Young Guns: hot shots hit their target

These days, Di Bella’s happy to acknowledge the kudos from awards—he was a finalist in this year’s Telstra Business Awards—he says they are part of his “journey” to becoming great, and knows he still has a way to go. “We’ve gone from good to very good and we’re on the way to great. When will be great? When we leave behind a legacy.”

Phillip Di Bella’s Three-Steps to Success

Set clear goals.

Establish strategies to achieve those goals.

Surround yourself with the right people.

HEATING IT UP

HOT & FAST

The Chef’s Toolbox

David Mills

David Mills is making his way into kitchens nationwide, proving that he and his toolbox can stand the heat.

The Chef’s Toolbox sells not only kitchenware, but an entire cooking experience. The method used to sell this experience? A unique party plan sales model. Armed with cooking utensils and a couple of original recipes, sales agents demonstrate their product through home-cooking workshops.

Four years ago, Mills realised that while a lot of people were interested in cooking, few had confidence in their cooking ability, and most were not very adventurous. He saw a gap in the industry to sell his product, but a creative approach was needed to show consumers how to improve their cooking through better quality equipment. “Cooking is fun with the right tools,” he says. But the right tools aren’t just utensils, Mills believes the tips and techniques offered are also necessary tools.

A big believer in “just jumping in and doing it,” Mills had his cooking adventure up and running within three months of grasping the idea. While his attitude is part of what has pushed business growth, at the beginning it did cause some planning problems. Knowing he wouldn’t be able to maintain procedure, Mills hired an office manager even before he hired a chef. “That’s not really my strength, so I give the people in the organisation the latitude to work.” Nonetheless, “there’s always fun and games,” he says.

Next to be hired was a cooking guru, who first developed recipes for the toolbox, then went on to train sales agents. “We have authentic but simple recipes, largely made from scratch, not from jars and packets,” says Mills.

According to Mills, the secret of their success lies in their attitude. “We don’t take ourselves or cooking too seriously,” he says. The Chef’s Toolbox has grown naturally, through virtually no advertising. The business, reliant on word-of-mouth, instead organises fun cooking events to show the potential of culinary exercises. “We build a community with a general store social aspect,” says Mills.

Human interaction has worked well for The Chef’s Toolbox. The 39-year-old founder now needs 360 sales agents just to keep up with demand. Having recently turned four, the Chef’s Toolbox is celebrating not only its birthday but also growth of 65 percent in the last financial year (it was 270 percent in 2005–06).

But relying on word-of-mouth comes with its own set of problems. “It’s a strength because it develops strong relationships with customers, but you’ve got less control and it’s harder to run a marketing campaign and harder to direct the growth,” says Mills.

Though none of this can slow Mills down. He is not only running a successful business, but is changing eating habits in Australia. “A lot of customers did have fast food and processed foods.” Mills believes people are more willing to cook at home once they are shown how. “It’s pretty much as fast to cook an authentic meal.”

THE WHITE STUFF

The White Agency

Craig Galvin

At four years old, interactive marketing company The White Agency is already driving a Jaguar and V8 supercars–well, via the marketing strategy behind them at least. Sporting big clients such as Jaguar, Telstra, and Coca Cola Amatil, the agency already has an enviable reputation and is set to blaze more trails at the forefront of the interactive marketing industry.

It was 2003 when Craig Galvin and Elizabeth Joyce took advantage of a sector in its infancy. From the wreckage of the dotcom crash came the realisation that even if some commercial websites had failed, internet users were still growing in numbers.

“Despite the crash, users didn’t say ‘that’s it, I’m not using Hotmail anymore’,” explains Galvin. “So the principles of what made [the internet] a successful marketing medium were always there. We understood what the marketing disciplines were and the business objectives of our clients, and we are good at putting the user at the centre of the thinking.”

Galvin and Joyce met at Yahoo!, an experience that contrasted with their early days in The White Agency when they were nobodies in the industry.

“The big difference was, when we originally started there was no brand established, no knowledge of who we were, so we had to figure out creative ways to open the door,” says Galvin. “[But] the fact that Liz and I had worked at Yahoo! definitely reassured clients that we knew what we were talking about.”

The agency’s growth is due to a number of factors, primarily hard work but also lack of a safety net. “A lot of people said start with a sound five-year business plan with a clear exit strategy, but we didn’t have that,” says Galvin. “The plan was to make as many phone calls or contacts or relationships as possible to get in the door of large organisations.”

Galvin and Joyce also had to “skill up” on the financial side as neither had a financial background. The daunting task of the finance and legal end of business almost put a dampener on the company–“they can take away from the focus and you forget what you have to do to grow”–but now, he says, the only problem they have is finding staff in a “tight employment market”.

“We always wanted to be a successful company and it was always as loose as it could be,” he says. “Success could have been four people and that’s a perfectly acceptable number, but if we wanted ongoing success then size did matter for the scale of the projects we wanted to do.”

The agency now has 55 staff members in their Sydney and Melbourne offices, growing at 50 percent in the last financial year. Galvin sees growth in the sector, which will grow “organically”, but clearly he wants the company to grow faster.

“We always look at how fast the market is growing in terms of interactive marketing and add a few percentage points on top of that, because obviously we’d like to do better than the market,” he says. “[We can] diversify into different spaces as well, as technology evolves.”

Galvin’s advice for growing businesses:

Dedication and hard work does pay off.

Shortcuts have consequences.

Always have a good business partner and a good relationship with them.

LIGHTNING PERFORMANCE

LIGHTNING STRIKES

Platinum Electrical

Joshua Nicholls

At almost six years old, Platinum Electrical falls just outside our start-up mark, but showing almost 800 percent growth in their first four years the business was too phenomenal to ignore.

