and other cross functional teams.

So we've been pondering how to deal with that and we started with scatterbrain like bits and pieces everywhere

and then it became a bit chaotic because one team's using like 11 labs and another one's using another tech company from Silicon Valley that's just started up. It's just and someone's using um some of the open AI tools, you know, like and someone's using core and it's like chaos, right? And I'm saying, okay, well, we're now past that point. That was good experimentation and learning for the last 6 months. We're actually going now the definitive plan. We've got to have a cross functional team and their remit as a strategic imperative is to introduce agents across the business using a centralized sort of methodology and technology. That's kind of that's kind of like strategic thinking and then a bit of execution on the STR execution in our plan.

And so you know when we think about that that's like an example of how we're applying AI in the business. Uh but when we think about the products

the products are evolving and we we're doing discovery with our customers. We know what they want and then we're looking at these billion dollar plus valuation businesses and saying what's the market liking? uh why is is let's validate that rather than just being you know finger in the wind and the validation saying yeah the market likes that and it and if you picture a future like you said 20 years you can see that future you can see a future where you talk to an agent and they order materials for you and they um confirm your next appointment and then uh get your calendar all synced up with your private event and then your route is optimized and um your invoices and payment is processed all seamlessly without you doing much other than saying done job's done which may even be able to detected when you're van.

So, you know, we're trying to picture the future with a vision and develop that into a strategy and plan budgets and plans behind it.

Yeah. And even to get like the core augentic AI into your product, into your company, that's two years worth of work.

Like you're going to be busy for the next two years.

That's right. That's right. Doing that.

Yeah. And and I think uh you know, we spent a lot of time talking about the platform, but we also you know, we talked a little bit about the homeowner experience, but then uh you know, how do we go beyond just using claw? So what what if what about we had the proprietary data on your house.

So your properties you rent a property or you own a property. We actually know the trades that you've used on your property which can also be replicated by chloride. Get it? But then we know all the floor plans for your property. You don't have to redo it. It's all there. It's all safe. It's like a like a vault.

And we can develop also a maintenance plan for your specific property all and and it's using your preferred trades, who you like, who you pay, payment arrangements, all of that. that's all taken care of. It's it's very specialized and I think that's kind of where it'll evolve where a competing product like claw will find it hard um as a user and uh and and as a business for you to to be able to support

you find smart people like you to go and build it but

we do it at scale the majority.

Yeah, it's do scale and volume but then it'll be you'll be embedded in a system of record that you prefer which is ours. Let me give you just one more example about how I've used open claw. Um not in your space but um yeah

my wife wanted to get like a teacher to teach the kids uh how to do but natim Indian dance.

Yeah.

She sent me a link for super prof one of those marketplace for tutors. Yeah.

My wife couldn't figure out how to sign up.

Yeah.

I just forward it to openclaw.

It worked it out for you.

Well, no. What I did it went signed up messaged the tutor. She emailed back and then messaged my wife.

Yeah.

Um so in that case I still totally use the platform. I just didn't have to go through the signup.

Yeah. Do you guys as the marketplaces care if people do that? I mean that I don't actually log on to high pages. One of my agents log on and does all the clicking through for me?

Does that make a difference?

So I haven't had that been posed to me to you um you know we

someone's clicking not me. the real life practical example that I can align it to is we've had business coaches

um come to high pages in the past

uh actually did the right thing and said hey I'm not the trade I'm like their coach and I'm helping them with their marketing I'd like to get them a profile set up but they really don't know how to do it but they want to be I want them to be a customer of yours will you accept it and I said yeah absolutely that's a great thing first you've got a business that wants to do better um and they know how to do the tool use the tools It's like they're they're being honest about the fact that they don't know how to do it. Maybe because it's a bit harder or trickier. We need more information.

You said, "I know what they need to do. I know how to make it happen. I'm going to help them."

Why wouldn't we accept an agent to do it? That makes that makes that's being that's being stuck in the mud. But, you know, so we I would accept that for sure.

Okay, fair enough. Well, just to wrap up, so the original question was like, how do we how do we

how do you make your platform relevant in the age of AI?

Yeah.

So, where do you think we've landed? So I think uh look I think it's clear in our strategy we we're very focused on that. I think the future for uh our pl I call it platforms because as a marketplace uh which traditionally was just connecting people we can make that more seamless and we can use AI to make that more seamless but we also now have what we call a platform for the businesses the supply side of the original marketplace and a platform that's forming for the demand side and inside those platforms are an amazing raft of tools and benefits and perks that will be powered by a AI that will make like unique and differentiated experiences in our in our in our in our products for our customers which ultimately if we can communicate that externally will help us grow customer base um and make them stickier as customers stickier for trades as in we want to make them stay with us and they may not necessarily need marketing on all the time but they'll use anything they might need our insurance they may need process their payments issue an invoice external jobs all of that will be done there and for the household think of a command center for your property where you where your uh where your dreams, your inspiration, your aspirations, your requirements, your needs, the repairs, the maintenance of your property and the whole log of that

um captured in your platform as a household. So, and that'll all be powered by an AI agent managing that for you simply and that's kind of like the dream of the product and that's sort of a product roadmap for the next 3 years.

Okay, brilliant. Well, last question I always ask everybody when we finish up.

Yeah. is what is something you've always known to be true that later on you actually found out wasn't?

Oh wow. You prepared me for that question. At least I would have thought about it.

It's better if you don't think about these things.

Um this is a silly one.

Go for it.

This is a silly one. Um, I don't know if it's going to make its way into when you edit it, but uh I for some reason assume people would be able to do basic mathematics, like simple mathematics to understand concepts. And I actually found out I think I'm the abnormal one. I think 10% of people can do proper maths and calculate. Sorry.

I reckon you're probably right.

And and I and I'm and and 90% literally cannot do like simple mathematical stuff. And it makes you the one that does maths, the odd one. And it's like, and it's like, but the the problem with that is that numbers are almost like the beauty of numbers. And maybe it's just maybe the ADHD in me or the the OCD, all those things in me, the neurodeivergent element of my pro personality.

Y,

everything has to sort of reconcile. Numbers have to make sense.

And I found that most people, they they get on their lives perfectly well with numbers. don't reconciling and I and I I think maybe keep it simple the accountant in me.

Yeah.

Everything has to make sense and things reconcile and most people can't get things to reconcile. So I don't know if that was enlightening or helpful for anyone. Maybe it

most people don't know basic math.

It's just too basic basic math. It's like it's like it's and it's so and I think the thing that I have to learn is I just have to be calm and explain it one at a time and some people just don't get it. They just never get it.

Just hope they're below you in the orchard, not above you. That's the only hope I have.

Yeah. Maybe don't put that one in. But like Yeah. Yeah. But if you ask me the truth, like I just thought people can do maths. People can't do maths. It's terrible. It's so bad.

Fair enough. Awesome. Great.

Was that what you kind of

Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you do want to be a guest, make sure you hit me up and do follow me on socials and make sure you check out