March 24, 2025 • 44 mins
In this episode of The Tech Trajectory Podcast, host Kavita Kerwar sits down with Roby Sharon-Zipser, Co-Founder and CEO of hipages Group, to explore how leadership evolves as a business scales—from garage startup to ASX-listed tech company. Roby unpacks what it takes to move from being a hands-on founder to an enabler of innovation, how to build a culture of strategic execution, and why staying curious about technology—especially large language models—is key to future growth.
1. Evolving from founder to enabler
[04:42] How Roby’s leadership style shifted from micromanagement to team empowerment as hipages scaled.
[06:32] What it means to step back and elevate your team with trust, clarity, and accountability.
[07:24] The importance of letting go of low-value tasks and building out an executive team.
2. Building purpose into strategy
[10:04] How hipages keeps its dual customer base—tradies and homeowners—at the centre of decision-making.
[11:38] Roby breaks down how AI and cross-functional teams are improving customer experience across the board.
[14:22] End-to-end customer journeys: why true innovation requires integration beyond the top of the funnel.
3. Leveraging large language models (LLMs)
[11:48] Roby’s first reaction to LLMs: from confusion to realising their transformative potential.
[15:37] The risks and rewards of LLMs—why hallucinations, security, and accuracy matter.
[17:52] How hipages is using AI to streamline internal processes and customer interactions.
4. Scoring innovation and strategic execution
[19:47] Scaling the tech team and building a product-led culture from the ground up.
[22:11] Internal scoring frameworks: how Roby weighs commercial value, customer impact, and long-term ROI.
[24:57] Why not every idea has a direct revenue line—but some drive lasting retention and experience gains.
5. Advice to his younger self
[26:09] Network early, network often—the compounding power of shared founder experience.
[28:56] Favourite books, podcasts, and frameworks that shaped Roby’s thinking, including The Hard Thing About Hard Things and Seven Powers.
[31:36] Why listening, learning, and structured strategy execution are key to scale.
6. Founder reflections and what’s next
[32:53] What Roby loves most about his job—from company-wide presentations to robust debates.
[34:59] His least favourite part? The admin-heavy side of performance reviews.
[38:48] The hardest part of scaling: capital management, making tough calls, and staying focused on long-term survival.
[41:36] What’s next for hipages.
Where to find Roby Sharon-Zipser
- Website: hipages.com.au
- LinkedIn: Roby Sharon-Zipser
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Kavita Kerwar (00:01):
Hello listeners, and welcome to the tech
trajectory podcast, where weexplore the human side of
innovation, technology andleadership. I'm Kavita Karwar,
and joining me today in thestudio is Roby. But before we
get into the podcast, I'd liketo take a moment to acknowledge
the custodians of the land onwhich we are recording today,
the Gadigal people of the Eoranation, and pay my respect to
(00:21):
elders past and present. Allright, welcome, Roby. Welcome to
the studio.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (00:26):
Thank you the podcast. Thank you. We got a
whole Jenga set up here, too.
Kavita Kerwar (00:30):
Oh absolutely. So for those who are not watching
us on video, we do have a Jengaset up, and as we get into it, I
might do a quick introductionfor you, Roby, and let me know
if I've missed something and gotsomething right. So for those
who don't know, RobySharon-Zipser, is the CEO and
Co-Founder of hipages. And ifyou haven't heard of hipages,
where have you been? Oh, my god,hipages is an Australian
(00:52):
startup, and like all startups,I believe this was born out of
an idea that you had and youimplemented it in a garage for
home improvement directory, andsince then, hipages initially
start up, and now is an ASXlisted company. And from what
I've heard, has been around forthe last 20 years, and we've had
around 12 million, 12 millionrecords on your platform.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (01:15):
Okay, yeah, that's kind of right, and mostly
right. I did really well, goodjob. Yeah. So actually, the
story goes a bit further back interms of where the idea was
born. I was trying to renovatean apartment, a newly purchased
apartment with my wife. Wasn'tnew. It was very run down, and
it was a horrible, horribleexperience. And figured there
had to be a better way. And sothe directory was born. And my
(01:36):
business partner and I, David,we started hipages as a just a
directory business, and I thinkit's getting close to maybe just
over 11 million jobs that havebeen posted all time. So that's
when you say records. I thinkyou mean like homeowner posting
jobs. And for everyone thatdoesn't really understand what
we do if you need a trade,hipages has this magic
(01:57):
algorithms that connect you withup to three trades very, very
quickly, pretty much anywhere inAustralia and New Zealand now.
Kavita Kerwar (02:05):
Oh, that's amazing. That's That's
fantastic. I remember, Oh, butfirst Yes, before we go into our
next question, we gotta do a bitof Jenga. Oh, yeah, because I
remember being like a newhomeowner, and I had moved into
an apartment with my sister, andwe both were very clueless of
how to do anything, because weboth were raised overseas, and
we didn't have this DIY mindsetthat now I see so many
(02:27):
Australians have. But I waslike, how to build this, so how
to fix this? So it's fantasticwhen you have a platform like
high pages and you can justreach out to trades people,
that's awesome. Yeah, all right,let's have a go.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (02:38):
So you're in what we call the Do It For Me
category.
Kavita Kerwar (02:40):
I'm in the very do it for me category. I'm like,
please don't let me do itmyself.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (02:45):
Exactly.
There's people that haveaspirations for DIY, but like,
like me cannot drill a hole inthe wall, so pay someone to do
it and maybe do it in anefficient, cost effective,
trustworthy way. And that'swhere you go to hipages.
Kavita Kerwar (02:57):
Oh yeah, I think I had high ambitions. Yeah, I
bought a drill. And never, Inever.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (03:02):
Stole my boss, like most people.
Kavita Kerwar (03:05):
Oh my gosh. All right, let's do it. Let's do a
Jenga. And I think my DIY, orlack of DIY skills, is going to
come across now, because I'mreally bad at Jenga, okay, I
might be good. Who knows? Whoknows?
Roby Sharon-Zipser (03:15):
That's a rookie mistake, what you're
doing.
So high up bottom. Anyway, do Ineed to do it in the no come on?
You've already broken the rule.
Look, you've let go of the brickthat you touch. You got to
follow through. You touched it.
You got to finish the job. Ifeel like maybe you're getting a
favor of my management style.
Now, let me help you. Okay, Iwould normally not help because
(03:39):
I'd like to win, but there yougo.
Kavita Kerwar (03:41):
Yes, empowering, empowering some. Oh, my god,
please, please. How dare you.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (03:51):
I thought you supposed to be nice. But
just like when you know this isthe limit, I'm also very
genuine.
Kavita Kerwar (03:59):
Fair enough. All right, do you want to have I'm
gonna do, oh, my god, startingfrom the is this the right way
to do it?
Roby Sharon-Zipser (04:08):
Little loose.
Kavita Kerwar (04:10):
What is this?
This is rigged. Is this rigged?
Kirsty, have you rigged this.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (04:14):
Did I tell you I am high risk I have a high
risk appetite. Is this rigged?
Kavita Kerwar (04:17):
Kirsty, have you been part like, what is this?
Roby Sharon-Zipser (04:22):
God damn it, we'll finish the game
afterwards.
I can see clearly you're gonnalose.
Kavita Kerwar (04:28):
Oh my god, that's true. So tell me. And I think
this is a really good analogy,and you referred a bit about
your leadership. So has yourleadership style changed since
when hipages was initially born,and now that you're scaled up so
much.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (04:42):
Yeah, absolutely, it's changed. I
think if I go back, I mean, Iwas a leader in the business,
but I actually wasn'tnecessarily the CEO. I took a
bunch of titles. I was CFO,Chief Revenue Officer, Chief
Operating Officer, andeventually evolved into the CEO
role about six or so years ago.
I think as you. Evolve in yourleadership style, I think also
as a startup and a scale up andthen, like a proper medium to
(05:03):
large size business, you have toevolve. I would probably say I
was a micro manager in thebeginning. And I think my main
learning is, I think stay trueto your values, and that should
be representative of theorganization. But for me, I
definitely have always been agenuine, transparent, hyper
competitive, as you can tell. Iwould never have guessed. But
(05:26):
for me, in terms of the mainleadership style is, I think, I
think it's okay to let somepeople fail a little bit if the
house isn't kind of fall down. Ithink they have more ownership
of projects, more ownership andresponsibilities handed over to
the leadership team and themanagement. It's a nice way for
people to develop themselves intheir career and giving them
(05:49):
some freedom to make mistakes. Imean, if the house isn't going
to fall over, even sometimeswhen they're trying to do things
that you know, have you've triedyourself and failed, you don't
always know if you tried it thebest way, and maybe sometimes
the wrong time, giving peoplesome freedom to experiment and
test and give things a go again.
Give them a go and go again. Ifyou've tried in the past, it's a
(06:11):
good thing.
Kavita Kerwar (06:12):
Yeah, that's that's fantastic. So you've
spoken very openly about being avery hands on, almost
micromanager, and from then now,you describe yourself as an
enabler, instead of atraditional CEO who is very
hands on. So how do you go aboutmaking the switch from being a
very hands on person who's verypassionate about their product
and their baby to then being abit of an enabler for your
teams?
Roby Sharon-Zipser (06:32):
Okay? So if you want to be a bit of an
enabler, you're sort of like asa founder, you kind of like, you
know, you do everything youknow, your chief water boy to
Chief Data Analyst to CFO to cooso you actually kind of okay at
everything, and that's that'svery common trait for founders,
but at some stage, you're goingto have to get the experts in.
And you my advice is, is toalways try and elevate your
(06:55):
team. So afford the best you canget to do specific roles,
delegate that as fast aspossible and make sure that you
trust those people to do a goodjob of it. And at the end of the
day, if you're not doing a goodjob of move very quickly on
those people and replace themwith better people.
Kavita Kerwar (07:11):
Okay, all right, yeah, move fast. Pivot fast.
Yeah. Know when to do that. Ithink that's a really good
answer. Do you have an examplewhere maybe stepping back gave
you a better outcome than if youwere hands on, then you would
have got otherwise.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (07:24):
I think, in the earlier days. And look, it's
probably you've got differentdifferent audiences from
different stages of theirbusiness life cycle, listening
to these podcasts. And so what Iwould say is, like in the early
stages, there was a lot ofadministrative tasks that I was
doing that probably in terms ofvalue add, like high value add
were probably on the low end ofthe scale, but were important
(07:47):
tasks that still needed to getdone. So for me, getting someone
operational to help with thatwas critical, and that certainly
was a good next step. Sort ofbuilt confidence for me. Okay,
well, I can hand over somethings. What next can I do?
