204 – How and why to make your brand beautiful, with creator of online accounting software, Saasu.

Marc: 

Definitely Steve Jobs. I love design. I think it’s fundamental. Aesthetics is really important to him and so I’d have to say Steve Jobs. I do have a lot of respect for what Gates did but he’s the man I almost follow.

Tim:                

Ah yeah, and the job things all about aesthetics. It’s about making things look beautiful. Tell me more about that.

Marc:         

Well I think I started business with a bit of a misconception about what selling was. I originally thought it was about selling products and services but quickly learned that it’s actually about sort of the emotional response to a business and what it offers in entirety, not just the product, and I think I learned that lesson not so much from Apple but just generally through experience. And I think that company really defines and his approach truly defines that, so I just think it’s critical. You have to sell the emotion.

Tim:      

Music to my ears and I know many listeners ears. Some business owners kind of shirk at that. I mean many business owners, that’s a very emotional thing to say, isn’t it? It’s not very rational.

Marc: 

It is.

Tim:           

And hey, business is serious, Marc.

Marc:       

Absolutely, yeah. The thing is I prefer that side because at the end of the day business owners are doing this because they had this sort of entrepreneurial spirit and that’s an emotional decision. They’re leaving jobs, taking risk, and that whole side of thing is about the feeling they’re getting from running a business and those people are really passionate about their products and selling that and selling their passion and selling right across their business and not just trading it like a commodity is what makes them successful. I really believe in that emotional side of what people do.

Tim:       

Wow! Let’s have this discussion because…what’s particularly interesting about this discussion is that you are the founder of an online, a piece of online accounting software and how many accountants have I ever heard saying “our business is boring. You can’t make that interesting. You can’t make that emotional.” Let’s just dig further into that. How have you gone? I understand what you’re saying is that you had this incredible passion around building some beautiful online accounting software. You needed to transfer that passion…emotion actually, not passion. You had to transfer that emotion across into your prospects, your clients. How have you gone about doing that?

Marc:        

It’s mostly been about how we look at the market. I think a lot of people look at, particularly with software and in particular accounting software, people look at the market like it’s tax and it’s compliance and that’s boring. It is really boring. But people forget that business owners, when they’re using accounting systems, they’re actually using them as business systems to try and do a lot of the operational things they need to do to make the sales happen and to workflow. It’s actually a very small amount of it, is compliance work and doing business activity statements and things like that. We knew that and we knew we wanted to build a product for business owners first and foremost. That was probably the key thing. We said “okay, let’s build for the business owner.” Nearly everyone in our industry wants to build for the accountant because the accountants, they’re massive sales channel, so they go “let’s build what the accountant wants.” You’ve got to build compliance in accounting software, which is like business activity statements and payment summaries or what they used to call group certificates, but we said “actually, what the business owner’s doing everyday when they get and they have to deal with accounting stuff is they’re using it like a business system.” So we sort of looked at it at a different direction and then we said “what do you do to build software for business owners, first and foremost.” We’re quite different as a software company in that respect.

Tim:  

And how did you, I mean there was obviously, you had a sense of what business owners would want, but did you asked just a whole lot of questions of business owners that you knew? Was it an informal kind of research or more formal?

Marc:    

It was probably more informal initially. We’ve done more formal research recently but informal initially because it was me talking to other business owners and saying “where’s the problem at the moment for accounting software?” Originally I was working at Deutsche Bank and I was a principal investor there. I was dealing in all these investing in equities and future markets and doing different things in the banking sector but I kind of felt that there was something missing at the business owner end and I’ve seen a lot of business owner friends that were really struggling with the financial side, so I was asking them what’s going wrong there and they’ve given me little bits and pieces but eventually I just thought actually I have to get out and I had to start  a bookkeeping business and find out how people use these systems. I left my investment banking job and became a bookkeeper and quickly build up a little business doing bookkeeping. I’ve got about 30 clients over about 3 months, build it up really quickly and researched the market by literally going and sitting in the corner of an office and doing the books for a business owner and looking at all the problems in the different products that are in the market like MYOB with books and I literally just started writing a list of all the pain points these guys were suffering, where was is it painful and really obvious things came up like “I don’t understand accounting, so I don’t understand the system. I don’t understand the words they use” or “this system doesn’t give me information that I need. It doesn’t help me process workflow. It doesn’t help me with the logistic side of what I do.” So I just had this list of things I needed to do and then I just said “okay.” We gave that business away, because we didn’t want to be in that business obviously, and we started designing the product based from what we learned from that experience. I think it was the best decision we ever made because we really felt like we knew that industry inside-out, we knew the problems that business owners were having and then we started building Saasu.

