By Amanda Ogilvie

Gen George started her successful online employment platform, OneShift, using a free WordPress blog and her iPad. OneShift now has more than 700,000 users and Gen’s new venture, employment website app Skilld, has in the seven months since its launch already attracted 100,000 users. Gen will be speaking at the upcoming Mobile-ising Women in Business event in Melbourne. Here, she gives Biz Better Together's Amanda Ogilvie readers some advance insights on making use of cutting edge tech, finding the right people and learning from mistakes.

Gen George: 

Mobile technology

OneShift is interesting in the context of mobile technology, because it evolved into more of a desktop approach due to the increase in large corporates using it. In October 2013 Programmed, a labour hire company, invested $5 million in us for a 27.5% stake. As we grew with this partnership, we had more and more corporates using the product. With clients posting around 3000 – 5000 roles a month, using application tracking and on boarding systems the feature base had to adjust to our client base. In contrast, seven months ago when it came time to launch Skilld, we focused on the needs of SMEs, who are mobile and don’t spend long hours at their desktop, so we wanted to offer a solution they could have in their hands, no job postings, to use on the run. Skilld is a website app, and it’s all been designed for use on your mobile. For instance, all the notifications are text-based, they don’t come as an email.

Scaling: Going international

At the moment we have a focus on hospitality and retail industries in Skilld. Our next step is to go international, before we look at expanding into cross-categories. Because it is mobile and we don’t need sales teams and it’s all online, we’re able to do that quite easily, rather than trying to go into cross-categories here in Australia.

All our algorithms are based on hospitality and retail, so the learnings are all contributed from a hospitality and retail base. That’s then like a secret sauce we can use to expand into other countries. For a new category, you don’t have any existing data or learnings, so it’s like starting from scratch all over again.

When you are thinking about things on a global, rather than a local scale, you do take a different approach. It changes the way you look at all the data you collect and how you are structuring things; you abandon the ‘country by country’ mentality and look at everything all together, because everything’s accessible now.

 

 

Data and machine learning

We’ve put a grid over the entire world. We’ve got a map where we can see the supply and demand in our market place for every 2.2 square miles. We can take any postcode and see what’s happening there, and then we can use those parameters to find out what other places display the same market patterns. We can look at all kinds of data sets, like searching for a match with the same density of businesses and the same make-up of businesses – say, cafes vs restaurants vs bars – or compare the employment rate. Then we can extrapolate the existing data to similar areas. Then the machine learning will pull out the answer for where to go next.

We use our data and benchmark it against other existing data; it allows us to branch out into new areas on a much better informed basis. It dramatically reduces our risk.

It means rather than targeting a place because it’s hip or we think maybe we should go there next, we can identify places that have the same data profile as another place we have already been successful in. It’s incredibly powerful.

People are critical to success

I didn’t start out with the knowledge of how to do this; the development side of things is pretty specialised. Always hire people who are smarter than you.

I have a vision, and that is to bring great tech to SMEs because I think unfortunately SMEs get left behind. So I’m about creating amazing technology that has never been available to SMEs before at cost-effective prices, and making that accessible globally. Today, the recruitment space, tomorrow it could be anything. World domination, obviously!

You find problem solvers, you hire leaders who are going to work within your team today on this challenge, and then they can work on the next one. Recruitment isn’t very exciting but it’s essential, and it’s something SMEs really struggle with. But they shouldn’t have to, it should be something they don’t even have to think about. This is a way of using the new technology and the new data to work smarter.

Trying to find the right people is always a challenge. When I started this I was twenty-one, I didn’t even know yet how to run a business, so in that situation, how do you know what to hire for? If you look back, you can see a clear correlation between my decisions and their impact, with how old I was at the time. In the first six months of OneShift we got 10,000 users; in the first six months of Skilld we got 92,000 users. A lot of that is due to the benefits of experience.

Everyone in business has challenges from cash flow to trying to work out your management style, to how to attract and retain the right people, to establishing your culture, so that you have a team of problem solvers rather than coding monkeys. If you only have people who only do what you say, you can’t innovate and you’re never going to get anywhere.

 

 

Learning from mistakes

With developing Skilld we’ve had the benefit of learning from the mistakes we’ve made along the way with OneShift. We built the tech to scale, we made it entirely online, we’ve got a mature team working on it in the sense that they’ve worked together for some time.

We’ve completely stuffed some things up along the way, but you learn from that. With a mature business behind us now we’ve learned how to build something better, faster and hopefully a lot cheaper.

The best thing about what I do is working with amazing people and meeting people you’d never expect to meet along the way.

My best advice to people is to just start. There are a lot of people with great ideas who never do anything about it. Start by having one conversation, turn up to an event, meet other people in the industry; you never know where it’s going to lead you.

Don’t be put off by the idea that you need money. If you are willing to give it a good crack there are so many free ways of doing things these days, or templates or sites that are pre-built. There’s lots of things you can do before you need seed money.

Start with what you want to do, find free or cheap ways to do it, get traction and then approach someone for money to scale it, rather than thinking that you need money to even try.

Everyone has their own drivers and fears that stop them. It’s about putting yourself out there, getting out of your comfort zone and trying. It’s how I started it, with my iPad and a free WordPress site.

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Hear more from Gen George and other fantastic speakers in the digital tech space at Mobile-ising Women in Business in Melbourne on 29 November. More details and ticket bookings fro the ACCI website.

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Amanda Ogilvie is the Communications Officer for the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s “Biz Better Together” productivity initiative: When employers and employees work together, business is better.

This article originally appeared on Biz Better Together by the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry.