My CEO Life

My CEO Life is the blog of Simon Baker, the ex-CEO and Managing Director of the REA Group. He is now building a new business called Classified Ad Ventures. This blog looks at real business problems and provides real solutions - ones that any manager around the world can follow and implement.

Whenever you launch a new business, the hardest thing to do is get cut through with your target market.  Therefore you need to do everything in your power to create awareness of what you are offering them.  We have managed to acheive this with one of our new businesses, ListGlobally.

Just over a month ago we launched a new business from our incubator, Classified Ad Ventures, called ListGlobally.  ListGlobally allows any realtor, agent, broker or developer around the world to advertise their listings to a global audience. All they do is upload the listing to www.listglobally.com and we then syndicate that listing to the market leading sites in 23 countries. We make money by charging US$90 to advertise the listing for 90 days and then pay our distribution network a percentage of what we charge. Overall a simple, but effective, model.

We were fortunate to have a great write up of the business in The Australian newspaper last week. Here is the article.

Nerd goes global in real estate listings: Simon Baker’s attraction to the net has paid off

FORMER REA Group chief executive Simon Baker is a self-confessed “closet nerd”.

From a young age, the 43-year-old says, he has been fascinated with computers.

Baker previously ran REA Group, the owner of realestate. com.au, before starting his latest venture, Classified ADventures.

He studied computer science at Monash University, and his first job was a “tour of duty” at IBM in the sales division.

“I started off life as a programmer in sales and marketing,” Baker says.

“As such, you can’t help but get attracted to the internet and the opportunities it provides.”

He loves the fact that the online real estate market is not fully defined yet, and that new products and possibilities are arising on a daily basis.

That fascination has brought him to where he is today — running his own show as founder of online classifieds company Classified ADventures.

The company provides operators of online classifieds sites with consulting services and helps them get the most out of the internet to advertise their listings.

Among the websites in the stable are smartagentsites; Sobox (Social Media in a Box) and listglobally.

The last, launched a couple of months ago, aims to help real estate agents get global advertising exposure for their listings.

After talking to real estate agents around the world, Baker discovered there were people buying properties across borders.

When you look at the way the online advertising space is set up, he says, each country has its own realestate.com.au, but no one is seriously asking how to market a property across a number of countries to attract an overseas buyer.

Out of that idea, listglobally was born.

From there, Baker says, his team approached the real estate.com.au equivalents in 20 markets around the world to see if they could put listings on their sites.

In each market, the website has become one of the most popular.

For example, if you are in Britain and want to buy property in Australia, he says, your first port of call may be rightmove.co.uk (the equivalent of realestate.com.au).

Each month, 1.6 million searches are carried out on that site’s international section, he says.

“What’s funny is that the fifth most searched country is Australia and there are only 200 listings there,” he says.

“It’s all about saying how do I put Australian listings in front of English buyers or South African buyers or Hong Kong buyers.”

Essentially, with one click and a fee of $90, a real estate agent can put their listing on the equivalent of realestate.com.au in 20 markets.

By the end of the year, he hopes to be in 23 countries.

If all goes to plan, listglobally will be a $10-20 million-a-year business.

Baker’s fascination with computers started early, but the property link was accidental, and only developed several years ago, while he was working at realestate.com.au.

Not long after joining News Limited (publisher of The Australian), Baker says, he was asked to undertake a review the realestate.com.au business.

Not long after that, he joined the board of realestate.com.au and asked for a shot at the top job.

In 2001, he got his shot.

For the next eight years, he says, he spent morning, noon and night turning the online property portal around from a loss-making business to what he describes as a very profitable, dominant market player. In 2008, he departed as chief executive of REA Group and a week later started his own venture with some of his former colleagues.

He had two aims. One was to invest in companies through an investment fund known as CAV Investment Holdings, and the other was to build companies.

With the money he earned from his shareholding in REA Group, Baker invested in a number of businesses. But the main focus for him is Classified ADventures.

He identified about four or five ideas and created an incubator in which those new businesses could be formed, he says.

Three of those ideas have become reality: Sobox, smartagent sites and listglobally.

Baker says his team has very clear goals it wants to achieve, given its financial projections.

With distribution partners lined up, he says, the next goal is to increase the number of listings going through the system. “Our first goal is to get to 1000 listings a month, then we want to get to 5000 listings a month,” he says.

“We are the only ones doing this,” Baker says of his new online property classified website.

“We are the first one to go out and line up all these market leaders, link them all together, and provide them with a feed of properties.

“Either it’s going to be an incredibly good idea or I just wasted two years of my life.”

Classified Ad Ventures is looking for experienced online sales people to join our rapidly growing sales team. We are currently looking for sale people in all states in Australia and later in the year, we will have opportunities in other markets.

The ideal candidate has probably worked for a seek.com.au, carsales.com.au, realestate.com.au or domain.com.au in a front line sales position. They would have experience as either a BDM (business development manager – ie new business) or account management (management of existing customers).

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I had a great chat today with the Head of eBay Talent Management based out of Ireland.  His role is to conduct a global search for top talent and to find out if they would be interested in working for EBay in the future.  At any point in time he has a number of live executive searches he is conducting.