Tim:      

Amazing, I didn’t know that. So you’ve had a big job at Deutsche Bank, investment banker, earning plenty; probably had a polished mahogany corner office. You’ve gone okay, what I really want to do for the next 5, 10 years into the long term is you want to develop just this wonderful peace of online accounting software. In order to do that, you have taken yourself back to the high street, back to the cold face and started a bookkeeping business, like literally doing people’s books, yeah?

Marc: 

Yeah that’s right.

Tim:          

Wow!

Marc:   

My mum taught me when was young. She owned business. She had flower shop and rent news agencies and she was very much about customer service. For me she was my first business mentor. She was amazing. She used to run a bakery dressed up in a suit and customers would come in and love the professionalism and everything. She said to me you have to know the customer, so that’s why I did that. I thought “you can’t do this honestly and properly if you don’t go out and learn from the business owners of using this product.” Otherwise, you’re just going to build something from an ivory tower perspective, which just doesn’t work, which is why a lot of products end up the way they are. They don’t end up setting the customer they’re designed for ironically. You have to live and breathe it to really know what they need.

Tim:   

Okay, so I’ve just bookmarked come back and talk about mum’s bakery wearing suits. But before we do that, so you are in your bookkeeping business, you’re doing people’s books. It’s almost like where was the balance? You were doing people’s books, managing their accounts, but at the same time kind of hidden agenda, almost more important agenda, researching the idea of what does the optimal online accounting software look like. Where’s the balance there?

Marc:   

I’ll say upfront with them when I was doing it. I was telling them what I was going to be doing. At the end of the day, they were getting someone who, like I had a lot of financial experience, so they’re getting someone fairly good for $30-$40 an hour. It wasn’t even about the money, so I just kind of set a nice little price for that. And I told them that this is an experiment for me. This is working out what I needed to do and I wasn’t going to be doing this forever but I was going to hand over to someone who knew what they’re doing and I did do that. It was fine. I was able to do that quite happily. And I’ve met a lot of friendships out of those early customers actually because people saw what I was trying to do and some of them still use our product to this day, sort of a long time now.

Tim:  

Marc, how long did you have the bookkeeping business for before you transitioned into Saasu?

Marc:         

I think we had the bookkeeping business about 3-4 months, we ran that, and then pretty much building Saasu took about 12-18 months after to get to the first version, which we brought out at the money expo. That was sort of our first marketing experience. It was a good kind of two years to get up and running. It wasn’t a quick exercise.

Tim:      

Tell me, during that 3-4 months of running the bookkeeping business, which isn’t a long time. I mean that’s 3-4 months of doing people’s accounts. What kind of process did you have for capturing the problems that you identified that what is now called Saasu was going to solve? How are you capturing the problem?

Marc:     

So what I did, I literally used Microsoft Excel. I just created a spreadsheet. I was reading up on how to build software. I’d built software in the bank. I had a team of people that would be putting program training models and things when I was working in the bank. But this was me doing from a very simple perspective. I didn’t have a team to do that. I literally went back to the basics of software, which is writing down what they call used cases, which is things people would need from a system or need a system to do and I just write them as lines in a spreadsheet. And then as people came along that needed to use that use case, I would give it a number and then I literally created a list of things prioritized based on the amount of people that were needing it. One of the things that flied right to the top was people saying “I want non-technical terms in my accounting software. I don’t want you to call it accounts receivable because I don’t understand it when I’m a new business owner.” They don’t know what that word means. We called it ‘money owed to me.’ And so we drove it from that direction. And then we looked at “okay, how many of these things can we seriously get in the first version of the product?” and we do prioritize the top ones in that list. So it was just a really simple spreadsheet. There was no size to it. I don’t think you need big, complicated ways to do these things. Just getting back to basics and using a bit of I guess just market intel to make the decisions. It’s a small sample but it’s enough that you can work out what’s important to people.

