Tony Nash - Creating Booktopia | #Perspectives Podcast

Perspectives Podcast - Tony Nash

[00:00:00] Hey, everyone. Welcome to this episode of  Perspectives. It's such a pleasure to join you. And I want to thank you for being with us. I really appreciate you. I got interviewed the other day and I got to brag about our view is, and I think you're fantastic. So it's great that you're here today. We have a very special guest, especially if you're Australian centric.

So his name is Tony Nash. You may know him as the man who co-founded Booktopia. It is a very large online book seller here in Australia. It's massive. It's where I do my business, which I didn't get to tell Tony in the interview, but Tony is just a great guy. He's a real pragmatist. You're going to enjoy.

He's very down to earth approach and nature. When it comes to building such a successful business, it is the world's largest online and offline book retailer. In the world, which is quite the achievement. I think it's fantastic because obviously everybody's minds go to Amazon, but Amazon's focus as Tony reveals is an inbox now.

So they've [00:01:00] carved out this phenomenal niche themselves with some entrepreneurial thinking, pragmatism seeing gaps in the market and just figuring out obsessing about what the customers want. He created the business with his brother, Simon and friend, Steve. And they're starting budget on Google ads was $10 a day.

They deliberately did not make a profit until 2016. They started in 2004 did not make any profit to two 16. We talk about that in the interview, and that was deliberate because what they wanted to do was to keep funding the growth that was required to take care of their customer demands. It turns over in exists.

I think it's over $200 million a year. Now it's been listed in the AFI Bow's fast hundred, eight times the only company ever to achieve this feat from 2009 to 2017, it's been voted bookstore of the year. They've moved into publishing as well. We didn't get to talk about that as much as I'd liked, but that's a really interesting new niche they're carving out for themselves.

It has [00:02:00] won the New South Wales Telstra Business  of the Year the Australian Telstra Business Award People's  choice Award we were a finalist in that. I remember that. They've been a finalist seven times in the Telstra business awards and they are state, it stated that Australian authors and titles are a key focus for this company.

And you'll hear that come through. When we talk with him, they completed an IPO in 2020 during the first year. Did you believe he'd ever say this the first year of this global pandemic and our response to it? They did an IPO. So initial public offering, they went public and their capital raised successfully.

They did an 11 week launch from decision to IPO, which I think is fantastic. They hold nearly 200,000 books in stock, ready to ship. They sell an item every 4.8 seconds. Their warehouses in excess of 10,000 square meters. Their main rival apparently is Amazon. Even though Amazon is in Australia, Booktopia is just doing gangbusters, going from strength to [00:03:00] strength.

We talk about teams, culture. We talk about what it takes to build a business very much this theme of pragmatism and keeping your head and focusing on the customer and figuring out where the sale is going to be made because everything else up until then is talk and with no further talk from him.

Here is Tony Nash. So you've been going now, you began in 2004. How would you say if you were to describe right now, how you got here? Rather than telling me what you did. How did you get here to be in this position where you are now with Booktopia mostly, for me, it feels like one thing led to another. So I'm very horizon point driven.

That means that I have a clear picture of where I want to get to. And I may not necessarily know that that's. How to get there, but by having that horizon point to me it's more