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Health span is as important as life span – enter FutureLab

By Leon Gettler, Talking Business >>

SINCE Covid-19, the big focus everywhere has been on human ‘health span’ as well as life span.

To respond to questions being raised about potential health and life spans, Melrose Heath has set up FutureLab, creating Australia’s first over-the-counter range of longevity supplements.

Melrose Health CEO Nathan Cheong said the lab had essentially developed supplements addressing four health problems as we age: cardiovascular disease, cancer, neurodegenerative disease and metabolic health issues. 

The supplements have been launched with one of Melrose’s pharmacy partners, Chemist Warehouse, and also across other pharmacies and health food outlets, as well as online. People can buy these product anywhere through the Melrose Health’s online shop.

“I saw an opportunity to elevate a product range that hasn’t really been focused on in the Australian market,” Mr Cheong told Talking Business.

“As it happens, longevity is hot right now. Everyone is talking about health span versus life span, which ultimately means how you can function and do the things you do today in the later years of your life, so that you’re not living with disease, you’re not living with debilitation that stops you from doing the things you like to do,” he said.

“What we did was, we formulated a product range around those four drivers of disease and we’re probably Australia’s first brand to do that.

“The products that we launched are around cellular longevity which is the cornerstone of how we age, our DNA replication.”

The products include NAD Plus, or DNA Repair, to focus heart health and vascular health, as well as products pertaining to inflammation – which is a big factor in chronic disease – and a product around cellular health which is about the clearing of dead cells out of our systems.

Supplementing de-stress

There are also products addressing stress, people’s sleep and muscle health because “we know as we age our muscles catabolise (break down instead of grow).”

There are also products that address cognition and memory. There is another product around immunity.

The company also has another 10-15 products it intends to launch over the next 12 months.

“Over the course of the last 12 to 18 months, we’ve been scouring the globe for the best ingredients, the most bio-available ingredients to bring them together in a form that really doesn’t have any competition in the Australian market at this point in time,” Mr Cheong said.

It’s all part of the bigger picture of people taking steps to stay healthy as they age. The supplements are just that – they are not magic pills.

Holistic approach: more to it than pills

“As a qualified practitioner, I think the most important things about health span and life span is exercise, a combination of strength training and cardiovascular training, you need to be doing that at least five times a week,” Mr Cheong said.

“The next part is around diet and ensuring you have a diet that is predominantly whole foods and you take processed foods out of your diet. You take seed oils out of your diet and you take sugar out of your diet. And you have a high-quality protein source so that you can retain your muscle mass.

“And then there’s sleep, and sleep is important because it impacts so many areas of your life.”

The other pillar is having strong connections with family, friends and neighbours.

“If you’re doing those things, you’re doing extremely well,” Mr Cheong said.

“The supplements that we bring to the market are the icing on the cake. They’re the extra levers you can pull to optimise your heath span.”

www.melrosefuturelab.com 

www.leongettler.com

    

Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness

https://shows.acast.com/talkingbusiness/episodes/talking-business-36-nathan-cheong-from-melrose-health-group

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Aussie companies are M&A targets – and with good reason

By Leon Gettler, Talking Business>>

DESPITE a post-Covid slowdown in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity, partly in response to global economic conditions and political uncertainty, M&A deals are now on the rise in Australia.

Nexia Australia’s corporate advisory partner, Brent Goldman said Australia had a tendency to “punch above its weight” in global markets.        

“If you look at overseas companies coming here, the US always buys in Australia,” Mr Goldman told Talking Business.

“They’ve been a consistent purchaser of companies and a lot of times that’s in the software type services type industries. So there’s definitely an ongoing (interest in) businesses with skill sets, recognising the talent we do have in Australia,” he said. 

This ‘buy Australian’ activity also adds to the growth of the overseas businesses.

Why Australia is an M&A destination

But this, he said, was part of Australia’s strength and why it remains so attractive to offshore companies and private equity.

“We have limited resources in Australia so we’re always trying to find solutions to problems,” Mr Goldman said.

“And so we end up finding smaller companies with skill sets to solve problems that larger companies cannot do.

“That’s just the nature of our culture and also our education.”

Mr Goldman said some of the major M&As were going on in the construction and engineering space.

There was a reason for that.

“You can see that as being defensive,” he said. “That’s an industry that’s been struggling.”

The next biggest sector in M&As in Australia was in software services and, rather than the hot-button of the moment – artificial intelligence (AI) – it was actually more related to cyber security companies, Mr Goldman said.

The third biggest sector for Australian M&As was in the consumer discretionary area, notably around pubs.

US and UK companies know M&A value here

The consistent buyers of Australian businesses are US and UK companies.

Of these, 32 percent were US buyers and 17 percent were UK buyers. In other words, nearly half the M&As in Australia were from the US and UK.