Tim:            

Did you have a…obviously you knew. When you’re at Deutsche Bank, you knew that there was a need. You saw the need for some online accounting software. Going in and starting the bookkeeping business, that wasn’t proving the need, was it? It was really just proving what was required to make really good online accounting software. Yeah that’s right. Proving the need, that really came about. It’s an interesting story actually. One of the guy that I worked for at Deutsche Bank that ran the bank, he was very successful obviously if you’re running a bank like that but had a lot of personal investments and things that he was running on the side, money bag, and he actually had a big sort of…back then it was called grace brothers, big grace brothers bag full of receipts and I always looked at it and thought “what are you doing with that big bag of receipts?” And I ended up asking him about it and it’s just he had no time to deal with it and some of them were work expenses, some more personal expenses and I thought a guy like that, he’s putting his customers in the bank before himself didn’t really have his personal finance sorted out, so what does a guy like that use? He’s not going to go on MYOB. He does not have the time and that’s actually bad use of his time to be using software like that. I thought a guy like that actually needs something really simple to capture his expenses or have his personal assistant do that. I thought it has to be cloud base. This was in 1998. We’d already decided inside the bank to not build any more software, just to build stuff that was web-based. I thought actually this is a brilliant business idea – go and build a web-based system for simple finances, for people to run their investments or their business. That’s what kind of how it came about. I like the business idea because it was also difficult. I think whenever you get into a new part of the market, people naturally go and start businesses in the easy thing but it’s the hard stuff that’s where you make the money. So I thought building an accounting system is hard and doing that online is hard, so we’re going to have a lot of competitive lead time where competitors aren’t coming to the market and fight with us because we’re doing something quite hard and we’ll have a head start. That’s essentially what happened. I said “okay, there’s a good start.”

Tim: 

Yeah. I love it. I love it. Before we leave the bookkeeping business because what I find interesting about that idea and I’m sure that many listeners will as well, was the fact that it was beautifully informal yet formal research. There was a bit of a cash flow. Okay you were earning $30-$40 an hour, coming off the back of an investment banker’s job, so I’m guessing cash flow at the time may not have been an issue for you, correct me if I’m wrong, but you’ve kind of developed a way of testing an idea and honing an idea and still providing some cash flow.

Marc:       

Yeah. Essentially though I guess I have an unfair advantage in that I sort of made a reasonable amount of money out of investment banking anyway, so I was really cheating the system, you might say, as how a startup might normally begin because I didn’t have financial pressure at that point in the cycle, but looking back on it, it would have been possible to do it the way I did without having a lot of money to play out into it. I think a lot of small business owners that start out and run things on the side of whatever their career is, is a really smart way to go just to reduce the risk and to give their idea some time to be tested and to think through it properly and not have it be a whim. I think a lot of small business owners’ first start out on a whim. They’re excited and passionate about something. They’d leave their job and borrow lots of money and I think that’s a real recipe for a disaster. It’s sometimes smarter just to do something on the side of what you’re currently doing and build up slowly. I kind of encourage staff in here to do that and a lot of them in here have got online businesses they’re building on the side of what they do inside Saasu, because it’s a really good way to risk-reduce a startup and learn before putting lots of dollars into it.

Tim:     

The $64 million question around that, I know there’s many listeners of this show that they have full time jobs, they’re trapped in the cubicle, they are working on their passion project, which they want to turn in to their long time business. The $64 million question, Marc, is at what point do you jump? Do you leave the security of the full time work and immerse yourself in that new business idea?

Marc: 

Well I’m fairly aggressive on how you live your life. I’m one of those people that will take risks and I guess I’m more of a risk taker than your average person. I personally think you should go really quickly. That’s my view. But I think realistically if you’ve got a family and kids in a big baggage and you haven’t got savings to do it, it’s foolish just to jump out because you’re just going to cause a whole lot of personal issues in relationships and stress, then you’re not going to enjoy it. I see it every day. I see these small businesses that are customers and they’ve started out that way and they have this massive passion for what they’re doing. They really want to do whatever it is they want to do and they’re excited about it and they got the classic entrepreneurial spirit and passion and really quickly gets killed because cash flow’s not maintained. They don’t know how they’re going. They can’t track how they’re going, cash flow wise, worried about raising capital and all of a sudden this small business dream turns into this absolute nightmare. I think for me that’s the fundamental thing at reason I’m in this business, is to try and solve that problem for business owners. We do that by providing tools that help them understand how they’re going financially and where the risks are and so on, but I think that’s the key thing. If people are risk averse, they should hold off and just wait longer. It’s all about risk capital.