Eventually we so that was anoperational admin type person.
Then we went to a financialcontroller, eventually, CFO,
eventually chief people officer,and, you know, HR manager and ng
(08:11):
people officer, you start toevolve that executive team over
time. And some businesses movefaster, and some move a bit
slower. It depends on yourbudgets and rate of growth and
available cash to do it. And sofor us, you know, we've got a
full executive team. Nearly allthe traditional executive roles
with modern titles are nowcovered. It is still evolving,
but it's mostly, mostly done 20years in.
Kavita Kerwar (08:34):
Yeah, fantastic.
Thank you. All right, let's doanother
Okay, so what should I followyour.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (08:40):
play your own game.
Kavita Kerwar (08:46):
Oh, this is a bad move. I don't know. This is, Are
you filming this? This is likefall of the Empire overhere.
Oh, gosh, I'm going to regretbringing this game. Why did I do
this?
Roby Sharon-Zipser (09:00):
So you just got to make a decision.
Kavita Kerwar (09:02):
I am I'm trying to kind of Yes. Oh, my God. Oh,
okay, maybe I'm gonna do thisone. I can do this, right? I can
hold no. Oh, no, I can't. Oh,hello, hello. Please come out. I
saw a video where someonetrained their cat.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (09:21):
All right.
How'd the cat go? Very well.
Wow. It's impressive.
Kavita Kerwar (09:25):
I'd be beaten by a cat. So do I do this? Put this
up here?
Roby Sharon-Zipser (09:27):
Oh, yeah, I forgot to put mine up.
Kavita Kerwar (09:37):
Oh, fantastic.
Oh, there's clothes.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (09:40):
Oh it's too early to be close. You've got
plenty to go here.
Kavita Kerwar (09:46):
This is very exciting for everyone else who's
in our studio. Kirsty is havinga great time. Kirsty, how's your
afternoon going? Good? So Iguess coming back to high pages,
my question is around yourpurpose is built around
empowering and supportingtraining. Its people. So how
does that guide decision makingon a day to day at your
workplace?
Roby Sharon-Zipser (10:04):
Yeah, so I usually take the customer's
experience into account in ourbusiness, we obviously have two
customers. We have what we callthe supply side, which is the
tradies, and we have the demandside, which is the homeowner.
And their experiences on ourplatform are critical. So if a
homeowner comes to high pages tobe connected with the tradie.
Our primary objective is to makethat connection experience
seamless and fast and get anoutcome, which is to get two to
(10:29):
three trades to call them backwith their query on whatever
they want to get done aroundtheir home. And so we're very
focused on that investments ininnovation around that key.
We're about to launch what wecall a Sarah AI tool. Also tools
around cost guides are all beingavailable for homeowners to
read. We've been doing that fora long time, but it's all
(10:49):
integrating all of thathistorical cost guide licensing
information, and thenultimately, the job is to get a
homeowner to connect to a tradeat speed. And we, you know,
we're moving into large languagemodels to help us with that kind
of thing on the trading side,everything to do with their
onboarding experience, togetting them set up well,
getting us to call them backquickly when they've expressed
(11:10):
interest, to get leads from us,explaining our technology that
we've been building in oursubscription packages to them in
a seamless way, getting themonboarded fast, getting all
their credentials checked fast.
All of that is top of mind. Andwe've invested in what we call
cross functional teams in thebusiness to ensure that
customers start to get betterexperiences, and also our
internal customers, which islike our sales and service
(11:33):
teams, getting betterexperiences so that they can
support the customers better.
Kavita Kerwar (11:38):
Yeah, that's fantastic. So how have you I'm
very curious to learn about yourimplementation of large language
models, and what has worked foryour business. Is there anything
you'd like to share?
Roby Sharon-Zipser (11:48):
Yes, it's like, it's like, it's
interesting. It's such a hottopic. I think two years ago, I
wouldn't have really thought toomuch about it. I think about two
years ago, a year and a halfago, you know, you start to read
some media about it, and peoplestart to ask questions about,
what are you doing with largellms? And I'm like, I think I
remember. I said, what's an LLM?
And I was like, Okay, it's AI.
That's just what they mean withlarge language models. I said,
okay, cool. I better look intoit. So start looking into it.
(12:10):
And I'm like, Oh, holy crap.
This is good. This is goodstuff. Like, we can see
potential growth opportunitieshere. Better customer
experiences, efficiency players,dare I say it? People may not
want to talk too much aboutthat, but, like, there's some
pretty interestingopportunities, certainly
removing menial tasks quiteseamlessly, using using the
latest technology. And so you gothrough this process of like,
(12:31):
Oh, wow. This is cool. Prettyinteresting. Like, what is this?
This is cool, interesting. Thenyou get overwhelmed, like, holy
crap. What do I do with this?
And then it starts to form partof your strategy as an
organization. And then you startto identify how you're going to
execute using the latesttechnology to give you the
either growth, revenue growth orexpenditure efficiencies that
(12:53):
will give you operationalleverage as a business. And so
that's now forming part of ourstrategy. You know, everything
down to writing emails atprobably a simpler level, even
helping writing the CEO reports,suming the language analyzing
data, down to sentiment analysisall the way through to our
matching algorithm, usingmachine learning and AI to
optimize that speed ofconnection, which is quite a
(13:16):
complex thing that we do, whereyou're connecting effectively
1000s of categories, like you'vegot, you know, 30 top level
categories, 200 you know, liketrade categories. But then
there's 1000s of subcategories.
So what do I mean by that? Soplumbing is a parent category,
obviously. But then underneathplumbing, you would have Blocked
drains, toilet replacement, hotwater tanks, that's, those are
(13:36):
all be subcategories. And thenif you look at Australia's
geographies, there's 1000s oflivable postcodes. So
effectively, you're down to thesubcategory level. To a livable
postcode is a micro marketplacethat you need to connect trades
to a homeowner at speed in thatmicro marketplace and also
create a good value exchangeotherwise charge the right
prices to the customers, so thatthe business that's doing that
(13:58):
connection at speed that'sleveraging its network effect
the investments it's made inmarket. Made in marketing and
technology, to make a goodreturn. So using machine
learning and AI to make thatcome to life.
Kavita Kerwar (14:08):
Yeah, definitely, that's fantastic. Like, I think
I've seen a lot of businessesthat focus a lot on the top of
the funnel, engaging thecustomer who maybe don't know
your product or are justentering into your ecosystem,
yeah, but what you're talkingabout is almost that end to end
customer journey, like,integrated in different.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (14:22):
That's right, yeah, so that's right.
And so, like, the way you'redescribing is, like, how to
help, you know, shortcut, so youdon't have to talk to a human
being, maybe use a chat bot,like, you know, it would be,
like, kind of like a secondlevel, AI, integration in the
business. There's fancy wordsfor it. I literally just came
from a Salesforce conference andthey gave the proper terms. I'm
just, like, talking in, like,simple terms, the way I
understand it. So yeah.
Kavita Kerwar (14:42):
yeah. I think yeah, you're right. There is a
lot of hype about it. And twoyears back, or three years back,
people weren't talking about itas much. And it's very
interesting, because at DiUS, wehave a few people who've done
PhDs on this subject. Yeah, theyjust look around, they're like,
you're just catching up. Yeah,we've been talking about.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (14:55):
it's definitely a game changer, I
think, if you're not, if you'rea CEO or a leader in a business,
and you. Are not thinking abouthow large language models can
enhance your your not just yourlife, but your business, in your
your your department in yourbusiness, or the overall
business, then you're reallygoing to be left behind, because
things are moving very quickly,and there's more and more
pressure to be more efficient.
And this is, this is an enablerfor that doesn't necessarily
(15:18):
have to be afraid of it, justlike when the first iPhone or
when the first search functioncame out, those were like, oh
wow moments. So certainly, ifyou've hadn't had an experience
with large language models andhave not gotten an oh wow
moment, and then start to thinkabout the applications of that,
then you need to start lookingat it very closely. That would
be my advice to people.
Kavita Kerwar (15:37):
Yeah, what challenges do you reckon for
someone who is a business ownerand who is just entering into
and learning about llms, maybethey're not familiar, and now
there is so much hype, and theystart to look into it. What
challenges do you reckon?
Roby Sharon-Zipser (15:48):
I think, I think, I think you're like for
us, for example, is is like notall the things that first of
all, except it's not, it's notall as good as what people say.
I have first hand experiencewhere all of the bad things that
human beings have, all the badtraits, so cheating, lying,
(16:08):
manipulating, llms, which isotherwise falling under the
banner of hallucination, yes,is, is all true. I've literally
had this thing lie to me. Andthen you call it out and say,
and then they say, Oh, Iapologize for that. You're
absolutely right, sir. So Sothat's, that's scary, right? So
you just can't let it go like onits own. You need to have an
(16:30):
expertise, and then you can, andthen test it and learn from it.
So, I mean, I give examples ofthat, but so that's more on
personal world. But I've noticedas well. For example, I've been
using chat GPT to assist mewriting the monthly CEO board
report, which is loaded up awhole bunch of data and all
that, and so it writes it reallynicely, but every freaking
(16:51):
number in the CEO report iswrong. So I have to go through
and check every number becauseit's not doing it right, and
train it to pick up the rightnumbers for the next time, but
it is slowly optimizing. That'sjust a little example. So if
you're a CEO, that's the fear. Ithink you need to be very
mindful that I'm working in aclosed environment, so I'm using
(17:11):
the power of the LLM, but I'mnot opening it up to the public
to have access. Obviously, beinglisted, we have high levels of
confidentiality. Privacy needsto be protected. So working in
that type of environment, so youneed to set that up. You
probably also need to be mindfulthat you just need to have some
rules for your organization,depending on the size of your
organization, what type of llmsYou're allowing people to use,
(17:34):
or a process for people to use,latest and greatest technology
that subsequently gets approved.
Security is a big issue,obviously, if you're processing
millions of records, as wetalked about earlier on, you
know we need to be mindful ofthe fact that information could
be shared publicly and so thatwe need. So we need to lock it
down. We want the capabilities,but we need the privacy and the
security that comes from it.