Mr Goldman said many of the acquisitions were in software services or in media and entertainment.

“You can see the countries that thrive with the potential synergies there,” he said.

While many of the buyers were corporate, they were also often backed by private equity.

Looking ahead, he said the next few years would be a continuation of the current trend.

He said the transactions would take longer to finalise “as everyone tries to deal with the uncertainty in the background”.

However, entrepreneurs will want to “start moving forward again”.

“Once we get through these next six-to-12 months, and hopefully in the new year, we’ll see the activity pick up as we put a lot of the uncertainty behind us,” Mr Goldman said.

“Whether you like what will happen or not, at least you’ll know. You’ll be able to make decisions with some certainty or stronger views and then.”

Mr Goldman said while there were many different views about what lies ahead economically, politically and with business, that diversity of views will create transactions.

“It’s about the economy and people in jobs and creating that level of activity so that people will feel confident to start transacting again and building businesses and that create opportunities for all,” Mr Goldman said.

www.nexia.com.au

www.leongettler.com

 

Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness

https://shows.acast.com/talkingbusiness/episodes/talking-business-29-interview-with-brent-goldman-from-nexia-

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Feeling right at home with remote work?

By Leon Gettler, Talking Business >>

REMOTE work is now becoming the norm.

According to Chris McNamara, the chief revenue officer for the company named Remote, companies that embrace remote work have more diverse workforces.

Alternatively, companies that fail to embrace some form of remote work will have trouble recruiting talent. 

He believes remote work has become the new norm. 

“I think over the last couple of years we’ve experienced the shift to remote work and I think what started as a reaction to the pandemic has become almost an awakening to the benefits of working from home,” Mr McNamara told Talking Business.

“I think that’s not only true from the employee side but also on the employer’s side.”

Mr McNamara said there was a lot of research now showing that not only is employee satisfaction higher with remote work, but employees working remotely are actually more productive.

One Stanford University study found that employees working remotely demonstrated higher job satisfaction, 35 percent lower attrition and 11 percent higher productivity than their peers working for the same company, but doing it in the office.

Aware of ‘remote’ benefits

Mr McNamara said more people around the world were becoming more aware of these benefits and it was now quite possible for companies to put in the right infrastructure for remote work – which especially suited knowledge workers, who could work in any setting.

“Perhaps even more important than having the right tools is having the right culture,” Mr McNamara said.

“You need the right management to be in place because it’s not the same, from my experience, that working remotely is the same as working in an office.

“If a company and a management team expect those things to be exactly the same, I just don’t think that’s going to work out,” he said.

“You need to be thoughtful about: how are you going to co-ordinate activity when people are working remotely? How are you going to share knowledge when people are in different locations and not in the office? How do you build culture when it’s not about pizza and beers on Friday?

“It needs to be something way more intentional when people are located in different places around the country, potentially even different places around the world.”

Remote itself is ‘fully distributed’

Mr McNamara said his company, Remote, had 1000 employees and it operated in 70 different countries. The company does not have a head office. It is a fully distributed team.

He said more and more employers were adopting distributed work models because they were finding it harder now to source the talent.

Mr McNamara said this now required a different approach to management and perhaps a greater level of trust than what some managers would be accustomed to.

“We work with customers who are opening up jobs outside their home country,” he said.

“So an Australian company decides to open up jobs in the Asia-Pacific region. We’re finding that for certain types roles, those companies are able to hire 50 percent more quickly because they are no longer competing for people in exactly the same locations.”

Mr McNamara said remote work “was here to stay” because employee interest in flexibility was “going nowhere but up”.

“Companies that preclude flexibility for their employees will find themselves on the wrong side of the decision when employees are choosing where they’re going to work.”  

www.remote.com

www.leongettler.com

 

Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness

https://shows.acast.com/talkingbusiness/episodes/talking-business-20-interview-with-chris-mcnamara-from-remot

 

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The Dom curates and informs customers about brands – and why it chooses them

By Leon Gettler, Talking Business >>

SHOPPERS looking for discounts on their clothing are sick of dealing with the cluttered look.

Justin Seskin, the CEO and co-founder of online store The Dom, said the aim of the company is to ‘get rid of the cluttered look’.

Instead, it’s offering more than 250 brands for an aspirational market that is looking for high-end discounts on 250-plus clothing brands including Adidas and Lee Matthews.

“Being in fashion and retail for a long time, I just saw an opportunity for more elevated and more premium outlets, particularly one online and one that really understands the needs of the brands, the sellers, and the product we are selling, and also the customer,” Mr Sekin told Talking Business.

“The customer is always looking for a discount and a big part of sales aren’t made at a discounted rate and there are discounted propositions online, whether it’s Catch or eBay, or some of the bricks and mortar offerings, but our opinion is a lot of them are cluttered down markets.