Tim:    

Yeah. It does come down to the situation, where you are in life. You’re single. You’ve got some cash backing from a previous job or you’re starting a young family, you’ve got all sorts of expenses. It does depend. There is no straight answer to that. I was hoping there was but clearly there’s not. So tell me, I want to revisit the passion kind of discussion but let’s just put some numbers around where you are with Saasu. You had 4 months of a bookkeeping business. At that point you’ve gone “right, it’s time to start developing the first iteration, Saasu 1.0” and it sounds like you gave yourself 18 months to get that to market. How long ago was that? And how long has Saasu been around now?

Marc:   

Yeah that’s right. We knew it was going to take some time. It’s not a trivial little exercise building accounting software, and we were trying to invent something that didn’t exist too. It was the classic R and D business in that it wasn’t cloud computing. It wasn’t called that. It wasn’t even called on-demand or anything. It didn’t have a name and we kind of described it to people as “this is a shared server” like your financial information is online. You share a server with a lot of other people and because you’re sharing that server, you’re reducing your cost for having accounting software. And because we manage all the security and the backups and everything, it saves a lot of time. At your end, you’re not having to pay for upgrades and all this kind of thing. We had to educate the market and had to invent the words to describe it and how to sell it. That was going to take time in itself, not just building the product. We had to develop our own language around how you describe these things. It’s a long experience but you really never stop building these things. We’ve never stopped doing things to the product. It just keeps going.

Tim:    

So where are you now with it, Marc? Can you kind of give us some numbers? Give us your scoreboard if you like – number of users, revenue, staff, countries available in.

Marc: 

Yeah sure. I think since we started, we’ve had about 100,000 people on the system. It’s in the tens of thousands of businesses now. They tend to be larger businesses because we’ve been around for a while. We’ve built our product up to be able to scale. It tends to have businesses that have got employees or a bit larger, it’s got an inventory system, so people that are assembling things or selling things online are the typical type of customer or in retail businesses. It’s built a lot. Then there’s probably a good 3000 accountants that use the system now and we’re across about, I think about 10 different universities Saasu has toured in. It has come a long way but we’re still a baby in the scheme of things. There’s some big global companies that do this that are in the millions of customers in the software world but it’s still early days. It’s a slow product cycle because moving online is not a quick thing that everyone in the world does instantly. It’s kind of like the adoption of mobile and internet. It does take some time. It’s still early days. It’s the first five minutes of a football game really is how I say it at the moment.

Tim:         

It sounds to me like you were the first online accounting software, correct?

Marc:    

I think NetSuite in the US started about the same time from what I worked out; I know it existed when I started.

Tim:   

How long ago is that?

Marc:    

I stared in ’98 and we incorporated in 2000 and I think NetSuite was around the same time. We were busy doing something similar way back then, not knowing each other though. It goes back a fair way.

Tim:  

Zero’s come along and obviously stolen, I’d say mind share. I don’t know what the market share looks like. You can tell me. But Zero to me I would say has got the biggest mind share awareness. If I went out into the street and said to a hundred people “name an online accounting software” I’m going to guess those who know what I’m talking about, 8 out of 10 are going to say Zero. MYOB, from what I understand, are moving in, finally embraced the cloud. They’re a little bit slower. Again, correct me if I’m wrong. I’m just making these observations as a punter almost. MYOB, up until recently, was still updating their software and sending out discs to clients and being able to download from the site. But Zero and MYOB have got the lion’s share; Saasu is kind of sitting there as now, despite the fact that you were a leader.  Are you more boutique in nature now?

Marc:      

Yeah we are. That’s by design. We wanted to run like a profitable business and we didn’t want to run a business that we have to raise a lot of capital and be worried about the next capital raising.

Tim:   

Which is what Zero have done?