Kavita Kerwar (17:52):
Yeah, yeah, that makes perfect sense. And if, and
I think what I've seen with withsome companies is they try and
make it a bit more transparentto the customer by by allowing
the customer to have somecontrol, by having customer
consent, like, if you want toopt out of this personalized, if
it's a recommendation orsomething personalization, you
can do that, and then you cantrack how many people actually
are hesitant or trust, AI, butno, that's fantastic. Thank you
(18:16):
so much. All right, should we doanother Jenga?
Roby Sharon-Zipser (18:20):
You gotta do faster. You're like, slow. I'm
like, Well, come on, let's doit.
Did I tell you I'm a veryimpatient human being?
Kavita Kerwar (18:31):
Oh, I think, you know, you don't need to say
that. No, no, don't. Don't fallon me, please.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (18:40):
I think you got it. You're good, you're
good.
Also putting pressure is part ofthe tactic in winning the game.
Kavita Kerwar (18:56):
God, this is like strategy, yeah. Okay, your turn.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (19:04):
Thank you for that one.
Kavita Kerwar (19:07):
I feel like I'm playing a losing game here.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (19:12):
I did tell you I'm hyper competitive. We
did the Gallup strengths. Youknow, where we match up people's
strengths, like, I score like,way above the average human I
don't like to lose.
Kavita Kerwar (19:22):
Well, I mean, we hate we are also very
competitive. And people whodon't believe that, just watch
us at a cricket match.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (19:29):
Yes for sure. I have seen some some
games. Yes, yes.
Kavita Kerwar (19:34):
Okay, so, so it sounds like you've really got a
culture of innovation going athigh pages, and that's like no
easy feat, especially as you'rescaling up the company. So what
do you do to maintain, like, aculture that focuses on
innovation?
Roby Sharon-Zipser (19:47):
Yeah, like, I mean, it didn't come easily to
be fair. I mean, we were verymuch an operations and sales
driven and service drivenorganization. I think, you know,
if you go back a few years, wewould have had a couple 100
employees and maybe 40-50 peopleworking. In technology and
innovation. So I'm talking aboutlike engineers and product
people and some designers, andmaybe a little bit on data. But
(20:08):
that would have been around, youknow, 50 ish people, and the
rest was sales, service andoperations. Now we're today, an
organization approaching 350people, probably 150 sales,
service people, maybe 4050 whatwe would call support functions,
which includes the typicalfinance people and legal side of
the business, and maybe a littlebit of marketing in there, but
(20:29):
marking, sort of embedded acrossthe business. And then on the
product and technology side, youknow, you've got 100 100 and
maybe 120 people approachingthat, that number. So it's like,
it's, really materially movedfrom the 40 to 50. And so having
having like organizers and startto get to scale, and you think
about all the things you need todo as an organization, you kind
(20:50):
of need to get to, like, 100100, over 100 people in
technology and innovation,thinking about all the types of
engineering expertise, all thedata, the product, the user, UX,
the design, all of that tobuild, to build a like an
organization at sort of a mediumto large enterprise level, you
need a minimum of that type ofresource, or people, I should
say, to support it. So that'sthat's been major decision in
(21:11):
investments in the business togrow that, and then obviously
raising capital to do that'sbeen key, and then making sure
that we develop good processeswhere cross functional teams in
our organization develop theirideas and initiatives but score
it, and then develop a businesscase, and then a timeline of
delivery and accountability.
Behind all of that, that'scertainly a key part of strategy
(21:34):
execution. So we've brought alot of that into the business,
and so that's been given likenot everything wins. Are you
gonna get some turkeys? But somethings are really like, oh my
god, blew it out of the park.
And then some things are a bitlike, yeah, what meet
expectations, but overall you'rebetter off. And then following
certain processes, you keep youcan continue to invest in the
(21:54):
business, yeah? Renovation.
Kavita Kerwar (21:56):
So you mentioned scoring. So very curious to
know, how do you internallyscore? Because you've got your
purpose where you're empoweringtrades people, you're looking at
solutions that actually empowerthem and add value. Yeah, and
then you've got a keen focus oninnovation and scaling up. So
how do you balance it out?
Roby Sharon-Zipser (22:11):
I don't think they're like mutually
exclusive ideas. I think they Ireally encourage the team to
think about, well, if you can'tfind a commercial reason as to
why that's not going to generatemore revenue for the business
and also get good outcomes forthe customer, then maybe you're
(22:31):
not thinking hard enough aboutit, and maybe you need a hand to
think through that. So sometimesthe revenue upside is not
apparent on the first instance.
So I'll give you, give you anexample. We had a team
partnerships him. So what's thedebate on partnerships?
Partnerships really work ordon't work? And there are some
fabulous examples of howpartnerships have worked around
the world. So you think ofStarbucks as an example, and how
(22:52):
it's embedded in Costco andBarnes and Noble, which is a
bookstore and like, it's afantastic partnership
arrangement for that business,and it represents a meaningful
proportion of its revenue. Butthen you've got other businesses
have done partnerships, and youhear about them, and it's like,
I don't want to call them out,but like, just been a total
flop, and they built their wholebusiness off that. So in our
case, we've had sort of mix.
(23:14):
We've got some fabulous partnerswith IKEA and Bunnings and
things like that, but sometimesit goes up and down. But what we
couldn't tell. The story is,what's the revenue upside of
those partnerships? And then werealized we were missing a
treat. We realized thatcustomers that were in enrolled
in a partner program, so ourtrading customers that were
enrolled in a partner programhad one of the lowest, lowest
(23:35):
churn rates, or highestretention rates, than any of our
other customers. As I was like,Okay, well that means that we
should be taking that intoaccount when we do our business
cases. But we were never doingit before. It was very linear as
like one to one. So what I'mtrying to say is sometimes the
revenue upside is not on thefirst step, but it could be a
second step, and you need to tryand work a way to quantify that.
So if you can't find a revenueupside or a second stage revenue
(23:58):
upside, then possibly there's away to find a way to justify
that in the business case, orinvestment in that technology
innovation through maybeinefficiency or a better
experience that results in acost saving for the business. So
you're getting good customeroutcomes, that you're also
introducing a cost saving in thebusiness.
So then you'd measure everythingand then look at it as a whole.
Before you say this is getting ascore or a weighted.
Exactly. So I try and I we use,like, OKRs in the business, and
that's a whole other podcast. Wewon't have time to go into that
(24:26):
detail. So we try and use that.
My first level is move x to y byz deliver X by Zed, because it
will do something for thebusiness. And sometimes, after
all of those processes, thereare, there are instances where
you just have to say, we justhave to do it because, like,
we're like, 10 years behind onsomething. We should have done
it already three, four yearsago, five years ago. So there
are instances and you have toput a strong argument forward
(24:50):
for that, but you can, you canstill get those through in our
internal processes to move oninnovation.
Kavita Kerwar (24:57):
Oh, yeah, that's, yeah, yeah, absolutely. But.
There'll always be thoseoutliers where you feel, even if
the numbers aren't adding up,there's a really strong need or
a drive to get that done. Yeah,fair enough. All right, should
we do another
Roby Sharon-Zipser (25:13):
I don't think people are playing games
with me. I don't think I'm fun.
You don't think you're fine. No,I don't think I'm fine. No, I
know, good call, good call. Youdid. Well Well done. Thank you.
Kavita Kerwar (25:31):
So we're like a few minutes in the podcast, I
just want to say the Jenga hasnot fallen on my watch. Oh, my
God. The confidence, theconfidence in that pool.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (25:43):
I'd been persuaded, right? Oh yeah, you
were like, emotions done.
Kavita Kerwar (25:49):
Okay, so I really like, I really like, how you,
how you've explained the thoughtprocess behind, I guess,
prioritizing innovative ideas,and also your approach to now
being an enabler for your team.
If you were to look back on yourjourney, what advice would you
give, like your younger self,who was just starting out with
hipages?
Roby Sharon-Zipser (26:09):
Oh, so there's so many like I don't
know where to begin. I think mybiggest like learning along the
way is someone, someone veryclose to me and involved in the
business told me a couplethings, and I wish I'd listened
to them more back in the day,but two things that they said to
me was network more and accessand network faster. So go to
(26:30):
some events, talk to people orconnect with other like people
that are in your position, thecollective network experience,
and it's an amplifier of 10x solike, you're on your own, so
you're one times one, right? Butthen you start meeting five to
10 other CEOs, and you can askthem some questions in a
confidential way, because it isreally a lonely job, and
sometimes you just can't askpeople within the organization.
(26:51):
And I don't necessarily know,I've had coaches and things like
that in the past, but just in anetwork of other CEOs that have
had experience, preferablyworking with a network of CEOs
that have run businesses acouple of times, or start up
businesses on their own once ortwice, the knowledge that they
have and the experience theyhave is just you can't compare
it. The second thing I would sayis thinking about strategy. I
(27:15):
think it took me a long time tounderstand what is strategy and
how to evolve strategy. And Ithink if I could give anyone a
piece of advice on strategies,know your product, know where
you think your product is goingto go, but then use research and
read a lot like, read, read,read like. Or if you don't like
reading, listen to audio books.
Or I found a fabulous productrecently that summarizes, I
(27:37):
think it's called Blinkist. It'sjust, and you can, I can listen
to, like, a book a day, and getthe gist of the book every
single day. And sometimes it'sgarbage, just total garbage out
there. Like, just, like, behonest, because that's rubbish.
Like, yeah, who even botheredpublishing that? Like, it's,
like, seriously, most booksdon't sell, right? There's very
(28:00):
low volumes, but, but there'ssome really good stuff, and if
you can get just like one goodidea a day that definitely helps
form in your mind where youshould take your business and
strategy and you become like athought leader, and then have a
very good strategic executionplan. So make sure your teams
present pillars of thosestrategies. There's always
pillars in a strategy, and putthe resourcing behind it and
(28:22):
then make people accountable andresponsible for the delivery of
the execution of that strategy.
I wish, I wish I'd listened topeople talking to me about
setting goals and metrics andmoving X to Y to Z, and
delivering x by Zed, and makingpeople accountable to that and
have the reporting cadence ittook. Took, I would say,
probably took me too long towork that out. And we have it
(28:45):
embedded in the business, andpeople know the way we operate.
So I think, I mean, people like,I like to give three things, but
I think those are, those areprobably the top two things off
the top of my head right now.
Kavita Kerwar (28:56):
Favorite, favorite book, or the book you
find most.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (28:59):
Yeah, I've said it before. I've been asked
this before, I thought I'm verypassionate about so I would say
the thing that's been eyeopener. I don't know if there's
one thing I've been movingreally into podcasts lately.
