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.

Classified Ad Ventures Pty Ltd today announced the launch of an expanded business offering to service the global real estate industry.   Leveraging the team’s extensive knowledge and experience working within the real estate category, the Classified Ad Ventures business provides digital marketing solutions and consulting services to portals, franchise groups and market leading real estate agents who are looking to stay ahead of the game in the highly competitive online market.

Classified Ad Ventures was founded in September 2008 by Simon Baker, best known for his eight years as CEO and Managing Director of the REA Group (www.realestate.com.au ).  During his time at the REA Group, Simon grew revenues from $4m in FY 2001 to $155m in FY 2008 and grew EBITDA from -$6m in FY 2001 to $37m in FY 2008. Most importantly, Simon delivered great returns for shareholders by increasing the market capitalisation from $8m in June 2001 to a high of $900m.

Baker has brought together a team of highly experienced professionals from his time at the REA Group, across key specialties including business management, sales & marketing, web design & development, project management and mergers & acquisitions.  Their combined hundred plus years of experience extends across both portals and agencies, in all major international markets, including Europe, Asia, USA, Australia and New Zealand.  No other team is better positioned to assist the industry in optimising its digital marketing mix to drive business success.

The team at Classified Ad Ventures includes Chris Vulovic, the former CIO of REA Group, Anthony Herman, former Head of Corporate Development in the EMEA region for the REA Group, Kelly Millar, former Consumer Marketing Manager for the REA Group, and John Hart, former Industry Marketing Manager for the REA Group, amongst others.

Simon Baker, CEO and founder of Classified Ad Ventures today stated:  “The incredible rate of innovation in the digital landscape presents opportunities for business never seen before, especially in the real estate sector.  The significant shift of consumers from print to online for their real estate needs requires businesses to adapt their marketing strategies.

Whether you are a portal, franchise group, broker or agent, success is determined by creating value for your customers and ensuring you are competitive and clearly differentiated in the digital landscape.  Our team’s track record in building a highly successful business for the REA Group gives you access to unmatched experience and insights into the category.”

Classified Ad Ventures current clients include some of the world’s major property portals, franchise groups, brokers and market leading agents.

Classified Ad Ventures online marketing services include business consulting, online marketing planning, website design & development, eMarketing, search marketing, editorial and video content, social media and display advertising.

More details about Classified Ad Ventures services can be found at www.classifiedadventures.com

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.”

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).

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 to the Australian market.

• SOBOX provides social media solutions for Australian and New Zealand real estate agents
• 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 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 mobile 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.

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.

Jobs Portal Watch follows hot on the heals of the success of property portal watch. In April, Property Portal Watch had 14,000 visits from over a hundred different countries and our articles cover businesses around the world. Property Portal Watch is now the leading industry site for the property portal industry.

Jobs Portal Watch aims to do the same for the jobs portal industry by providing the industry with up to date news, views and analysis on what is happening in the jobs portal industry around the world.

The site provides a range of information including:

News – daily updates on the top happenings at jobs portals around the world including acquisitions, new features, new site launches and movements of key people

Interviews – in depth interviews with key industry leaders

Opinions – receive the latest thoughts on where the industry is heading from Simon Baker, a recognised leader in the online classifieds industry

Analysis – detailed analysis of the listed jobs portal stocks

Overviews – business overviews of portals, companies, countries and thought leaders in the jobs portal world

Strategy Thoughts – regular strategic thoughts on the key issues facing jobs portals and what they can do about it

Operational Tips – tips and techniques covering sale, marketing and technology for people running jobs portals

You are able to subscribe to any or all of these sections just by entering your email address on the home page.

My guess is that most business managers around the world are probably thinking the same thing.  Revenues will be flat or falling this year and that the business will have to focus on cutting costs – mostly through letting people go – to maintain profit margins (or minimise losses).  The funny thing is that if most managers in the same industry do the same thing, the status quo will probably be maintained.  The only changes will be that the little guys go out of business but the relative market shares of the leaders will remain steady.

The contrarian in me say that now is the time to acquire businesses – especially those that are poorly financed but in a good market position.  By taking this contrarian approach, businesses will be able to change the competitive landscape – potentially for years to come.