The story begins in 2001 with electrician Joshua Nicholls, then 22, struggling to obtain so much as a mobile phone contract. Although lenders saw his youth as a risk, Nicholls says he had little trouble actually starting the business, “because I had no idea what I was doing,” he laughs. “I didn’t have any responsibilities, so if everything went bad, I knew I wouldn’t lose much.”

The punctual, well-mannered electrician soon had an expanding customer base, adding other electricians to his business until he realised he had outlived his parents’ garage and was filling job sheets at two o’clock in the morning. At that point, Nicholls realised he was out of his depth when it came to growing the business, and so hired Steven Kay as his business coach.

“I thought that because I was a good electrician, I could run my own business,” says Nicholls. “Steve started working through the areas where I was struggling. The first area was how to get my time back and the next step was to build a management team to do everything and build business that way.”

Building a team worked. The company struggled with cash flow until Nicholls hired someone to look after that aspect of the business, allowing him to focus on his strengths–recruiting the right people and maintaining the company’s high level of customer satisfaction, which, until recently, was their only form of marketing.

Recruitment remains a key element of the company’s success, which Nicholls attributes to his philosophy of “hiring on attitude”. The company now has 30 staff, of which 21 work in the field as electricians and apprentices. With a management team behind him, he now finds he has the time to attend to problems, which also serves customer service standards.

“Because of our reporting systems I can see any communication that comes through and I’m on top of it straightaway.”

The other aspect of the business that enables growth is efficiency through technology, including a paperless office and electronic job sheets. “I thought if I can use technology to reduce my unbillable hours, that would be a huge advantage,” explains Nicholls. “Our system is completely web-based so if our workshop burned down overnight, all I would need is an internet connection and we’d be up and running again tomorrow.”

With Platinum Electrical on solid ground, Nicholls now aims to continue expansion with companion trade Fusion Plumbing, less than two years old but “growing faster than Electrical”, and franchising the main business.

“I don’t want to build up, I want to build out. In five years I want to have 150 vans on the road; that’s 50 franchisees with three vans. My advisers say that’s a moderate figure but it still blows my mind!”

Awards, such as the NSW Telstra Business Award that Platinum Electrical took home this year, and his contribution to the book ‘Secrets of Small Business Owners Exposed’ will make selling the franchise easier, he believes.

“It gives credibility to the business and it shows I’m serious about where it’s going and what I’m doing.”

Nicholls’ advice for growing businesses:

Surround yourself with good mentors. Have a good business coach, have a good accountant, have people around you who will encourage and motivate you.

Understand why you do what you do.

FUTURE CALLING

A FUTURE IN PEOPLE

FuturePeople Recruitment

Linda Simonsen

First impressions can make or break a company’s reputation, which is why FuturePeople is Sydney’s new favourite recruiter. Headed by Linda Simonsen, FuturePeople specialises in call and contact centre recruitment, which, for some businesses, is where the most interaction occurs between staff and clients.

“Most large high profile organisations have a contact centre operation, and more and more are realising that the centre is often the first point of contact for a customer or prospective customers,” says Simonsen. “A specific recruitment methodology to attract, select and retain the right people is essential.”

It is clear from FuturePeople’s success that the method works. Established in 2002, when Simonsen was just 28, the business addressed a niche that she believed would continue to grow despite the competitive industry. Starting was the hardest part.

“The main challenge I faced in starting the business was finding the confidence to take the leap of faith required to liquidate my assets into a very cash hungry business within a highly competitive marketplace at a reasonably young age,” she says. “Fear of failure was the biggest hurdle to overcome. Once overcome, I think most operational challenges are a piece of cake.”

Growth presented Simonsen with the challenge of resource planning, which involved hiring the right people at the right time and managing cash flow, an obstacle that hinders most growing businesses. Her solution was simple–give it to financial experts to handle.

“Cash flow is king in this industry due to the need to finance the temporary payroll,” she explains. “The introduction of a debtor finance facility assisted significantly in the business moving to the next stage in turnover.”

The next stage involved the company’s profit doubling year on year, fulfilling Simonsen’s plan to build a multi-million dollar company. Although the 2006–07 financial year saw FuturePeople grow at the relatively modest rate of 53 percent (after reported growth of 128 percent the previous year), it is no surprise that this also was part of Simonsen’s growth strategy.

“I was focused on growing a large sustainable business from the outset, so I was careful to ensure each phase of growth was supported by the right processes to get to the next phase,” she says. “This has slowed our growth down to an extent but it has boosted profitability and made it sustainable, which is more important to me.”

Now, at five years old with 15 staff, FuturePeople’s next move is to expand nationally, starting with Melbourne. “Our mission,” states Simonsen, “is [to become] the first stop for any contact centre manager in Australia seeking a staffing solution.”

The only real hurdle the 33-year-old needs to negotiate now is the employment climate, where using principles such as “carefully managing debtors and being client selective” and “not being scared to drive performance and move low performers out of the business” will help the business stay competitive.

“Shortage of talent increases demand and drives up price in our industry, but it also increases the cost of sales and makes delivering on client needs more challenging,” she maintains. “[We focus on] creating value rather than dropping price to retain clients. Our mantra is deliver great service, enjoy doing it, and profit will follow.”

Simonsen’s advice for growing businesses:

Set goals that you believe you can achieve.

Get work–life balance into the equation from the outset.

Build your support team and invest in developing good processes early.

Drive high performance through goal setting and review on a weekly basis with all staff.

Don’t neglect cash flow planning and debtor ledger management.

Never get complacent.