And, I mean, I'll give an answerto the book, like, I think, for
any founder that hasn't read thehard things about the hard
things, and obviously, and itmight get boring if you've heard
(29:19):
me talk about it, but there'slike, a page in the book. I
think it's page 69 or 68 it'slike, just read those two pages
or print it off and have it inyour drawer. And it's like, it's
just like, worth reading. Ittalks about the challenge of
being a CEO and every aspect oflike, firing people and having
investors and like, alleverything. It's like 100 lines,
(29:40):
like it's quite poetic. Sothat's the book thing. Put that
aside, I would say for people toreally elevate their
understanding of business andunderstand what makes people
successful. The Hamilton Helmer,Helmer, seven powers is an
absolute must read. So. Talksabout how you can generate your
(30:01):
competitive mode, and looks atthe most successful businesses
in the world and understand whatare the powers that make those
businesses the most successfulbusiness in the world. Now
there's a podcast calledacquired Ben and David. They've
been running for about eight ornine years, and what they do is
they do like a completebiography, Autobiography of some
(30:23):
of the most successfulbusinesses in the world,
everything from Costco, lvhm,Walmart, Amazon, Microsoft, they
did one on Mars Corporation justrecently. Lvhm Amaze like the
whole history of those companyand what's happened. And then
they do an overlay of what theseven powers, how they work with
(30:43):
those businesses. And I wouldsuggest just pick a few of them.
Start maybe with the Costcopodcast. I thought that was
amazing. But then start pickingand choosing the ones that you
might be interested in, or maybestart into a category that you
like. So if you like cars, theydid one on Porsche. So Porsche,
okay, so you can hear the wholehistory of Porsche if you're
(31:03):
interested in retail. So you'vegot, obviously, Costco, which is
like, food and things like that.
But then you might be interestedin the IKEA story, so they go
into a whole history of highcare. And I love, I love, love,
love that type of learning. Sothat's been my new thing for the
last couple of years. Was a longanswer to that question.
Kavita Kerwar (31:23):
Great. It's perfect, because I've found that
I myself, I'm on the journey,and I think most of our
listeners will probably be thesame, but you start off with, I
loved books, and then now Ithink you just have a shorter
time frame. You don't have thetime.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (31:36):
But you have time when you're commuting all
traveling.
Kavita Kerwar (31:39):
So easy. Yeah, even I like audiobooks very
much, but it almost depends onthe narrator. Sometimes, yeah?
Because I'm, like, somenarrators, it's just the accent.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (31:48):
Yeah, so Ben and David, it's like, this very
American. It's like, sometimes abit of, like, a hyper
intelligent Beavis and butthead, but they're awesome.
They're so good. And if you'renot listening to their podcasts,
you're out of the game, like,you got to know what's going on,
and applying the Hamilton helmetseven powers to those
businesses, and then thinkingabout how you can apply it to
your business, very strong. Ialso listened to another one
(32:09):
domestically. It's called thecontrarians. It's Adam Schwab,
who's like the founder of luxuryescapes, and a Adir Schiffman,
who's executive chairman ofcatapult sports. And those guys
have the founders, and they'vehad lots of experience in
business, and the way theyexplain a lot of the way things
work in the Australian market,and particularly around
(32:30):
accounting and how to thinkabout business, the contrarian.
So you have to agree witheverything they say, but the
debate, and that's the kind ofdebate and the discussion that
you'd be having at a board andexecutive level as you mature as
a company. So that's also areally good, good one to listen
to.
Kavita Kerwar (32:46):
Yeah, fantastic recommendations. Thank you. So
what's the best part about yourjob? What's your favorite part
about your job?
Roby Sharon-Zipser (32:53):
Look, it is definitely like a roller coaster
Road, like I love presenting infront of the company. I know
that's not everyone's thing. Ilove presenting and talking
about the business and thedirection, and seeing the plans
come to life and achievingmetrics. Now you you get those
joys momentarily, and then youbecause you as a founder, you
typically beat yourself up onthe misses way more than you
(33:15):
acknowledged the wins. But thosemoments when you do have a win,
or you're celebrating with theteam, or you're working in deep
debate. I'm a little bit of anagitator as well, so I like to
agitate people a bit. It'salmost like a stylistic thing.
Like to rub people the wrongway, but it forces people to
speak up and say what they'rereally thinking. And then you
(33:37):
get the challenge and thedebate. I love a debate. I love
the opinions coming through, andthen you get to pick and choose
the best ones that you think aregoing to come, come from the
business. So it can be a lot offun, too.
Kavita Kerwar (33:49):
So you don't want people who just agree with you
and just say, yes, yeah.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (33:51):
Yeah those people suck. Like, I mean, I
mean, then you just pleasing me.
I don't mind it. But like, Ithink what I do, I do, think,
though, is at some stages thatyou acknowledge politely that
you know what you've said, and Iunderstand it, and I've gotten
good at like coaching that backto people, but sometimes you do
have to make your decisions.
Personal experiences in the lastlast year have been always
(34:12):
present options. Sometimes theoptions aren't the ideal answer,
but getting a couple of options,and preferably a recommendation,
but also just showing a coupleof options and feeling the room,
reading the room to see which isthe option that feels right for
the consensus. So you don'talways get consensus, but then
you have, sometimes you have tojump in and just say, Okay,
(34:33):
well, this is the one we'regoing to go with. And sometimes
you just don't have, like, adata driven reasoning. You have
to work on intuition and gut.
And sometimes you're going to bewrong, and you have to own it
you're wrong. So it'sinteresting, interesting process
in leading a business. Yeah.
Kavita Kerwar (34:46):
And what's your least favorite part about your
role? So another, most favoritepart you speak about, like your
team just having those debate onideas, looking at options,
looking at how to move forward,whether it's data driven or.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (34:59):
I know much.
People in culture person gonnakill me for saying this. Okay, I
know that they're gonna kill mefor saying it. So I think one of
the lessons I probably the thirdlesson, which I didn't finish
off because I had a bit of amental blank earlier. But the
third lesson was, if you'refinding yourself as a CEO,
actually doing some kind ofwork, like some sort of
spreadsheeting or something, or,you know, mucking around with
(35:20):
something that you shouldn't bedoing. You should be asking
yourself, why the hell am Idoing this? And is it the right
time that I should be gettingsomeone in my organization to be
doing this work? And so, likethat, that's a key thing. So
delegation is probably the thirdpoint back where, five questions
ago. So we do, like, I don'tknow if we can edit it, leave it
in, because, yeah. But my point.
(35:43):
So the thing like is the money,it's hard to delegate, is the
performance and grow sessionswith team. I like the
conversation and just gettingdoing, you know, the feedback?
Have you heard of the feedbacksandwich? You could tell
everyone about that, like, 10good things that they did, and
give them maybe one littlenugget, because everyone's so
sensitive nowadays abouteverything. It's like, I used to
just go straight to the jugularon that was a bit shit, whereas
(36:04):
now I realize that's superimportant. You got to tell
everyone, like, this is this?
This is good. You did reallywell. There. You're amazing.
This is awesome. You're achampion. That was so cool. And
then, oh, but this thing here,it was kind of like, not that
great. And maybe we could do abit better next time. So, so
that the actual writing of allof that down. I hate. I just
like to have, like, a freeconversation, like, more
friendly conversation withpeople about that. So the
(36:26):
writing bit and publishing that,and that's the process, sucks a
little bit.
Unknown (36:33):
But I get, like, your people and culture, a person's
job, because otherwise it'simportant. Imagine the glass
door reviews
Roby Sharon-Zipser (36:38):
like, I know that it's important. I'm not
saying not to do it. It's justyou asked me honestly, part of
my hands being genuine. Reallyenjoy, because I actually feel
like I'm doing work.
Kavita Kerwar (36:50):
And it doesn't come it's not like a very
especially if you're like inyour case, you've grown your
business from scratch, where youhad a higher degree of control
you and you had perhaps acamaraderie with your, you know,
core team, and now you've scaledup so much, so I can definitely
understand why this is now. Thelayers of having admin and
having that people and culturespeak is probably, like, very
foreign to how you maybe theteam used to operate.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (37:12):
Yeah and we've been doing it for a while.
It's just like, I think justwriting of it all, it's like,
the formality of it is what, youknow, whereas I'm a little bit
more like, play it by a freetalker kind of thing?
I'll give you a tip at the endof the game.
Kavita Kerwar (37:28):
Yes I would like a tip. I don't know why I chose
this game.
This is my own doing. No one toblame, but must, I don't know.
Oh, this is so dangerous.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (37:39):
I'll give you a tip. So you got to find
the loose one. There's going tobe always a loose one, because
the weight gets because thewight gets distributed. So you
find a loose one, and then it'sjust easy to come out. And
that's why I did it like quite,quite swiftly with my movements,
sometimes it's hard to findthere's always one. There's
always one, because the Whitegets the weight gets
redistributed every time a brickcomes out.
Unknown (37:59):
Only like the loose ones is only when Roby touches
the Jenga, they're like.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (38:04):
Did you see there was one? You see, I just
gave you a little tip. Thankyou. Thank you so much
leadership moment. Okay, sothere's my go, right? So now I
now probably stuff it up becauseI gave my tips away. Okay, here
we go. Oh, that is good. See howeasy that was. There you go.
Yeah.
Kavita Kerwar (38:21):
T hat's amazing.
Thank you. Thank you very muchfor that. I guess the next, the
next question I had was morearound scaling, scaling your
company, and we were talkingabout, like, admin and team and
delegating as well, what wasyour biggest challenge when you
were scaling up? Because, andthis is, like, such a privilege,
because not every company thatstarts in a garage can scale up
and be on the ASX. So, yeah,fantastic, what you and your
(38:42):
team have achieved. But whatwould be, I guess, the biggest
hurdle or challenge.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (38:48):
Capital is always a challenge. Like, I
think we finished a fundraising,and you start looking for
another fundraising. And youknow, sometimes you got to ask
yourself, if this is what youwant, and maybe slowing the
growth down a little bit. Butthen you run into channel
challenges, because you have,you know, seed funders that may
be less pressure at you at thebeginning, but you don't want to
lose their money, because it'susually friends and family. You
(39:09):
move to early stage, and thenyou move into sort of, like,
some VC funding. So when you getthe VCs in, like, you've you've
got to grow. You don't have achoice, and they're in the door.
