Nothing to lose but time
The best thing to do when you’re young is make risky decisions – at least that’s what one digital adventurer tells Brittany Baker.
The ripe age of 22 – it’s a time when most people are still figuring out who they are and how they fit in the world, but for Dan Radcliffe it was a time to make a risky move and start a business.
The story of how the founder of International Volunteer HQ (IVHQ) lasted three days in the corporate world before he decided he wanted to take charge of his own life is now the stuff of legend.
‘‘I was fresh to the world and I had nothing to lose,’’ Radcliffe says matter-of-factly.
‘‘The hardest thing about it was I had to go and live with my parents, which after being at university was difficult.’’
Back at his family’s Uruti farm, Radcliffe saved up enough money to pay for a volunteer trip to Kenya.
‘‘It was pretty disorganised,’’ he says.
‘‘They didn’t pick me up at the airport, staff support was really poor, the local family that I was staying with didn’t know I was coming, and the school that I was teaching at didn’t know I was coming.
‘‘To make matters worse I paid a fortune for it.’’
Radcliffe returned to Taranaki with a bad taste in his mouth over the experience and a plan for a new way for volunteers to travel.
He had $40,000 in capital to work with – $20,000 in his back pocket and $20,000 borrowed from his mum and dad, he says.
Radcliffe identified four countries – Kenya, Thailand, Vietnam and Nepal – and travelled there for about two months.
‘‘I was basically cold-calling local organisations that I had researched online in the depths of Google, page 20,’’ he says.
The premise behind the venture was to send a lot of volunteers for an affordable rate, Radcliffe explains.
‘‘Which is a hard pitch because one, people don’t want to keep their fees affordable and two, I was really young and three, we had nothing behind us.
‘‘Thankfully there were some people or organisations that believed in the idea.’’
With four destinations on the books, Radcliffe then turned to technology.
‘‘I knew the market wouldn’t be in New Zealand, definitely wasn’t going to be in Taranaki, especially out in Uruti,’’ he says.
‘‘So I knew we had to create a vehicle where we actually reached this wider audience and that vehicle would be our website.’’
Radcliffe outsourced developers through an Auckland agency and in 2007, his company went live.
‘‘The content, the imagery, the way it was designed with an intuitive layout – we spent a lot of time and for me, a lot of money to make sure we built a website 100 per cent correct.
‘‘We knew if we’d got that right, we’d do well and if not, we’d fail.’’
That first year, Radcliffe ambitiously set out to send 200 people overseas – he ended up sending out 400 volunteers.
‘‘A lot of that was because we came out in social media as it was developed,’’ Radcliffe admits.
While he wasn’t sure how social media could work for his business, Radcliffe created an IVHQ Facebook page.
‘‘It gave us a big leg up because no one else was doing this and it allowed us to connect our volunteers, which allowed the new ones to trust we were legitimate even though we weren’t that large.’’
Within its first year, IVHQ was organised through a little black diary. In it were notes of who to email when and what the email would say.
But as the number of volunteers reached 500, Radcliffe turned to the development agency to find an automated solution.
‘‘It was a game changer,’’ Radcliffe says.
‘‘We went from having three people run off their feet to two people working and another person helping me with marketing.’’
In 2008, Radcliffe moved his business into an apartment in New Plymouth, where he operated for four years.
‘‘That went really well until we got to a stage where we had seven people walking in and out of this apartment every day so we thought we should move ourselves into some proper offices on Gill St,’’ he says.
And about a year-and-a-half ago, IVHQ moved into its current premises on Devon St West.
The business now has 31 staff in New Plymouth, five developers in Auckland and works with 40 different countries, sending 1800 people overseas annually.
Radcliffe has been well recognised for his achievement. In 2014 he was named Young Entrepreneur of the Year and Entrepreneur of the Year at the New Zealand edition of the Ernst and Young Entrepeneur of the Year Awards. He then went on to represent New Zealand at the World Entrepreneur of the Year Awards in June 2015.
‘‘Its very much a global company,’’ Radcliffe says.
‘‘We’re proudly an international company but very proudly based here in Taranaki.’’
But looking back at his success, Radcliffe admits there is one thing he wishes he had done differently, and that’s bringing tech staff inhouse.
‘‘We outsourced our tech work for the first eight years of the business,’’ he says.
‘‘That’s a problem because when you’re growing at a rate that we are, the money and the work we were investing in technology was increasing exponentially.
‘‘It’s fine when you’re small but we were spending half a million in agency fees and that’s not smart.’’
And as the world continues to become more digital, Radcliffe presses the importance of human connection.
‘‘Even though we’re an online business based in Taranaki, we’ve really pushed this idea that we’re human,’’ he says.
‘‘We’re people working with people.’’
‘‘Its very much a global company ... We’re proudly an international company but very proudly based here in Taranaki.’’
Dan Radcliffe, founder of IVHQ