What is intersting is that he found me via linkedin.  He reached out, contacted me and we had a chat.  While i am not interested in changing jobs at the moment, i know people that would be suitable and i will the eBay guy in touch with them.

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Today i received an email from the CEO of Qantas apologising about the recent disruptions to their services. Initially i thought i was someone important then i realised it went to all Frequent Flyers. The good news is that this email directly addresses some of the bad press the airline has been receiving. It was good, from a customer perspective, to actually hear from the man at the top and not some PR mouth piece.

Overall this is a great example of using PR and email to directly get to those customers that really matter, the frequent flyer.  More companies should use this approach more often.  Overall, well done … not just fix the maintenance issues.

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Classified Ad Ventures is looking for experienced online sales people to join our rapidly growing team.   Initiall we are looking for sale people in all states in Australia and later in the year, we will have opportunities in other markets.

The ideal candidate has probably worked for a realestate.com.au or domain.com.au in a front line sales position.  They would have experience as either a BDM (business development manager – ie new business) or account management (management of existing customers).

Classified Ad Ventures is building a series of new and innovative online products and services targeted at the real estate agency market. Recently we launched SOBOX and ListGlobally.  SOBOX provides social media solutions for Australian and New Zealand real estate agents while ListGlobally allows real estate agents to advertise their listings around the world.  Classified Ad Ventures has more products in the pipeline and these will be launched in the coming months.

Our sales team will have the chance to sell across the range of products to real estate agents in their territory.

Packages for sales people are competitive, weigheted towards uncapped commission, and include telephone and laptop.

In addition, you will get to work with many of the team the built realestate.com.au and the REA Group.

If you are interested in a position, know someone that is or just want more information, please send an email to sbaker@classifiedadventures.com.

RedBubble, one of CAV Investment Holdings investments, is looking for experienced online marketing people. There are two major roles available – Head of Consumer Marketing and Head of Industry Marketing.

The Head of Consumer Marketing is responsible for rapidly increasing the number of visitors to the site and improving their conversion from visitors to buyers.  Over 1.5 million people from all parts of the world visit the site each month.  The successful candidate will need to increase this traffic.  In addition, the successful candidate needs to ensure that the site presents the art for sale in its best possible light to maximise the conversion from visit to sale.

The Head of Industry Marketing is responsible for rapidly increasing the take up and useage of the site by artists from around the world.  Artists are the core of the business.  It is their art work that is being presented for sale and it is important that we increase the volume of art work on the site and that we help the agents to market their art work on the site and to their customers directly.

RedBubble is a leading online retailer of the works of emerging artists. Visitors to the site are able to select the work that they like, select how they would like to receive the work (t-shirt, print, cards, etc) and then RedBubble does the fulfilment.  While the head office is in Australia, customers are from throughout the world.

The roles are based in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

If you are interested in this role or know someone that would be interested, email sbaker@classifiedadventures.com

In today’s economic environment businesses are making tough decisions.  They are laying off people at a great rate, cutting back on non-essential costs, and pushing through price increases on their customers, all in an effort to improve the overall performance of a business.  Banks are a great example of this, they are looking for any way to increase their revenues through new fees and charges while quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) laying off people. These businesses, especially the public ones, have no choice.  Their share prices reflect the belief by shareholders in higher and higher returns from these companies.

However, while these changes in an organisation can be difficult for the employees (no one likes to see collegues lose their jobs), senior management often dont cut back on their pay packets or their perks, thereby creating an us and them culture in a business.  If senior management don’t walk the talk, they run the risk of undermining the culture of a business.

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The cold hard reality of life for all businesses is that, from time to time, people need to be let go.

Recently i chatted with one person that was made redundant.  Her description of the process was “I was notified I was being made redundant, and immediately frog-marched out of the building. I wasn’t even given the opportunity to collect my wedding photos off my desk. It was all rather disrespectful.”

The above is an example of a company that is not approaching the letting go of people in the right manner.  How should companies handle this most difficult of times?

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In the late 90′s pundits around the world foretold of the rapid dimise of traditional business at the hands of the Internet.  Of course this didnt really happen as the internet provided more of an evolutionary change than a revolutionary change.  Still, the internet has dramatically changed our economic landscape.

Just take the online real estate advertising business.  Ten to 15 years ago, everything was advertised in the paper.  Now classified sections have shrunk to former shadows of themselves.  If you are looking for a flatmate or a rental, you wouldnt even consider buying a paper, Craiglists or one of the thousands of niche sites out there provide a far better service.  The same is happening with homes for sale … it is just a matter of time before more and more papers either reinvent themselves or just disappear.

Therefore it was with interest that the following article came across my desk from the Wall Street Journal about the Blockbuster thinking about entering bankruptcy protection.   No wonder businesses like Netflix (USA), Lovefilm (UK and Europe) and Quickflix (Australia) are growing at ever increasing rates.

It will be interesting to see which other busniess and industries give up holding back the tide and are swept away by the continuous onslaught of the internet.

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Its been a while since i last wrote however i just couldnt resist writing about a PR event that i am sure Tiger Airways is regretting.  I was kicking back and watching TV the other night when the show Airways came on.  Now i dont usually view these types of shows however i was intersted in seeing how the Australian version of the UK show faired.  Suffice to say, the Tiger Airways, about which the show is about, came off looking amateurish at best.

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