Luke Anear, founder of a global work safety platform
Luke Anear reckons that driving his rally car at breakneck speeds is the most fun he has ever had, even compared with other daredevil sports he has tried such as skydiving. “I forget about work completely and focus on what I’m doing with the car and the navigator and the team,” he says, when strapped into his purpose-built Ford Fiesta R5.
It’s about as far away from his day job as he can imagine, running an online global platform he founded that helps businesses manage and improve their safety practices. This has been a critical concern for companies large and small during Covid.
Anear dabbled in many things before SafetyCulture. Leaving school in Townsville at age 16, he worked in a service station and car wrecking yard. He credits his boss, Bill Smith, with teaching him most of what he knows about the basics of running a business. “He taught me things like ‘A dollar saved is better than a dollar made’, because you don’t have to pay tax on the dollar you save. He taught me the importance of building a sound business, not having too much debt, and taking care of customers. I read up on baby boomers and realised they had created businesses for themselves and were tied to them even though they might want to travel. I pitched the idea to Bill that I could run the businesses for him and split the profit. He let me down gently. ‘I’ll run them with you, and we’ll split the profit three ways,’ he replied – between himself, his wife and me.
“By 18 I was earning $120 grand a year. All of a sudden, I had more money than all of my friends and lived in a house on my own. But I was very lonely. That’s when I decided there had to be more to life than just making money. I had grown up with my mother, and never had any cash. Unless you have friends and family you can share experiences with, what’s the point?”
After a stint as a private investigator in Brisbane, Anear attended a seminar by US self-help guru Tony Robbins. Audience members were challenged to write down something they would never do. Anear came up with making $40,000 in a month. “I had no idea how to do it. I was only earning $700 a week as a trainee investigator.”
After a couple of false starts, he decided Darwin was the place to fulfil his goal, and he set up his own no-rules boxing competition. He drummed up local publicity and 1500 people paid to see the show. He made $64,000. “It taught me that I was capable of doing more than I had ever realised. It has served me for my whole life because I know that, if I go out the door with just the clothes on my back, I’ll find a way to figure it out. It will be okay.”
He tried several other ventures before
“Unless you have friends and family you can share experiences with, what’s the point of just making money?”
striking upon SafetyCulture. The main attraction of that idea was it didn’t involve trading his time for money. “I wanted to give people value on a much bigger scale. How could I give millions of people value, and have those millions paying you money in return?” Another criterion was that he wanted to make the world better. Even in his early 20s, making money was no longer his primary goal.
While these notions were fermenting, Anear returned to being a private investigator. “I saw 2500 cases where people had been injured at work, and my job was to spy on them to see the extent of their injuries. I thought, this is part of the problem, not part of the solution. I’m waiting for people to get injured and putting in an insurance claim before I investigate what’s happened. I wasn’t effectively helping them.”
Compensation was linked to specific injuries. The more injuries a claimant had, the more compensation was paid. “They were making decisions, being told by lawyers not to go back to work, because they got more money.”
The idea of SafetyCulture clicked when formal occupational health and safety practices were required for the service station business once owned by his mentor Smith (later in the hands of Anear’s mother). “They paid $20,000-$30,000 for consultants to print basic OH&S policies,” recalls Anear. “I thought this was crazy, so I wrote them. Then I got former government safety inspectors to write more policies and method statements for high-risk activities in the workplace. I paid $1000 for a statement and put it online for $80 each download. I sold close to $20 million worth of those Microsoft Word documents with one-and-a-half staff. I had an amazing lifestyle business.”
What gave sales a kick along was a search optimisation strategy he developed while recuperating from knee surgery. “I bought 1200 domain names and set up micro-sites for all the key words that related to workplace safety. That was how I built the business.”
Anear is now a big-time disruptor. “More than 45,000 Australian businesses have bought those training guides,” he says. But not everything he tried in developing workplace safety applications worked. His first training platform failed to gain traction, and neither did a document management portal.
But a flash of inspiration came when he was contacted by a safety inspector investigating the death of a roofing insulation contractor. “I started to ask, what does best practice look like? That set me on the path to building an app based on checklists for use in the workplace. Pilots have used checklists before they take off since the 1930s. Surgeons use them in hospitals to reduce complication rates, and 14-yearold kids use them in McDonald’s to show when bathrooms were last cleaned.” He hired a software engineer to design what became a hit product, iAuditor. “The rest, as they say, is history.”
iAuditor is flexible. It allows safety inspectors to set up their own checklists. Given that underpinning, they could more effectively work on different work sites in different industries. It includes a public library, where users can share their own specialised templates. “I didn’t know if that would appeal. But after the first week, people had shared 15 checklists.”
Today there are 130,000 checklists that Anear says covers any job, anywhere. That service has morphed to become an operations platform, but iAuditor remains the heart of SafetyCulture. Last year, a training app was purchased, and an insurance business launched with QBE to cover workers compensation and business insurance. “People are getting reductions on their insurance premiums by taking their safety reports to their insurers to show them what they are doing,” says Anear. “If a restaurant in New York City undertakes checks three times a day, they get an A rating from the New York Health Department. That’s worth $10,000 a week to a top steakhouse. They put a big A in their window to show they maintain the highest standards.”
This edges towards yet another initiative: quality. “We are giving customers platforms that allow them to build their own workflows. It goes well beyond safety. We have a technology platform that allows people to measure the critical areas in their businesses. It’s not just about keeping themselves and their customers safe. It’s about how they can do their best work every day.”
Anear is partly funded by venture capital. When Blackbird Ventures Capital’s Rick Baker saw a TV program on how Google Glass head-mounted displays (lightweight smart glasses) were being used for safety checks, he flew to Townsville to see how it was done. “I said to the guys, ‘We’ve got a venture capitalist coming’,” says Anear. “You’re going to have to put shoes on. Let’s look professional.”
It went well, despite a rushed attempt at smartening the office by filling one wall with clocks set to different time zones. Some fell down when their wall mountings failed, and everyone feared they had blown their chance. Baker liked what he saw, however. He jumped onboard and later introduced Anear to Atlassian founders,
Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar.
“Scott has become the second mentor in my life, helping me build and scale the technology,” says Anear. “He’s invested personally all the way through. We’ve raised north of $250 million now in five rounds of funding. We hit breakeven in January 2020.”
Covid has provided unexpected growth. “Customers like Kmart went from 300 store checks a month to 18,000. There was an incredible awareness of what was needed to maintain the highest standard in workplaces. It was the largest retraining of staff in the workplace since World War II. Our customers use our training app, EdApp, to ensure that their teams know what to do. Regulations are changing every week. We’ve been at the heart of businesses re-opening around the world.”
The Covid-19 pandemic has involved the largest retraining of staff in the workplace since World War II