They're probably usually takinga director seat. They've
probably got some preferentialrights. If you can avoid that,
that's would be good to do. So,you know, like the scaling up
bit and getting capital. Andthen what happens in the life
(39:30):
cycle of businesses is you gothrough many stages, and the
problem is, is that you're gonnahave to make some decisions
sometimes that are superuncomfortable. And the longer
you wait to make thosedecisions, the worse the
business will be. And you needto survive, right? So you have
to have a survival mindset. AndI'm not trying to speak in, you
(39:50):
know, hidden messages and smokesand mirrors or whatever. I'm
just saying that sometimes youhave to cut costs in the
business, and particularly ifit's in technology, it's usually
people, and so sometimes youhave to. To make adjustments or
slow down your hiring or makesome redundancies. And
unfortunately, we've had to gothrough that journey because
capital isn't free. It was freefor a while, which has been good
for a lot of companies, but itisn't free, and people expect to
(40:13):
return, and they want to startto see operational leverage and
margins come through. And sobeing being able to scale up is
knowing when to be prudent withCapital Management, and that's a
key skill. And making,sometimes, what I would call,
you know, going back to thebook, the hard things about hard
things is making those harddecisions.
Kavita Kerwar (40:30):
Yeah cool. All right, let's do another one.
Oh, my God. Okay. Oh, God, thisis something. Yes, please,
please, please.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (40:39):
Oh, I feel sorry for the next interviewee.
Why? Because I've given you thetips. I'm assuming you do Jenga
with everyone.
Kavita Kerwar (40:48):
No, this is, this has just been you so far. Oh,
wow. Maybe now I will.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (40:53):
I've increased your competency
Kavita Kerwar (40:55):
Absolutely. Thank you so much. Yeah.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (40:59):
Okay, there we go. You see how there's a
loose one in the middle there.
Kavita Kerwar (41:02):
I feel like I struggle, and there's like
latency when I do this and whenRoby does it, oh yes.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (41:08):
Nearly fell.
I was, like, a bit aggressive onthat one, but I'm playing by the
rules, which is, once you toucha brick, you can't let go.
You've got to stay on. I havenot let go. I've seen you touch
and let go, but you were tellingme that. I reckon if we play
back the video, I think you'llsee touch, let go, touch echo,
whereas you see my swiftmotions, one one motion. I'm
just saying, not accusing youanything of saying, yeah.
Kavita Kerwar (41:32):
Okay. So what's next for high pages? Anything
exciting? Yeah, yeah.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (41:36):
So, I mean, we've had a big focus in the
last half on getting all ourtrades onto a single
application. There's so manyreally cool things going on. So
for the trades, where we'regoing is building more features
in our single application. Soexpansionary services are going
to do a pretty decent investmenton providing a payment solution
for trades. They don't all paycash, just by the way, but we
(41:57):
want to give them really cooltools. So spending a lot of
advances in payments, and we dohave a payment solution, but
it's just more of a merchantfacility. We want facility. We
want to provide a broader rangeof payment options, and getting
adoption of that, and alsoadoption of the features that we
have already built. So that'sbeen a critical focus. There's a
lot of stuff to help tradesmanage and run their businesses.
We've improved our matchingalgorithms, and also, one of the
(42:18):
other things that we're doingfor the homeowner is we've
effectively improved ourmatching algorithm so the
homeowners get a faster andbetter experience. But also the
homeowner is going to enjoy thebetter outcomes of trades using
more technology so they get theyget a better experience. One
other really cool thing, just alittle AI thing, is we've got
Sarah AI being in prototype,which is effectively the
(42:42):
homeowner can have aninteractive conversation with an
LLM, answer questions about thejobs that they want to get done,
and then ultimately post thatjob and get it connected within,
within the flow of thatcommunication, which should be a
an enhanced, nicer experience.
And we're testing that as wespeak. And you know, hopefully
we'll roll some of that out soonas well. Very exciting. Yes,
there's lots of, lots of, lot ofthings. New Zealand business is
(43:02):
also going to replicate whatwe're doing in Australia. So I
could go on forever on it, butwe, like you said, we're making
some big players in innovationtechnology.
Kavita Kerwar (43:11):
Yeah, that's awesome. So if people haven't
heard of hipages, how can theyfind you guys?
Roby Sharon-Zipser (43:15):
Oh that's easy. Just hipages.com.au. if
you go to the website or justdownload, go to the app stores
and just download hipages, lookfor the homeowner app, and then
you can post your jobs away andget quotes on your jobs and see
how it goes for you.
Unknown (43:26):
It's awesome. And then you you've got a drill lying
around that you are never goingto use. You can get on, put it
on, you sell it.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (43:33):
Like you don't need it anymore, and you
know you're going to get a goodprice. And they're all vetted
and checked and trusted so andthere's ratings and there's
ratings and recommendations. Soit's all happening on hipages.
Kavita Kerwar (43:43):
Yeah, that's awesome. Okay, on a closing
note, what has been the most funpart of your journey from on
hipages.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (43:50):
Oh, wow. So, I mean, there's been a lot of
moments. I mean, like, you cango back in time when you first
made your very first sale, toall the way to listing on the
ASX, to delivering on a piece oftechnology like we just did,
rolling it all out to all ourcustomer base, and getting that
happen, and hitting just doingit on time, have been some
amazing moments in the historyof the business. Yeah, so so
(44:13):
many it's been a long journey,but keep finding new ones, and
keep getting surprised, and keeplearning along the way.
Kavita Kerwar (44:20):
Yeah amazing.
Thank you so much. Thank you somuch for coming on our podcast.
Yeah, we really enjoyed havingyou. Thank you so much.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (44:26):
Pleasure. I love having it. Love. Love
meeting you, and hopefully I getto win this game.
Hello listeners, and welcome to the tech
trajectory podcast, where weexplore the human side of
innovation, technology andleadership. I'm Kavita Karwar,
and joining me today in thestudio is Roby. But before we
get into the podcast, I'd liketo take a moment to acknowledge
the custodians of the land onwhich we are recording today,
the Gadigal people of the Eoranation, and pay my respect to
(00:21):
elders past and present. Allright, welcome, Roby. Welcome to
the studio.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (00:26):
Thank you the podcast. Thank you. We got a
whole Jenga set up here, too.
Kavita Kerwar (00:30):
Oh absolutely. So for those who are not watching
us on video, we do have a Jengaset up, and as we get into it, I
might do a quick introductionfor you, Roby, and let me know
if I've missed something and gotsomething right. So for those
who don't know, RobySharon-Zipser, is the CEO and
Co-Founder of hipages. And ifyou haven't heard of hipages,
where have you been? Oh, my god,hipages is an Australian
(00:52):
startup, and like all startups,I believe this was born out of
an idea that you had and youimplemented it in a garage for
home improvement directory, andsince then, hipages initially
start up, and now is an ASXlisted company. And from what
I've heard, has been around forthe last 20 years, and we've had
around 12 million, 12 millionrecords on your platform.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (01:15):
Okay, yeah, that's kind of right, and mostly
right. I did really well, goodjob. Yeah. So actually, the
story goes a bit further back interms of where the idea was
born. I was trying to renovatean apartment, a newly purchased
apartment with my wife. Wasn'tnew. It was very run down, and
it was a horrible, horribleexperience. And figured there
had to be a better way. And sothe directory was born. And my
(01:36):
business partner and I, David,we started hipages as a just a
directory business, and I thinkit's getting close to maybe just
over 11 million jobs that havebeen posted all time. So that's
when you say records. I thinkyou mean like homeowner posting
jobs. And for everyone thatdoesn't really understand what
we do if you need a trade,hipages has this magic
(01:57):
algorithms that connect you withup to three trades very, very
quickly, pretty much anywhere inAustralia and New Zealand now.
Kavita Kerwar (02:05):
Oh, that's amazing. That's That's
fantastic. I remember, Oh, butfirst Yes, before we go into our
next question, we gotta do a bitof Jenga. Oh, yeah, because I
remember being like a newhomeowner, and I had moved into
an apartment with my sister, andwe both were very clueless of
how to do anything, because weboth were raised overseas, and
we didn't have this DIY mindsetthat now I see so many
(02:27):
Australians have. But I waslike, how to build this, so how
to fix this? So it's fantasticwhen you have a platform like
high pages and you can justreach out to trades people,
that's awesome. Yeah, all right,let's have a go.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (02:38):
So you're in what we call the Do It For Me
category.
Kavita Kerwar (02:40):
I'm in the very do it for me category. I'm like,
please don't let me do itmyself.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (02:45):
Exactly.
There's people that haveaspirations for DIY, but like,
like me cannot drill a hole inthe wall, so pay someone to do
it and maybe do it in anefficient, cost effective,
trustworthy way. And that'swhere you go to hipages.
Kavita Kerwar (02:57):
Oh yeah, I think I had high ambitions. Yeah, I
bought a drill. And never, Inever.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (03:02):
Stole my boss, like most people.
Kavita Kerwar (03:05):
Oh my gosh. All right, let's do it. Let's do a
Jenga. And I think my DIY, orlack of DIY skills, is going to
come across now, because I'mreally bad at Jenga, okay, I
might be good. Who knows? Whoknows?
Roby Sharon-Zipser (03:15):
That's a rookie mistake, what you're
doing.
So high up bottom. Anyway, do Ineed to do it in the no come on?
You've already broken the rule.
Look, you've let go of the brickthat you touch. You got to
follow through. You touched it.
You got to finish the job. Ifeel like maybe you're getting a
favor of my management style.
Now, let me help you. Okay, Iwould normally not help because
(03:39):
I'd like to win, but there yougo.
Kavita Kerwar (03:41):
Yes, empowering, empowering some. Oh, my god,
please, please. How dare you.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (03:51):
I thought you supposed to be nice. But
just like when you know this isthe limit, I'm also very
genuine.
Kavita Kerwar (03:59):
Fair enough. All right, do you want to have I'm
gonna do, oh, my god, startingfrom the is this the right way
to do it?
Roby Sharon-Zipser (04:08):
Little loose.
Kavita Kerwar (04:10):
What is this?
This is rigged. Is this rigged?
Kirsty, have you rigged this.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (04:14):
Did I tell you I am high risk I have a high
risk appetite. Is this rigged?
Kavita Kerwar (04:17):
Kirsty, have you been part like, what is this?
Roby Sharon-Zipser (04:22):
God damn it, we'll finish the game
afterwards.
I can see clearly you're gonnalose.
