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!

Classified Ad Ventures has 3 foci – Inform, Invest and Innovate around online classified businesses.   We are initially focusing on the online real estate vertical.

Inform

Inform is about providing players within a particular industry vertical with high quality information on what is happening.  Our goal is to become the “go to” source of information.

The first site we launched was Property Portal Watch which provides the owners and operators of property portals around the world with information, news and views on what is happening within the industry.  This niche site now has 10,000+ visits each month and is rapidly positioning itself as a credible source of information for the industry.

Following up Property Portal Watch we recently launched Property Ad Guru. This site provides Realtors and agents around the world with information on how they can get the most from their online advertising spend. As we build out the audience for this site, we can then launch products and services through this channel to a global audience. Well that’s the theory

More sites that inform industry participants will be launched over time.

Invest

CAV will take investments in classified sites around the world focusing on those that are early in their life cycle with the objective of providing high levels of growth in the investment.  To date CAV has investments in a number of online businesses including the REA Group, Homethinking, and Arts Hub.

Watch this space. 

Innovate

As we explore the online classifieds world and provide information to participants in various verticals, we are noticing opportunities to provide new products and services .  A goal of CAV is to develop (either directly or with partners) a number of new products and services to fill the gaps we have found.