How to be a disruptor

1 You need to be paranoid

If you think that your business isn’t being disrupted, you’re likely to be wrong. There’ll be something going on in the background somewhere. Being paranoid is really important.

2 You need to be prepared to disrupt yourself

As a business, it’s one thing to be disrupted but if you do it to yourself, at least you know you’re in control of your own destiny. As an organisation, there have been quite a few occasions where we’ve tried hard to disrupt ourselves.

3 Don’t just innovate around product

Most companies think innovation is around product but it’s not. In our business, we’ve had to innovate around process – we had to move from being subscription based to being opportunity based, which was a huge change. We had to change the user experience on the site and re-educate our field team in terms of how to communicate with a dealer.

4 Innovation doesn’t have to be big

We never think about 100 per cent change to anything we do; we make incremental, rapid one per cent changes to everything we do all the time. And so when we think about our core business, it’s about how do we keep making those changes, how do we keep evolving our customer experience and how do we keep improving on what we’re doing?

5 Remember the three Ps

Passion: all the people inside our business are extremely passionate about what we do. And we love how our market’s evolving and changing. Paranoia: we’re always looking for competitive threats and how we might respond. Perseverance: it’s about never giving up, it’s about always being prepared to try to do different things and if they don’t work the first time, pivot, evolve, change and do it rapidly until you hopefully get a better result.