Marc:        

Yeah that’s right. Zero’s model is what they call like a manufactured sales model, where you manufacture sales to increase the amount of customers you’ve got, then you go back to the market with that increased customer base and you raise more capital, and then you do that again and you roll that over and over and you grow your business that way. That’s quite different. We’re more what you refer to as a gravity sales model. We try to attract customers that are sort of long term customers and we do that slowly without spending lots of marketing dollars. We find interesting high ROI ways to market instead of manufacturing that. It’s a different model. And then MYOB’s dealing with the incumbency problem of hanging on to current customer base. They’re in a different situation again. They’re dealing with this dilemma. There’s three quite different business models and we never wanted to be the big guy. We wanted to be something that people really loved and have a profitable business because I don’t think there’s any point doing this if you’re not sustainable and I think Zero has got an offshore, I think it’s $40 million loses or something they’re dealing with. We said we just don’t want to have that stress hanging over us, having to worry about can we get the next capital raising done. It’s  a different mindset from the owners of this business to be more, I guess enjoy the journey more and earn our customers in a different way. It’s a choice rather than something that’s just evolved that way.

Tim:      

I might be using the wrong term but you guys, the owners of Saasu, you want to build a brilliantly useful product but you are not out to build an empire necessarily. Maybe there’s some lifestyle kind of objectives amongst the owners.

Marc:      

Actually if I was going to say, if I’d describe it as thinking of Saasu, we’re more of trying to look at the craftsmanship and the artistry of building software and what that means and to build really fantastic software that’s aesthetically pleasing, works really well at high scaling and for bigger businesses and is high quality and is backed by a business that’s making money. We really wanted to build that in lieu of…I think it’s a bit of a vanity metric to say biggest is best. Apple’s the most valuable company but it has a tiny market share relative to what all the other guys have got. It’s hard to judge companies’ performance based on the vanity metrics of revenue and customer numbers. It doesn’t quite work that way, in my opinion.

Tim: 

I love how you described that, the craftsman of it. You enjoy what you do, I reflect. Craftsman, you don’t often hear that word when we’re talking about online businesses by the way. The last craftsman I think I saw was when I was in Florence in December and I saw a guy chiseling out a Pinocchio and I sat there, literally sat in his workshop for I reckon a good hour, if not two, and I just watched, like time disappeared and I can still smell the wood and this guy, he was covered in shavings. It was beautiful. There’s not enough of that in this busy world.

Marc:  

Yeah that’s right. I just think the world is changing on what it demands from people in business. It used to demand price mostly. It still does to a degree but now companies like Apple have reshaped the market and people are now expecting a certain sort of aesthetic and they’re expecting an experience from a service perspective like with their genius bars and just how the company operates in the market. They’re expecting something that’s way bigger than just the product. And to really achieve that, you’ve got to have a design-thinking type mindset as a business owner. You’ve got to say “how do I design what I offer in totality, not just the product but how the service team interacts with market, how the sales team interacts with the market becomes really important. A good example of that is we call what we do service as a sales channel. We give really good service to cause sales. It’s not driven from a push to sell manufacture type of approach. It’s like give great service, make sure the customer’s happy, educate them. We’re involved in uni and startup community, on that front to help with that, and then you will attract customers in and they will talk about you in their community. And as a result, you’ll get sales. It’s the secondary effect. It’s like artists don’t do art to make money. They do art to make beautiful things and even though those guys get rich pretty much after they die, they attract money and it’s not their primary motive. And we said we want to do that in the software world, in the business world. We want to make it about getting the passion to the business owner, making a product that’s beautiful and aesthetically and then attract people. And then the money will happen because of that anyway. It’s a different sort of order in which we do things, you might say, and artistry and craftsmanship is about that.

Tim:  

I came across a business yesterday, just yesterday. I was actually doing some research on blogs and I came across a business called Back Country. It’s an adventure retail business in the states and it’s one of those ones, sort of like Katmandu, that business that sells all the different – from rock climbing to cycling gear to camping gear. It’s called Back Country and they have got a really strong…what would you call it? Not environment…culture, really strong culture where they employ just crazy adventurers and these crazy adventurers they’re part of the sales team. You can even connect with the crazy adventurers when you actually log on. I’m just having a quick look now to see what they call them, but it was really cool in that they gave them a name which was gear heads, the gear heads. You could actually connect with a gear head. If you’re into cycling, then there are cycling gear heads. And these guys were out every weekend. When they weren’t working at Back Country, they’re out doing crazy cycling things or scaling bloody…do you do the same in your business?