Kavita Kerwar (04:28):
Oh my god, that's true. So tell me. And I think
this is a really good analogy,and you referred a bit about
your leadership. So has yourleadership style changed since
when hipages was initially born,and now that you're scaled up so
much.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (04:42):
Yeah, absolutely, it's changed. I
think if I go back, I mean, Iwas a leader in the business,
but I actually wasn'tnecessarily the CEO. I took a
bunch of titles. I was CFO,Chief Revenue Officer, Chief
Operating Officer, andeventually evolved into the CEO
role about six or so years ago.
I think as you. Evolve in yourleadership style, I think also
as a startup and a scale up andthen, like a proper medium to
(05:03):
large size business, you have toevolve. I would probably say I
was a micro manager in thebeginning. And I think my main
learning is, I think stay trueto your values, and that should
be representative of theorganization. But for me, I
definitely have always been agenuine, transparent, hyper
competitive, as you can tell. Iwould never have guessed. But
(05:26):
for me, in terms of the mainleadership style is, I think, I
think it's okay to let somepeople fail a little bit if the
house isn't kind of fall down. Ithink they have more ownership
of projects, more ownership andresponsibilities handed over to
the leadership team and themanagement. It's a nice way for
people to develop themselves intheir career and giving them
(05:49):
some freedom to make mistakes. Imean, if the house isn't going
to fall over, even sometimeswhen they're trying to do things
that you know, have you've triedyourself and failed, you don't
always know if you tried it thebest way, and maybe sometimes
the wrong time, giving peoplesome freedom to experiment and
test and give things a go again.
Give them a go and go again. Ifyou've tried in the past, it's a
(06:11):
good thing.
Kavita Kerwar (06:12):
Yeah, that's that's fantastic. So you've
spoken very openly about being avery hands on, almost
micromanager, and from then now,you describe yourself as an
enabler, instead of atraditional CEO who is very
hands on. So how do you go aboutmaking the switch from being a
very hands on person who's verypassionate about their product
and their baby to then being abit of an enabler for your
teams?
Roby Sharon-Zipser (06:32):
Okay? So if you want to be a bit of an
enabler, you're sort of like asa founder, you kind of like, you
know, you do everything youknow, your chief water boy to
Chief Data Analyst to CFO to cooso you actually kind of okay at
everything, and that's that'svery common trait for founders,
but at some stage, you're goingto have to get the experts in.
And you my advice is, is toalways try and elevate your
(06:55):
team. So afford the best you canget to do specific roles,
delegate that as fast aspossible and make sure that you
trust those people to do a goodjob of it. And at the end of the
day, if you're not doing a goodjob of move very quickly on
those people and replace themwith better people.
Kavita Kerwar (07:11):
Okay, all right, yeah, move fast. Pivot fast.
Yeah. Know when to do that. Ithink that's a really good
answer. Do you have an examplewhere maybe stepping back gave
you a better outcome than if youwere hands on, then you would
have got otherwise.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (07:24):
I think, in the earlier days. And look, it's
probably you've got differentdifferent audiences from
different stages of theirbusiness life cycle, listening
to these podcasts. And so what Iwould say is, like in the early
stages, there was a lot ofadministrative tasks that I was
doing that probably in terms ofvalue add, like high value add
were probably on the low end ofthe scale, but were important
(07:47):
tasks that still needed to getdone. So for me, getting someone
operational to help with thatwas critical, and that certainly
was a good next step. Sort ofbuilt confidence for me. Okay,
well, I can hand over somethings. What next can I do?
Eventually we so that was anoperational admin type person.
Then we went to a financialcontroller, eventually, CFO,
eventually chief people officer,and, you know, HR manager and ng
(08:11):
people officer, you start toevolve that executive team over
time. And some businesses movefaster, and some move a bit
slower. It depends on yourbudgets and rate of growth and
available cash to do it. And sofor us, you know, we've got a
full executive team. Nearly allthe traditional executive roles
with modern titles are nowcovered. It is still evolving,
but it's mostly, mostly done 20years in.
Kavita Kerwar (08:34):
Yeah, fantastic.
Thank you. All right, let's doanother
Okay, so what should I followyour.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (08:40):
play your own game.
Kavita Kerwar (08:46):
Oh, this is a bad move. I don't know. This is, Are
you filming this? This is likefall of the Empire overhere.
Oh, gosh, I'm going to regretbringing this game. Why did I do
this?
Roby Sharon-Zipser (09:00):
So you just got to make a decision.
Kavita Kerwar (09:02):
I am I'm trying to kind of Yes. Oh, my God. Oh,
okay, maybe I'm gonna do thisone. I can do this, right? I can
hold no. Oh, no, I can't. Oh,hello, hello. Please come out. I
saw a video where someonetrained their cat.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (09:21):
All right.
How'd the cat go? Very well.
Wow. It's impressive.
Kavita Kerwar (09:25):
I'd be beaten by a cat. So do I do this? Put this
up here?
Roby Sharon-Zipser (09:27):
Oh, yeah, I forgot to put mine up.
Kavita Kerwar (09:37):
Oh, fantastic.
Oh, there's clothes.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (09:40):
Oh it's too early to be close. You've got
plenty to go here.
Kavita Kerwar (09:46):
This is very exciting for everyone else who's
in our studio. Kirsty is havinga great time. Kirsty, how's your
afternoon going? Good? So Iguess coming back to high pages,
my question is around yourpurpose is built around
empowering and supportingtraining. Its people. So how
does that guide decision makingon a day to day at your
workplace?
Roby Sharon-Zipser (10:04):
Yeah, so I usually take the customer's
experience into account in ourbusiness, we obviously have two
customers. We have what we callthe supply side, which is the
tradies, and we have the demandside, which is the homeowner.
And their experiences on ourplatform are critical. So if a
homeowner comes to high pages tobe connected with the tradie.
Our primary objective is to makethat connection experience
seamless and fast and get anoutcome, which is to get two to
(10:29):
three trades to call them backwith their query on whatever
they want to get done aroundtheir home. And so we're very
focused on that investments ininnovation around that key.
We're about to launch what wecall a Sarah AI tool. Also tools
around cost guides are all beingavailable for homeowners to
read. We've been doing that fora long time, but it's all
(10:49):
integrating all of thathistorical cost guide licensing
information, and thenultimately, the job is to get a
homeowner to connect to a tradeat speed. And we, you know,
we're moving into large languagemodels to help us with that kind
of thing on the trading side,everything to do with their
onboarding experience, togetting them set up well,
getting us to call them backquickly when they've expressed
(11:10):
interest, to get leads from us,explaining our technology that
we've been building in oursubscription packages to them in
a seamless way, getting themonboarded fast, getting all
their credentials checked fast.
All of that is top of mind. Andwe've invested in what we call
cross functional teams in thebusiness to ensure that
customers start to get betterexperiences, and also our
internal customers, which islike our sales and service
(11:33):
teams, getting betterexperiences so that they can
support the customers better.
Kavita Kerwar (11:38):
Yeah, that's fantastic. So how have you I'm
very curious to learn about yourimplementation of large language
models, and what has worked foryour business. Is there anything
you'd like to share?
Roby Sharon-Zipser (11:48):
Yes, it's like, it's like, it's
interesting. It's such a hottopic. I think two years ago, I
wouldn't have really thought toomuch about it. I think about two
years ago, a year and a halfago, you know, you start to read
some media about it, and peoplestart to ask questions about,
what are you doing with largellms? And I'm like, I think I
remember. I said, what's an LLM?
And I was like, Okay, it's AI.
That's just what they mean withlarge language models. I said,
okay, cool. I better look intoit. So start looking into it.
(12:10):
And I'm like, Oh, holy crap.
This is good. This is goodstuff. Like, we can see
potential growth opportunitieshere. Better customer
experiences, efficiency players,dare I say it? People may not
want to talk too much aboutthat, but, like, there's some
pretty interestingopportunities, certainly
removing menial tasks quiteseamlessly, using using the
latest technology. And so you gothrough this process of like,
(12:31):
Oh, wow. This is cool. Prettyinteresting. Like, what is this?
This is cool, interesting. Thenyou get overwhelmed, like, holy
crap. What do I do with this?
And then it starts to form partof your strategy as an
organization. And then you startto identify how you're going to
execute using the latesttechnology to give you the
either growth, revenue growth orexpenditure efficiencies that
(12:53):
will give you operationalleverage as a business. And so
that's now forming part of ourstrategy. You know, everything
down to writing emails atprobably a simpler level, even
helping writing the CEO reports,suming the language analyzing
data, down to sentiment analysisall the way through to our
matching algorithm, usingmachine learning and AI to
optimize that speed ofconnection, which is quite a
(13:16):
complex thing that we do, whereyou're connecting effectively
1000s of categories, like you'vegot, you know, 30 top level
categories, 200 you know, liketrade categories. But then
there's 1000s of subcategories.
So what do I mean by that? Soplumbing is a parent category,
obviously. But then underneathplumbing, you would have Blocked
drains, toilet replacement, hotwater tanks, that's, those are
(13:36):
all be subcategories. And thenif you look at Australia's
geographies, there's 1000s oflivable postcodes. So
effectively, you're down to thesubcategory level. To a livable
postcode is a micro marketplacethat you need to connect trades
to a homeowner at speed in thatmicro marketplace and also
create a good value exchangeotherwise charge the right
prices to the customers, so thatthe business that's doing that
(13:58):
connection at speed that'sleveraging its network effect
the investments it's made inmarket. Made in marketing and
technology, to make a goodreturn. So using machine
learning and AI to make thatcome to life.
Kavita Kerwar (14:08):
Yeah, definitely, that's fantastic. Like, I think
I've seen a lot of businessesthat focus a lot on the top of
the funnel, engaging thecustomer who maybe don't know
your product or are justentering into your ecosystem,
yeah, but what you're talkingabout is almost that end to end
customer journey, like,integrated in different.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (14:22):
That's right, yeah, so that's right.
And so, like, the way you'redescribing is, like, how to
help, you know, shortcut, so youdon't have to talk to a human
being, maybe use a chat bot,like, you know, it would be,
like, kind of like a secondlevel, AI, integration in the
business. There's fancy wordsfor it. I literally just came
from a Salesforce conference andthey gave the proper terms. I'm
just, like, talking in, like,simple terms, the way I
understand it. So yeah.