“That’s not the experience that customer or the brand wants. That’s why we came into The Dom and there certainly is a movement globally for more elevated discount propositions. There is a big movement to the more aspirational premium outlet proposition which we believe The Dom is fulfilling in Australia,” he said.

“Our goal is to be that fashion and lifestyle destination.”

Cluttered outlets seem ‘cheap’ and downmarket

The problem with having an outlet that is too cluttered, he said, was that it gave the perception that it was selling cheap downmarket products. 

“In many instances it’s not, it’s just the environment you find them in,” Mr Seskin said.

“When you go into an outlet and you find tens of products stacked on a rack or as many as you can fit on a shelf, that’s what creates that perception of that product being old or that product being not aspirational – but that’s absolutely what we are trying to change.

“We are trying to educate the customer that the outlet is a place where you can find good fashion products.”

‘Editorial’ approach to presentation

Mr Seskin said The Dom was handpicking the brands it wanted to present for customers. The brands are not presented as being on sale in a final clearance.

There is a lot of content on site and communication with customers, whether it’s by email or social media, informing them what brands they should be buying.

“The editorial component is key,” Mr Seskin said. “So it’s not throwing all the products we can find at the customer. We merchandise. How can we provide the customer with the product that’s relevant to them, whether that’s through typical search and merch or and editorial lens that gives the customer some guidance to what they should be buying,” he said.

All the brands on The Dom are placed in precincts, similar to what you find in any shopping centre.

“We are creating that concept online which does help us talk to the customer in a language familiar to them,” Mr Seskin said.

“So without knowing who the customer is, if they find their way to the designer precinct, we roughly know what language we should be talking to them.”

www.thedom.com

www.leongettler.com

     

Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness

https://shows.acast.com/talkingbusiness/episodes/talking-business-12-interview-with-justin-seskin-from-the-do

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Jessica Booth becomes Biza.io’s first chief operations officer 

BIZA.IO, the Brisbane-based tech startup – already a market leader in consumer data right (CDR) solutions – has promoted Jessica Booth to the newly-created role of chief operations officer (COO).

Ms Booth will focus on driving operational efficiencies and fostering cross-team collaboration, playing a critical role in supporting Biza.io’s growth trajectory, according to Biza.io founder and CEO, Stuart Low.

Ms Booth joined Biza.io as head of customer success in September 2023, “quickly making her mark as a strong leader with a wealth of knowledge in building and maintaining highly successful customer relationships,” Mr Low said.

Prior to joining Biza.io, Ms Booth was head of customer success at cloud enterprise software company Mastt, and held key leadership roles at AlayaCare ANZ and Telstra Health. 

“Jessica has quickly become an invaluable member of the Biza team,” Mr Low said. “With Jessica’s steady hand on the tiller and well-reasoned strategic thinking, Biza is well-placed to continue to simultaneously scale and drive innovation throughout the CDR ecosystem.”

Biza.io has continued to build out its team in the midst of rapid customer growth. In the past quarter, Biza has focused on growing its customer success, security and product teams, bringing the number of total staff to 32, an increase of 48 percent. It has plans to hire a further five employees across its product and go-to-market teams, including a cloud engineer and two mid-level engineers to support a number of innovations in the pipeline, Mr Low said. 

Biza kickstarted the DataRight Plus initiative in 2023 and has developed a draft standard for Action Initiation in the CDR. Biza intends to pilot this specification amongst its customer base later in 2024.

Founded in 2017, the Brisbane-based Biza.io helps banks, financial institutions, energy retailers and data economy participants navigate the highly regulated CDR ecosystem and comply and innovate within the Australian data sharing landscape. More than 18 million consumers have data-sharing access enabled by Biza technology.

www.biza.io

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Aussie courier innovator’s promise to zoom to you faster

By Leon Gettler, Talking Business >>

STEVE ORENSTEIN wanted to reshape the delivery and courier industry.

So he created Zoom2U which enables private drivers to become courier. It’s a business that competes with Uber.

Orenstein said the great differentiator is that customers actually get to know who the driver is. 

“We’re a market place connecting the customer to the driver so you’re building a relationship between the two parties and the ability to be able to communicate with that driver,” Mr Orenstein told Talking Business.

He said the technology layer that sits over the top allows the customer to see who the driver is and when that driver is actually arriving – and seeing that on the map.

He said Zoom2U was created to fill a gap in the courier and delivery service industry.

“When I started the business, I went through the experience of placing a delivery online, never knowing when the courier was actually arriving and so from that, I thought, can I build an experience that’s much better for the consumer and knowing when that delivery is actually occurring and using a lot of technology to do that,” Mr Orenstein said.