Marc:       

Yeah we do, we do. One of the first things I look for when I’m hiring people is do they have something they’ve got going on the side or some sort of entrepreneurial spirit behind how they operate, and that’s a big win, or they’ve got something doing in their life that’s a real passion. As an example, when I hired our CT, I was very impressed because he’d done a whole lot of martial arts genres and gotten to black belt status and all those. He was super passionate about that stuff. And then I’ve just recently hired someone in the service team who has an online business selling sort of hanging pots and leather wallets and things and built all of that herself. Those sorts of things are really inspiring and you want kind of people in your team that think that way. They’re really passionate about something and it’s like those guys that you’re talking about, those gear heads. They will definitely be not thinking of that job as a job. They’ll be going there, going “this is what I do and I love and I just happen to get paid for it.”

Tim: 

It’s an extension.

Marc:       

Yeah that’s right.

Tim:   

Part of me, and I get exactly what you’re saying. It excites the hell out of me. If I were an owner of a business like that, I’d be going putting all this effort into employing very good people, cool people, passionate people, people who don’t even see this as a job but an extension of who they are, I’m probably not going to hold them for very long.

Marc:   

Yeah I think you’d be surprise because people, it kind of creates a family effect and there’s a lot of loyalty comes with it. If the employer is really good at structuring how they run their business around that personality, that can work. We’ve got great loyalty in here. People have long longevity. We pay long service leave to quite a few people already. It doesn’t take long for people to realize that it’s a good business to work in and to hang around. And you’re always going to get people that want to go off and start new businesses. We have people that I kind of almost kick out and saying “mate, you’ve been talking about starting this business for five years. You need to go and have a look at doing it. Don’t stay with us forever.” Saasu should not be the last thing they do. It is a stepping stone to the next thing they want to do. That in itself, you might say that’s pushing people out the door. They’re not going to be loyal if you want them to move on and you’re going to have to rehire. But it’s authentic. It’s like giving people a chance to be the best they can and they’ll stay here and work really hard for the time they’re here but they know that the business isn’t going to be upset at them for going and doing the next thing. That’s good and that’s what we believe in, that entrepreneurial spirit. It’s okay to leave and start a business or to move to the next thing. I think most businesses can’t think that way because they operate from a self serving perspective and it’s them first before the employee, but we run a balanced model, which is employee-customer-company. It has to be driven by those three values. It’s not shareholder-driven. That’s what the difference I think a lot of business owners could make. If they adopt that model, the business actually ends up better off, end up with more loyal customers, with more loyal staff and the business actually makes more money than being a purist shareholder-driven company.

Tim:      

Interesting, interesting. Have you ever actually, really time to tell the truth, not that you haven’t been, but have you had that conversation with an employee where you said “we love you but you’ve been talking about that new clothesline peg idea for too long. Go.”

Marc:       

Yeah I did. Actually the second guy I hired, he left about a year ago. He’s running a program trading business in Indonesia now, trading financial markets, and he’s a guy that had been wanting to do that. He’s a very important person in the business and I’ve been saying to him each annual review “mate, you should go and do it. Stop thinking about it.” I have massive mixed emotions about that. He’s a friend of mine now and he was a guy who was really important in the business but he had his ambitions and I wanted to make sure he didn’t sacrifice that for his loyalty he had to our business, which I gladly appreciate. But he’s a human after all and that’s going to come before money.

Tim:       

I hope he’s using Saasu in his new business.

Marc:   

Yeah of course he is. I’ll revisit that passion conversation but you’ve answered the question. My question was when I talk to business owners or founders of businesses, it was originally their idea to do whatever they decided to do and then they’ve launched that idea and they’ve had some degree of success. Of course the ones that I speak to have generally had great success. Then it’s like how do you then take the passion and in your case that need to create emotion in online accounting, how do you take that and make sure that everyone else in the business shares the vision, shares the aim, and takes what you had and grows it because sometimes that’s really hard. But you kind of answered that by saying you just basically employ the right people, which is easy to say, harder to do.