Kavita Kerwar (14:42):
yeah. I think yeah, you're right. There is a
lot of hype about it. And twoyears back, or three years back,
people weren't talking about itas much. And it's very
interesting, because at DiUS, wehave a few people who've done
PhDs on this subject. Yeah, theyjust look around, they're like,
you're just catching up. Yeah,we've been talking about.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (14:55):
it's definitely a game changer, I
think, if you're not, if you'rea CEO or a leader in a business,
and you. Are not thinking abouthow large language models can
enhance your your not just yourlife, but your business, in your
your your department in yourbusiness, or the overall
business, then you're reallygoing to be left behind, because
things are moving very quickly,and there's more and more
pressure to be more efficient.
And this is, this is an enablerfor that doesn't necessarily
(15:18):
have to be afraid of it, justlike when the first iPhone or
when the first search functioncame out, those were like, oh
wow moments. So certainly, ifyou've hadn't had an experience
with large language models andhave not gotten an oh wow
moment, and then start to thinkabout the applications of that,
then you need to start lookingat it very closely. That would
be my advice to people.
Kavita Kerwar (15:37):
Yeah, what challenges do you reckon for
someone who is a business ownerand who is just entering into
and learning about llms, maybethey're not familiar, and now
there is so much hype, and theystart to look into it. What
challenges do you reckon?
Roby Sharon-Zipser (15:48):
I think, I think, I think you're like for
us, for example, is is like notall the things that first of
all, except it's not, it's notall as good as what people say.
I have first hand experiencewhere all of the bad things that
human beings have, all the badtraits, so cheating, lying,
(16:08):
manipulating, llms, which isotherwise falling under the
banner of hallucination, yes,is, is all true. I've literally
had this thing lie to me. Andthen you call it out and say,
and then they say, Oh, Iapologize for that. You're
absolutely right, sir. So Sothat's, that's scary, right? So
you just can't let it go like onits own. You need to have an
(16:30):
expertise, and then you can, andthen test it and learn from it.
So, I mean, I give examples ofthat, but so that's more on
personal world. But I've noticedas well. For example, I've been
using chat GPT to assist mewriting the monthly CEO board
report, which is loaded up awhole bunch of data and all
that, and so it writes it reallynicely, but every freaking
(16:51):
number in the CEO report iswrong. So I have to go through
and check every number becauseit's not doing it right, and
train it to pick up the rightnumbers for the next time, but
it is slowly optimizing. That'sjust a little example. So if
you're a CEO, that's the fear. Ithink you need to be very
mindful that I'm working in aclosed environment, so I'm using
(17:11):
the power of the LLM, but I'mnot opening it up to the public
to have access. Obviously, beinglisted, we have high levels of
confidentiality. Privacy needsto be protected. So working in
that type of environment, so youneed to set that up. You
probably also need to be mindfulthat you just need to have some
rules for your organization,depending on the size of your
organization, what type of llmsYou're allowing people to use,
(17:34):
or a process for people to use,latest and greatest technology
that subsequently gets approved.
Security is a big issue,obviously, if you're processing
millions of records, as wetalked about earlier on, you
know we need to be mindful ofthe fact that information could
be shared publicly and so thatwe need. So we need to lock it
down. We want the capabilities,but we need the privacy and the
security that comes from it.
Kavita Kerwar (17:52):
Yeah, yeah, that makes perfect sense. And if, and
I think what I've seen with withsome companies is they try and
make it a bit more transparentto the customer by by allowing
the customer to have somecontrol, by having customer
consent, like, if you want toopt out of this personalized, if
it's a recommendation orsomething personalization, you
can do that, and then you cantrack how many people actually
are hesitant or trust, AI, butno, that's fantastic. Thank you
(18:16):
so much. All right, should we doanother Jenga?
Roby Sharon-Zipser (18:20):
You gotta do faster. You're like, slow. I'm
like, Well, come on, let's doit.
Did I tell you I'm a veryimpatient human being?
Kavita Kerwar (18:31):
Oh, I think, you know, you don't need to say
that. No, no, don't. Don't fallon me, please.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (18:40):
I think you got it. You're good, you're
good.
Also putting pressure is part ofthe tactic in winning the game.
Kavita Kerwar (18:56):
God, this is like strategy, yeah. Okay, your turn.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (19:04):
Thank you for that one.
Kavita Kerwar (19:07):
I feel like I'm playing a losing game here.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (19:12):
I did tell you I'm hyper competitive. We
did the Gallup strengths. Youknow, where we match up people's
strengths, like, I score like,way above the average human I
don't like to lose.
Kavita Kerwar (19:22):
Well, I mean, we hate we are also very
competitive. And people whodon't believe that, just watch
us at a cricket match.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (19:29):
Yes for sure. I have seen some some
games. Yes, yes.
Kavita Kerwar (19:34):
Okay, so, so it sounds like you've really got a
culture of innovation going athigh pages, and that's like no
easy feat, especially as you'rescaling up the company. So what
do you do to maintain, like, aculture that focuses on
innovation?
Roby Sharon-Zipser (19:47):
Yeah, like, I mean, it didn't come easily to
be fair. I mean, we were verymuch an operations and sales
driven and service drivenorganization. I think, you know,
if you go back a few years, wewould have had a couple 100
employees and maybe 40-50 peopleworking. In technology and
innovation. So I'm talking aboutlike engineers and product
people and some designers, andmaybe a little bit on data. But
(20:08):
that would have been around, youknow, 50 ish people, and the
rest was sales, service andoperations. Now we're today, an
organization approaching 350people, probably 150 sales,
service people, maybe 4050 whatwe would call support functions,
which includes the typicalfinance people and legal side of
the business, and maybe a littlebit of marketing in there, but
(20:29):
marking, sort of embedded acrossthe business. And then on the
product and technology side, youknow, you've got 100 100 and
maybe 120 people approachingthat, that number. So it's like,
it's, really materially movedfrom the 40 to 50. And so having
having like organizers and startto get to scale, and you think
about all the things you need todo as an organization, you kind
(20:50):
of need to get to, like, 100100, over 100 people in
technology and innovation,thinking about all the types of
engineering expertise, all thedata, the product, the user, UX,
the design, all of that tobuild, to build a like an
organization at sort of a mediumto large enterprise level, you
need a minimum of that type ofresource, or people, I should
say, to support it. So that'sthat's been major decision in
(21:11):
investments in the business togrow that, and then obviously
raising capital to do that'sbeen key, and then making sure
that we develop good processeswhere cross functional teams in
our organization develop theirideas and initiatives but score
it, and then develop a businesscase, and then a timeline of
delivery and accountability.
Behind all of that, that'scertainly a key part of strategy
(21:34):
execution. So we've brought alot of that into the business,
and so that's been given likenot everything wins. Are you
gonna get some turkeys? But somethings are really like, oh my
god, blew it out of the park.
And then some things are a bitlike, yeah, what meet
expectations, but overall you'rebetter off. And then following
certain processes, you keep youcan continue to invest in the
(21:54):
business, yeah? Renovation.
Kavita Kerwar (21:56):
So you mentioned scoring. So very curious to
know, how do you internallyscore? Because you've got your
purpose where you're empoweringtrades people, you're looking at
solutions that actually empowerthem and add value. Yeah, and
then you've got a keen focus oninnovation and scaling up. So
how do you balance it out?
Roby Sharon-Zipser (22:11):
I don't think they're like mutually
exclusive ideas. I think they Ireally encourage the team to
think about, well, if you can'tfind a commercial reason as to
why that's not going to generatemore revenue for the business
and also get good outcomes forthe customer, then maybe you're
(22:31):
not thinking hard enough aboutit, and maybe you need a hand to
think through that. So sometimesthe revenue upside is not
apparent on the first instance.
So I'll give you, give you anexample. We had a team
partnerships him. So what's thedebate on partnerships?
Partnerships really work ordon't work? And there are some
fabulous examples of howpartnerships have worked around
the world. So you think ofStarbucks as an example, and how
(22:52):
it's embedded in Costco andBarnes and Noble, which is a
bookstore and like, it's afantastic partnership
arrangement for that business,and it represents a meaningful
proportion of its revenue. Butthen you've got other businesses
have done partnerships, and youhear about them, and it's like,
I don't want to call them out,but like, just been a total
flop, and they built their wholebusiness off that. So in our
case, we've had sort of mix.
(23:14):
We've got some fabulous partnerswith IKEA and Bunnings and
things like that, but sometimesit goes up and down. But what we
couldn't tell. The story is,what's the revenue upside of
those partnerships? And then werealized we were missing a
treat. We realized thatcustomers that were in enrolled
in a partner program, so ourtrading customers that were
enrolled in a partner programhad one of the lowest, lowest
(23:35):
churn rates, or highestretention rates, than any of our
other customers. As I was like,Okay, well that means that we
should be taking that intoaccount when we do our business
cases. But we were never doingit before. It was very linear as
like one to one. So what I'mtrying to say is sometimes the
revenue upside is not on thefirst step, but it could be a
second step, and you need to tryand work a way to quantify that.
So if you can't find a revenueupside or a second stage revenue
(23:58):
upside, then possibly there's away to find a way to justify
that in the business case, orinvestment in that technology
innovation through maybeinefficiency or a better
experience that results in acost saving for the business. So
you're getting good customeroutcomes, that you're also
introducing a cost saving in thebusiness.
So then you'd measure everythingand then look at it as a whole.
Before you say this is getting ascore or a weighted.
Exactly. So I try and I we use,like, OKRs in the business, and
that's a whole other podcast. Wewon't have time to go into that
(24:26):
detail. So we try and use that.
My first level is move x to y byz deliver X by Zed, because it
will do something for thebusiness. And sometimes, after
all of those processes, thereare, there are instances where
you just have to say, we justhave to do it because, like,
we're like, 10 years behind onsomething. We should have done
it already three, four yearsago, five years ago. So there
are instances and you have toput a strong argument forward
(24:50):
for that, but you can, you canstill get those through in our
internal processes to move oninnovation.
Kavita Kerwar (24:57):
Oh, yeah, that's, yeah, yeah, absolutely. But.
There'll always be thoseoutliers where you feel, even if
the numbers aren't adding up,there's a really strong need or
a drive to get that done. Yeah,fair enough. All right, should
we do another
Roby Sharon-Zipser (25:13):
I don't think people are playing games
with me. I don't think I'm fun.
You don't think you're fine. No,I don't think I'm fine. No, I
know, good call, good call. Youdid. Well Well done. Thank you.