“So what we’re fulfilling is allowing e-commerce and retail businesses to have something delivered on the same day but also being able to see the live location of that drive actually arriving,”

Zoom2U will send consumers a text message enabling them to a link showing the live location of the driver, the estimated arrival time and even the ability to call the driver.

The business, which started in 2014, is used by consumers and SMEs and brands like Nespresso.

The other differentiator for Zoom2U is that it is so easy for drivers to sign up to the platform. It is completely flexible. 

”Drivers have the ability to use their existing vehicle so it’s quite easy for us to scale up,” Mr Orenstein said. “Drivers choose when they’re going to work, which bookings they actually take or whether they deliver for five hours in a day, or two hours, or the whole week.

“They have complete flexibility in being able to do that. Having the ability to be so flexible gives the ability for many drivers to sign up.”

Zoom2U also has apps for business.

One is called Locate2U which has all the technology of Zoom2U.

“That’s designed for any business that manages their own fleet of drivers,” Mr Orenstein said.

“The Locate2U app takes all their bookings for the day, optimises their route, builds them into runs for drivers and provides that same live tracking experience for the customer,” he said.

“So rather than saying we can deliver it today, we can deliver it to a 15 minute time window and provides SMS alerts for those customers.”

Zoom2U also acquired an app called Local Delivery which sits on the Shopify e-commerce platform.

Mr Orenstein said retailers have been taking to it because they now know people want things delivered faster.

“What that allows you to do is, if you’re a Shopify e-commerce owner, and you’re wanting to provide local delivery to your customers, you need to ask the customer when you want that product delivered and here are the available time windows to do that,” he said.

www.zoom2u.com.au

www.leongettler.com 

 

Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness.

https://play.acast.com/s/talkingbusiness/talking-business-41-interview-with-steve-orenstein-from-zoom

 

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KwikKopy has quick turnaround in its fortunes

By Leon Gettler, Talking Business >>

PRINTING provider KwikKopy is rebranding itself as part of a new and successful growth strategy.

It comes after a hard, few years for the company. KwikKopy had been in decline for the last 12 years, from a revenue perspective.

The organisation had been growing steadily up until the global financial crisis (GFC). The franchise business stopped growing from 2008 when the GFC hit.

In the 11 years until COVID-19, it had declined 16.78 percent. The number of KwikKopy centres had gone from 108 to 92. The result: a 17 percent decline in top line sales revenues and a 13 percent decline in its footprint of store locations.

However, last year the business grew for the first time since 2008, growing 2.8 percent on pre-COVID numbers, and that was with the business in Sydney and Melbourne struggling with COVID conditions. Taking the Sydney and Melbourne CBD operations out, the rest of the business grew 11 percent. 

Back on track

This year the business is expecting to grow 7 percent. The figures at the end of Q1 show it’s on track to meet that.

KwikKopy has re-engaged with its franchise network and brought in a lot of new infrastructure and technology. With automation, it is looking to increase productivity in the centres.

Sonia Schwabsky, KwikKopy’s CEO, said the company’s growth strategy was now focused on two areas in its new format.

First, it has moved from a focus on small format – A3 and A4 – print. In the last year it has moved into the wide format of signage.

“That really had a renaissance during the COVID times. If you recall, there were floors, stickers and window signage and all of that really started to become a strong area,” Ms Schwabsky told Talking Business.

“Luckily KwikKopy had identified this a couple of years before and we’re really investing heavily in becoming known for signage at the same level as signage providers.”

She said the other big growth area for the company was design.

“We’ve always done design but probably always connected to print,” Ms Schwabsky said.

“We see design as an area with all the new technology that people have at their disposal, you’ve got do-it-yourself tools like Canva.

“But what do you do when you’ve outgrown doing it yourself? Where do you go? What’s your next step?

“There is a great opportunity for KwikKopy to provide those services,” Ms Schwabsky said. “We have a lot of graphic designers in our midst and we are looking at ways to bolster that supply line.”   

More complete marketing services company

In short, Ms Schwabsky is making sure that KwikKopy has much more of a ‘marketing services’ approach to its customers.

She said parts of the business, such as administrative print, training manuals and business cards, had declined with digitisation.

“Like you do with any good category management product management, these things are in decline, what are the things that will replace them?” she said.

Ms Schwabsky said signage and short-run packaging – due to the e-commerce and online “explosion” – have picked up the slack.

“We can do things quickly, we can do things close to where you are, and we can do short runs which dovetails into the next big change in our industry, which is digital,” she said.

“So digital marketing, digital advertising, that’s the natural way things move.

“If you’re a small business, then we need to empower entrepreneurs to make their mark on the world. So we’re looking at digital signage and that digital space.”  

 

Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness.

https://play.acast.com/s/talkingbusiness/talking-business-39-interview-with-sonia-shwabsky-from-kwikk

 

 

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