hi everyone welcome back to the get chatty about your local businesses series and today i have my friend lucas here with me how are you i’m good thank you so much for taking part in uh in this series and do you mind uh letting the audience know a little bit about yourself and what you do yeah sure so um i’ve been working in innovation entrepreneurial space for like a number of years now i used to i’m just finishing a phd actually so phd’s are part of this story but really what i’m interested in is helping small businesses to evaluate their businesses and i used to be pretty interested in the technology side of it but now i’m sort of looking at solutions for small business that are technology agnostic or not so novel i found that lots of benefits can be got to small business just from applying existing marketing and technology type equipment out there software out there so that’s pretty much from work perspective what i’ve been doing fine-tuning the way i deliver that for a number of years it’s something it’s quite interesting because with um many of our business space have been going for a digital transformation in the past 10 years or so but most of them are like i wouldn’t say most of them but i i would say that many of the small to medium business might have missed out from that one so that’s it’s definitely yeah so that’s definitely a space to to fill and we look at the bright side now that now that they test it out on other people so we’re we’re not at the time that we’re the guinea pigs anymore very sure but i mean how much did it prove how quick we can all all adapt and adopt the small businesses in particular like accelerated their learning and their technology adoption like tenfold you know you know it’s amazing what adversity does to right to drive innovation it just sort of creates that impetus to get it together oh gosh well look i mean we all need to look at the bright side of things and something like a zoom meeting or something like that this is actually much easier for me and and hopefully for you as well because like you know we all have our other obligation like you know family friends and everything in between so something like this is great i’m going to carry on like using this for the chat i agree especially like when you think about how much a meeting takes out of your day when you have to go somewhere to do it especially if you’re a bit of a bit of a hands-on operator for your business where you’re dealing with the admin and a little bit of the finance and the mark homs being dragged away for a half day meeting is you know is problematic so this means we can meet regularly with people just really quickly add value you get to the point and i think there’s a lot of good good to come out of this for sure absolutely i mean well i mean uh downside is i haven’t been ironing my pants for quite a few months so oh yeah at least you’ve got hands on there you go there you go back to the interview what uh prompt you to start your own business newitch can i pronounce correctly yeah well previously i had a company and we worked with startups and we worked with startups who were raising capital so they were looking to raise capital and what i found was in that whole industry of startups looking to startups on this end wanting to raise money and then venture capitalists on this end holding the golden chest they really want unreasonable type uh small businesses that they’re going to put money into meaning that they won’t really look at a regular small medium enterprise that has a tangible product because tangible products in australia because our manufacturing costs are so high we just we’re not going to scale the companies so the vcs the venture capitalists i just found that the model was broken because we’re trying to chase the next uber yeah and there’s a hell of a lot of good companies out there that need support that are building producing good tangible products here and i thought that’s really where i’ve got to focus it is actually something very interesting because i i noticed that for example if say the space in in america or in europe if it is something that even if it’s say like an app or software or something like that venture capital seems to be a really good fit with it however in australia that we have our own identity we have our own way of producing and working with customers so that’s why there is a gap a huge gap that uh capital raising it it’s kind of like
yeah that’s not yet i could completely agree that’s one of the huge problems we’ve got it’s they expect these companies to have like a hockey stick curve of profit and loss of revenue mainly revenue because they just wanted to grow exponentially so they run at a loss initially then they raised the capital and they it in but when you have a look at a lot of these companies how they’re doing it they’re just almost purchasing their their customer it’s not customer acquisition cost they’re purchasing their scale because the more you spend on marcon’s you know it’s a sales funnel the more you’re going to get bytes and the more you’re going to sell your products a lot of these products aren’t sticky and they’re completely overvalued oh gosh and then you’ve got in australia you’ve got i mean all of the industries fell over like automotive and aluminium and steel but that was meant to happen that’s not a problem because the really agile little disruptors were already up and about rejigging what they could do and largely they’re going unnoticed still even though we say we support that area all of the r d tax incentive and all of the government grants they’re just tailored towards product development which is heavy investment back into r d it’s and think about what else and think about what else has to happen after you finish the r d you know you’ve got all of your marketing side and there’s no support for that exactly i think hey i mean i’ll say yes to that i mean pay me extra i’ll do it in costumes but
yeah so to close out the interview do you mind sharing two of your top tips for individuals or creatives and small businesses about moving forward yeah i’d say the first thing is that there’s lots of good technology already out there so don’t try and reinvent the wheel make do a good search even if it’s just searching through google find out what’s available before you go and try and reinvent something okay and especially if it’s an australian company then you can work with them get a good discounted rate and utilize their platform or their technology and focus on what you do best and i think that’s that’s probably number one number two i would say technicians creative engineers marketers hang in there i think your reward your work for your reward is is unheralded but i think it’s very soon going to be recognized i think soon the government will reward non-r d innovation and that will flow back to acknowledge the work that everybody’s doing out there i think that’s good seriously fingers crossed yeah yeah i think so i think it’s going to turn this the government’s now they’ve seen what’s happened during covert they know that the designers technicians engineers and marketers are adding value because there’s no doubt about that but it’s just how quick can the policies catch up to reward everybody else in that value chain to keep going and keep producing it’s it’s a very um interesting time to begin yeah yeah i think we’ll see change it just just doesn’t happen quickly what would the government oh gosh usually usually you would take forever but you would take one a while lucas thank you so much for your time for taking part in this interview get chatty about your local businesses now do you mind telling people how they can find you yeah at the moment at the moment i’m the only social media i use is linkedin so i don’t actually have a facebook or twitter or anything like that not for personal or anything but linkedin you can find me and newledge.io which is l-e-d-g-e dot io and feel free to contact me my email address as well lucas l-u-c-a-s at new ledge dot io i’m happy to help and i think we can create a lot of value together so be happy to hear from any small businesses with a with a product that they want to increase the value of and or save some money in their business there’s no harm to start a conversation i think it’s just you know it is time to just kind of like you know just send an email send a message see how it all goes seriously yeah and in that case thank you so much for taking part in this and good luck with newage and all the contact information are underneath this video and uh yeah so let’s keep on chatting about businesses thank you see you later
Lucas can be contacted via:
[email protected]
www.newledge.io
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/lucasmerlo
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