Marc:   

Yeah I think one of the key things you got to do beyond that though is you have to have them very involved in the whole process of planning and give them the ability to run their own machine. Each people in different parts of the business have their own machine they’re managing, whether it’s a marketing automation machine or it’s an engineering team and they really have to be left to do that, the best way they can, without a management team trying to chop and change things and get too involved in what they do to the point where it’s really frustrating for them and it’s almost like a management meddling I call it. It happens in a lot of companies and it really upsets senior people in teams because management can be a bit fickle sometimes in some companies and mock things around and change things. It becomes like a moving feast that they can’t control. I think the trick is you’ve got to hire the right people and let them do as much as possible in sales without interfering too much and just have really good conversations about strategic issues that are the guidance for what they’re doing anyway. If that’s set really firmly and everyone’s really clear on the strategy, they can get the other bits right themselves and it’s in line with what the business owners want, so you’re  all happy then.

Tim:      

Yeah got you. Marc, I just want to finish with, well all of this has been a marketing discussion, pure marketing, I kind of trying to figure out in leading up to our chat, why haven’t I heard of Saasu? I’m not Saasu’s type of client. I actually think I move across to Saasu, having spend some time looking at it and chatting to you, but I first became aware of Saasu because I had met you at a couple of different functions. You had a stand at the Westpac road show that I spoke at and that’s kind of where I got in front of Saasu. I know about Zero and MYOB because they got big budgets, sounds like they’re going into lots of debt. They’ve been around a while; MYOB’s been around a while, all that type of stuff. Saasu, again not your ideal client, one man show, but how are people finding about what to me seems like a hidden gem?

Marc:      

The main way people find out about us is still online. That’s first and foremost in our stats. It’s through Google and ads online.

Tim:   

So pay per click advertising, Google AdWords?

Marc:   

Yeah that’s right, yup, and natural search as well, just the natural listings. We rank the top spot in Australia because we do have a lot of customers here in Australia and we have been dominating this market. I think the total dollars in Saasu system is still greater than what are riding in Zero for example, even though they’re a much bigger company, and that’s because our customers tend to be quite large, so we still rank really well and that means a lot.

Tim:          

For what? When you say rank, is there a particular keyword that you’re talking about?

Marc:        

To things like online accounting. On accounting software we wouldn’t. That would be one of the older companies generally win that one, but for the new space in online accounting. That’s probably the fundamental one. The second and very close second is the classic word of mouth, word of word effect that we get from business owners and that’s because there’s a bit of a myth in our industry that accountants tell people what to use for accounting software and it is true to some degree but it tends to be in the micro-business space that happens but as businesses get bigger, business entrepreneurs tend to go to their fellow friends in business or they go and do a lot of DIY in terms of when they’re looking for a system as they get bigger and so we’re sort of more in that space. That’s where we approach business owners more and the type of marketing we do is different. We go to events like we did when we met you. We pick up people from that direction. We’re not buses, banners and billboards type of company like MYOB or Zero. We’re all about marketing automation. We do direct sales online. We use a lot of SEO, AdWords. We do content marketing and we do a lot of events too. What we’re trying to do is find the 20% of tech savvy slightly larger small business and focus on that as our market segment that we’re after instead of going for the sort of manufactured sales approach and spending hundreds and millions of dollars on putting ads on the back of buses. It’s not the way we want to do things.

Tim:         

Clearly. Much more slow burner. Your priorities are just different. There’s a lifestyle need amongst the owners. There’s a love of aesthetic, of craftsmanship. It’s just like slow food.

Marc:    

It is, yeah. We actually refer to it as slow code, sometimes. Slow food, slow code. It’s like do the code right, make it work really well and the products will scale and can deal with a business that starts out little, gets really big, still works for them. That’s sort of what we’re trying to do.

Tim:  

You even talk slow. I love it.

Marc:

Yeah I’m not a traditional sales guy. I’m a service guy.

Tim:       

Yeah. I love that. Hey listen, Marc, before we finish mate. Thank you for sharing everything that there is about Saasu. I want to hear about your mum rolling up to her bakery in a suit. I don’t get that.

Marc:      

Yeah. It was quite clever. It was a news agency and a bakery and they went “let’s knock the wall out between the two” because everyone wants to buy their newspaper and their milk at the same time. That’s a fantastic business model but my mum she just used to say to me “it doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, you have to treat the customer with a lot of respect and if you want to earn respect you have to present well and be professional and a lot of people that appreciate that, which are high quality, sort of what they call royal loyal customers, would come to that shop because of how mum presented herself and the food and the news agency items as a single offering. And so she was doing that in a way already. She was saying it’s not just about the bread or the milk. It’s about her and the milk and how she operates. I think that’s the key takeaway, I reckon, out of my mum’s experience. You got to look at it as the job as much as the product.

