COOL CHANGE BRINGS MILLIONS
A broken air conditioner lead to a business empire
IN a self-described “humble” office in one of Surfers Paradise’s more weathered buildings is one of the Gold Coast’s fastest-growing young businesses.
Since starting Service.com.au in 2012, the founders have built it from a part-time operation to a fulltime national business with 25 staff that turned over $1.8 million last year.
Their platform – built and tweaked over five years of customer feedback, trends and ideas – essentially links tradies seeking jobs with customers who want them done.
They have 7000 businesses who pay a premium for a priority subscription on the site, with another 22,000 basic members in 450 categories of trades and services – ranging from plumbers and painters to roofers and cleaners.
It began with a broken airconditioner.
Dexter Devlin was telling close mates Jacob Banks and Dan Kerr about the hassles he’d encountered over three weeks trying get his air-con fixed in the Gold Coast summer.
“It shouldn’t be this hard,” they said, so they set about making it easier.
Mr Banks had worked for Yellow Pages and Mr Kerr’s family owned building merchant businesses in the UK. Their backgrounds led them to a solution.
The founders brought on chief technology officer Patrick McCallum in 2015, bringing their tech in-house and transforming their costs as well as their customer experience.
They said winning a business accelerator program at Bond University was also a turning point.
“It gave us a general sense that we were on to something, and that we were commercial, which in the start-up environment is quite rare,” Mr Kerr said.
“We very much self-funded it through being able to get tradesmen on board.”
When starting out, the team were faced with a highlychallenging chicken-and-egg scenario – the tradespeople wouldn’t sign up if the platform had no customers, and the customers wouldn’t sign up if there weren’t enough providers to get their work done efficiently.
They tried a free period – it failed – so they took a different angle, using their marketing skills to help their business clients while they waited for potential trades customers to get on board.
“We were able to run some marketing things, like Google Ad Words, things that would benefit their business while they were waiting,” Mr Kerr said.
So we could provide that value while we were waiting for that equilibrium in their area where enough users had come on board.”
Mr Kerr said, despite the “humble setting”, the team remained energised because they were empowered to share and action their ideas for the business.
“We like to think we create a culture where, not only do people want to be here and enjoy turning up, that they really do have a say in what we do,” he said.
“That’s one of the benefits of having such a small, nimble team where there’s not so much bureaucracy.”