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.

On Friday I had the chance to talk to a group about their property portal in the Russian market.  They were looking to raise additional funding to drive growth and wanted to know if i would invest.  Naturally we spent chunk of time looking at the P&L projections for the business.

The first thing that jumped out was the enormous growth they were projecting.  Revenues going from 1.6m euro in year 1 to 58m euro in year 4.  Suffice to say i nearly feel off my seat, especially since their current revenues are ZERO!  The next step was to look at the drivers of revenue and to understand even if these numbers were possible.

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Have you ever had the situation where a customer rings up with a request and before you know what has happened, you have said “yes, we can do that”?  You then put down the phone, scratch your head and then realise that you just may have a problem.  This is an all too familiar occurrence for many business people.

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OK … back again after another little hibernation.  CAV Investment Holdings is my investment vehicle.  We have made 11 investments, mostly in the online classifieds industry.  When making investments, it is important to not only look at the business that you are investing in, but also at the management team and, equally importantly, the other shareholders.  The last group are often overlooked by investors and, as i am learning, this can come back to bite you in the butt!  So what do i look for in a good investment?

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I have been in hybernation for the last few months working on the Classified Ad Ventures business. Originally we started this business as an incubator in which we developed new businesses including List Globally, SoBox, CAV Web Design, and SmartAgent Sites.  However it became appartent that our customers were really asking for a lot more from us than social media and website products, they were asking for digital marketing solutions.  So, being pragmatic as always, we spun out ListGlobally to be a separate business and then merged together Classified Ad Ventures, SoBox, CAV Web Design, and SmartAgentSites to create a full serivce digital marketing agency serving the global real estate industry.

Since this has happened, business has boomed.  We are working on 5 different countries on a range of problems from new market entry to international expansion to new site development.

Here is our press release.

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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.

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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