At Classified Ad Ventures, we have established an investment fund and are taking positions in online classified businesses around the world.  We believe that the movement to online classifieds will be accelerated in this down turn – especially as advertisers move away from traditional print media advertising.  At the same time, the current online classifieds businesses have been oversold and are now trading at attractive valuations.

When the economies recover, we believe we will be in a good position to capture much of the upside potential these businesses have to offer.

When you set up new business, you have clear choices in how you want that business to work and how you plan to run that business. As these businesses always start off relatively small, the founder sets the tone and tenor for that business. As we create Classified Ad Ventures, we are facing these issues everyday. Here are some of the lessons we are learning.

Selection of Team Members

The beauty of starting a business from scratch is that you can select the people that you want to work with rather than being inheriting a team that may not be aligned to your style.  Therefore in selecting people to work for Classified Ad Ventures and its subsidiaries, i have decided to select people that are not only smart but that i also get on with personally.  I want to be able to turn up to work each day and have fun.  Sure we need to get the job done, but we want to do it in a way that sees us smile and laugh.  Therefore being smart and having a good track record gets you the interview, it is the interaction with the team that will get you the job!

Approach to Working

One thing that is important to do in building this new business is to change the way we have to work.  Yes we have an office – a funky warehouse in the city, however i am keen to set it up so that people can work from home or from anywhere in the world – we dont have to be dependent on a location.  To make this work, we need to have the right tools in place as well as the right work ethic and processes.   In CAV, we have team members spread around the world. 

Another change in the approach to working is the strong use of part time and contract people.   I am particularly keen to leverage people who dont want to work full time – for example stay at home mum’s – and it is important that the infrastructure supports remote working.

Creation of a New Culture

Probably the most fun i am having is creating a new business culture – well new for us.  I am keen to create an environment that is built on trust, openness, having fun, working hard, respect for the individual, community service, and so on.  What i am keen to do is to ensure that there are no politics, that the best ideas float to the surface and that people want to be in the business.

To do this i have to lead from the front.  I also have to select the right people to join the business … if we get this right then we will work well as a team and anything will be possible.

Having Fun

Finally, and most importantly, it is so important that we have fun when we create this new business.  Now fun can happen in so many ways and depends on the environment that you are working, however some of the things that we are doing is having an open office space, we have a creative team so i am encouraging them to express themselves and to display their artwork on the walls, and we are making sure that we celebrate every little milestone that we reach as we build the business.

The bottom line is that if you are going to spend time building a new business, you might as well have a heap of fun doing it and do it with people that you like and respect.  Life is too short to do anything else!

Clarity of Mission is Critical

When you have a small busness it is very important to make sure that you have extreme clarity in what you are doing – your mission in life.  In addition you need to make sure that what you are doing is related to a real business model with real revenue and profit potential.  The ultimate test of this is the elevator test – can you clearly articulate what your business does in 30 sec to a minute.  If not … think clearly about what you are doing.

Focus on What Matters

Having worked out what the business is going to do, you need to make sure that everyone is totally focused on making that mission come true. What is as important is working out what you are not going to do – that is, the ability to say no to things. In our business the team often comes up with great ideas (well interesting at least) and i spend time on asking the simple question “how is this going to help deliver our mission and bring in revenue?” More often than not these ideas dont actually add value and are more of a distraction.

Make Sure You Have Funding

Great ideas without money to make them happen are just great ideas. Therefore it is important that you have enough funding to get the idea off the ground or at least have enough man-power to make it happen. Often the man-power can be secured on a sweat equity basis where labour is provided in exchange for equity in the business. This is not my preferred option as equity should be treated as gold and cash used to pay for people as often as possible.

Build a Strong Team

No business can truly happen unless there is a team in place and preferably a strong team. Building a strong team is the most important objective for any founder of a business. At CAV we are really focusing on building a strong team and in doing so, i prefer to work with people i have worked with before as i know their skills and workstyles and they know mine.

Keep a Close Eye on Costs

You may have raised some money however this is not revenue so it is important that you keep a very close eye on all costs. At CAV (and its subsidiaries) i personally sign off on all costs before the are incurred and make sure that there are strong cost control procedures in place. We want to create as much runway as possible to get the business off the ground.