Tim:         

Wonderful. And she’s built a brand and she’s built some emotional connection and listeners to this show will know exactly what I’m talking about because I think in today’s day and age, that’s been reflecting on this the last few weeks because someone passionately asked me a few weeks ago in a keynote, “how do I find my USP?” Unique selling proposition. I might have mentioned, I might be doubling up. I’ve talked about this so much recently. It might have been in a most recent episode but the USP was invented by 1950s ad guy and back then products were different. One fly spray had a better active ingredient than another fly sprat, so there was a USP. Nowadays, one could argue that most products are the same and most service offerings are the same, so what’s going to differentiate us is the way the people in that business go about the business.

Marc: 

Absolutely. I totally believe that. And you can see so many examples of it already out in the market. But the good thing for small business owners who are listening is that you have a real opportunity because still such a small percentage of businesses operate this way. There’s very few apples out there. There’s very few. It’s less than 5% in my opinion and that’s a massive opportunity for a business owner who’s in a difficult situation, competing with lots of other people in a similar industry. It’s an opportunity for them to say “we can make ourselves unique in how we operate in the business.” It doesn’t have to be about the product specifically. It can be how they choose to operate. And so it’s a great opportunity, I think, for many industries out there.

Tim:   

Well done mate. Listeners, you have been listening to Marc Lehmann, chief craftsman as Saasu. Time to change that business card, man. I’m looking at it now. Chief executive officer doesn’t ring through. Head over to Saasu, great name, hard to spell. Saasu.com. Check it out. Even if you don’t need online accounting software, have a look at the site and how he’s gone around about putting it together. It’s beautiful. Marc, thanks so much for sharing mate.

Marc:        

Thanks Tim, appreciate it.

Tim:         

I feel like I need to just slow down. I love that chat. Do you like it? I liked it. It was slow. It was kind of comforting. It was kind of how life should be. Hey team, what did you learned from that? I learned a lot. I want to share my top 3 with you thanks to Netregistry and 99 Designs because there’s so much gold in that little fireside chat. I got a top 3, probably going to go top 4 because I just can’t decide. #1 I think we should all just slow down. I love Marc’s reference to slow code. I’d give you a little insider tip. I have a little…is it a process? I don’t know what you call it. I do a thing called JAM, just a minute, and every hour I stop for 1 minute. I have a little chime that goes off on my computer and I meditate for 1 minute, just to kind of flush out the head, get back to normality, loosen the load so to speak. So slow down, slow code, slow food, jam. #2 learning from Marc – pay attention to aesthetics. Hard word to say, hard to spell, important though. Get a grip on how your business looks. We’re a judgmental lot, team. We are so judgmental and the visual emotion and the visual look that we create for our businesses is one of the first things your prospects and your clients see. And we do make a subconscious, maybe sometimes conscious decision. You want to make your brand look beautiful? Head over to 99designs.com.au/sbbm and you’re away. That’s how you solve that problem. #3 learning – remember your selling emotion. I’ll never get sick of saying this. Great marketing is all about emotion. Go back and listen to all the interviews, the 200+ interviews on this show and emotion plays a massive part. The world’s most viral video, First Kiss, hey that’s emotional. Tom Dickson, from Will It Blend? He’s into emotion. Mia Freedman from Mamamia, she talks about the emotional entry point. Can’t bang on about that enough. #4, I said top 3, can’t do top 3, start a business as a way of researching and identifying the gaps your future business will fill. I love how Marc went from investment banker, I nearly said investment wanker but I didn’t, to owning a bookkeeping business for 3 or 4 months, identifying the gaps, completely open about it to the people that he was doing the bookkeeping for, and then he starts Saasu, and he’s got a crystal clear idea of what the market wants and is missing. I love that. Also, there was a little kind of words he used throughout the interview. I don’t know whether you picked that up. Buses, banners, billboards; I love that phrase for what we call push marketing. Word of web, word of mouth, word of web, like that. I like how he referred to himself as a craftsman.