Kavita Kerwar (25:31):
So we're like a few minutes in the podcast, I
just want to say the Jenga hasnot fallen on my watch. Oh, my
God. The confidence, theconfidence in that pool.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (25:43):
I'd been persuaded, right? Oh yeah, you
were like, emotions done.
Kavita Kerwar (25:49):
Okay, so I really like, I really like, how you,
how you've explained the thoughtprocess behind, I guess,
prioritizing innovative ideas,and also your approach to now
being an enabler for your team.
If you were to look back on yourjourney, what advice would you
give, like your younger self,who was just starting out with
hipages?
Roby Sharon-Zipser (26:09):
Oh, so there's so many like I don't
know where to begin. I think mybiggest like learning along the
way is someone, someone veryclose to me and involved in the
business told me a couplethings, and I wish I'd listened
to them more back in the day,but two things that they said to
me was network more and accessand network faster. So go to
(26:30):
some events, talk to people orconnect with other like people
that are in your position, thecollective network experience,
and it's an amplifier of 10x solike, you're on your own, so
you're one times one, right? Butthen you start meeting five to
10 other CEOs, and you can askthem some questions in a
confidential way, because it isreally a lonely job, and
sometimes you just can't askpeople within the organization.
(26:51):
And I don't necessarily know,I've had coaches and things like
that in the past, but just in anetwork of other CEOs that have
had experience, preferablyworking with a network of CEOs
that have run businesses acouple of times, or start up
businesses on their own once ortwice, the knowledge that they
have and the experience theyhave is just you can't compare
it. The second thing I would sayis thinking about strategy. I
(27:15):
think it took me a long time tounderstand what is strategy and
how to evolve strategy. And Ithink if I could give anyone a
piece of advice on strategies,know your product, know where
you think your product is goingto go, but then use research and
read a lot like, read, read,read like. Or if you don't like
reading, listen to audio books.
Or I found a fabulous productrecently that summarizes, I
(27:37):
think it's called Blinkist. It'sjust, and you can, I can listen
to, like, a book a day, and getthe gist of the book every
single day. And sometimes it'sgarbage, just total garbage out
there. Like, just, like, behonest, because that's rubbish.
Like, yeah, who even botheredpublishing that? Like, it's,
like, seriously, most booksdon't sell, right? There's very
(28:00):
low volumes, but, but there'ssome really good stuff, and if
you can get just like one goodidea a day that definitely helps
form in your mind where youshould take your business and
strategy and you become like athought leader, and then have a
very good strategic executionplan. So make sure your teams
present pillars of thosestrategies. There's always
pillars in a strategy, and putthe resourcing behind it and
(28:22):
then make people accountable andresponsible for the delivery of
the execution of that strategy.
I wish, I wish I'd listened topeople talking to me about
setting goals and metrics andmoving X to Y to Z, and
delivering x by Zed, and makingpeople accountable to that and
have the reporting cadence ittook. Took, I would say,
probably took me too long towork that out. And we have it
(28:45):
embedded in the business, andpeople know the way we operate.
So I think, I mean, people like,I like to give three things, but
I think those are, those areprobably the top two things off
the top of my head right now.
Kavita Kerwar (28:56):
Favorite, favorite book, or the book you
find most.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (28:59):
Yeah, I've said it before. I've been asked
this before, I thought I'm verypassionate about so I would say
the thing that's been eyeopener. I don't know if there's
one thing I've been movingreally into podcasts lately.
And, I mean, I'll give an answerto the book, like, I think, for
any founder that hasn't read thehard things about the hard
things, and obviously, and itmight get boring if you've heard
(29:19):
me talk about it, but there'slike, a page in the book. I
think it's page 69 or 68 it'slike, just read those two pages
or print it off and have it inyour drawer. And it's like, it's
just like, worth reading. Ittalks about the challenge of
being a CEO and every aspect oflike, firing people and having
investors and like, alleverything. It's like 100 lines,
(29:40):
like it's quite poetic. Sothat's the book thing. Put that
aside, I would say for people toreally elevate their
understanding of business andunderstand what makes people
successful. The Hamilton Helmer,Helmer, seven powers is an
absolute must read. So. Talksabout how you can generate your
(30:01):
competitive mode, and looks atthe most successful businesses
in the world and understand whatare the powers that make those
businesses the most successfulbusiness in the world. Now
there's a podcast calledacquired Ben and David. They've
been running for about eight ornine years, and what they do is
they do like a completebiography, Autobiography of some
(30:23):
of the most successfulbusinesses in the world,
everything from Costco, lvhm,Walmart, Amazon, Microsoft, they
did one on Mars Corporation justrecently. Lvhm Amaze like the
whole history of those companyand what's happened. And then
they do an overlay of what theseven powers, how they work with
(30:43):
those businesses. And I wouldsuggest just pick a few of them.
Start maybe with the Costcopodcast. I thought that was
amazing. But then start pickingand choosing the ones that you
might be interested in, or maybestart into a category that you
like. So if you like cars, theydid one on Porsche. So Porsche,
okay, so you can hear the wholehistory of Porsche if you're
(31:03):
interested in retail. So you'vegot, obviously, Costco, which is
like, food and things like that.
But then you might be interestedin the IKEA story, so they go
into a whole history of highcare. And I love, I love, love,
love that type of learning. Sothat's been my new thing for the
last couple of years. Was a longanswer to that question.
Kavita Kerwar (31:23):
Great. It's perfect, because I've found that
I myself, I'm on the journey,and I think most of our
listeners will probably be thesame, but you start off with, I
loved books, and then now Ithink you just have a shorter
time frame. You don't have thetime.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (31:36):
But you have time when you're commuting all
traveling.
Kavita Kerwar (31:39):
So easy. Yeah, even I like audiobooks very
much, but it almost depends onthe narrator. Sometimes, yeah?
Because I'm, like, somenarrators, it's just the accent.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (31:48):
Yeah, so Ben and David, it's like, this very
American. It's like, sometimes abit of, like, a hyper
intelligent Beavis and butthead, but they're awesome.
They're so good. And if you'renot listening to their podcasts,
you're out of the game, like,you got to know what's going on,
and applying the Hamilton helmetseven powers to those
businesses, and then thinkingabout how you can apply it to
your business, very strong. Ialso listened to another one
(32:09):
domestically. It's called thecontrarians. It's Adam Schwab,
who's like the founder of luxuryescapes, and a Adir Schiffman,
who's executive chairman ofcatapult sports. And those guys
have the founders, and they'vehad lots of experience in
business, and the way theyexplain a lot of the way things
work in the Australian market,and particularly around
(32:30):
accounting and how to thinkabout business, the contrarian.
So you have to agree witheverything they say, but the
debate, and that's the kind ofdebate and the discussion that
you'd be having at a board andexecutive level as you mature as
a company. So that's also areally good, good one to listen
to.
Kavita Kerwar (32:46):
Yeah, fantastic recommendations. Thank you. So
what's the best part about yourjob? What's your favorite part
about your job?
Roby Sharon-Zipser (32:53):
Look, it is definitely like a roller coaster
Road, like I love presenting infront of the company. I know
that's not everyone's thing. Ilove presenting and talking
about the business and thedirection, and seeing the plans
come to life and achievingmetrics. Now you you get those
joys momentarily, and then youbecause you as a founder, you
typically beat yourself up onthe misses way more than you
(33:15):
acknowledged the wins. But thosemoments when you do have a win,
or you're celebrating with theteam, or you're working in deep
debate. I'm a little bit of anagitator as well, so I like to
agitate people a bit. It'salmost like a stylistic thing.
Like to rub people the wrongway, but it forces people to
speak up and say what they'rereally thinking. And then you
(33:37):
get the challenge and thedebate. I love a debate. I love
the opinions coming through, andthen you get to pick and choose
the best ones that you think aregoing to come, come from the
business. So it can be a lot offun, too.
Kavita Kerwar (33:49):
So you don't want people who just agree with you
and just say, yes, yeah.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (33:51):
Yeah those people suck. Like, I mean, I
mean, then you just pleasing me.
I don't mind it. But like, Ithink what I do, I do, think,
though, is at some stages thatyou acknowledge politely that
you know what you've said, and Iunderstand it, and I've gotten
good at like coaching that backto people, but sometimes you do
have to make your decisions.
Personal experiences in the lastlast year have been always
(34:12):
present options. Sometimes theoptions aren't the ideal answer,
but getting a couple of options,and preferably a recommendation,
but also just showing a coupleof options and feeling the room,
reading the room to see which isthe option that feels right for
the consensus. So you don'talways get consensus, but then
you have, sometimes you have tojump in and just say, Okay,
(34:33):
well, this is the one we'regoing to go with. And sometimes
you just don't have, like, adata driven reasoning. You have
to work on intuition and gut.
And sometimes you're going to bewrong, and you have to own it
you're wrong. So it'sinteresting, interesting process
in leading a business. Yeah.
Kavita Kerwar (34:46):
And what's your least favorite part about your
role? So another, most favoritepart you speak about, like your
team just having those debate onideas, looking at options,
looking at how to move forward,whether it's data driven or.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (34:59):
I know much.
People in culture person gonnakill me for saying this. Okay, I
know that they're gonna kill mefor saying it. So I think one of
the lessons I probably the thirdlesson, which I didn't finish
off because I had a bit of amental blank earlier. But the
third lesson was, if you'refinding yourself as a CEO,
actually doing some kind ofwork, like some sort of
spreadsheeting or something, or,you know, mucking around with
(35:20):
something that you shouldn't bedoing. You should be asking
yourself, why the hell am Idoing this? And is it the right
time that I should be gettingsomeone in my organization to be
doing this work? And so, likethat, that's a key thing. So
delegation is probably the thirdpoint back where, five questions
ago. So we do, like, I don'tknow if we can edit it, leave it
in, because, yeah. But my point.
(35:43):
So the thing like is the money,it's hard to delegate, is the
performance and grow sessionswith team. I like the
conversation and just gettingdoing, you know, the feedback?
Have you heard of the feedbacksandwich? You could tell
everyone about that, like, 10good things that they did, and
give them maybe one littlenugget, because everyone's so
sensitive nowadays abouteverything. It's like, I used to
just go straight to the jugularon that was a bit shit, whereas
(36:04):
now I realize that's superimportant. You got to tell
everyone, like, this is this?
This is good. You did reallywell. There. You're amazing.
This is awesome. You're achampion. That was so cool. And
then, oh, but this thing here,it was kind of like, not that
great. And maybe we could do abit better next time. So, so
that the actual writing of allof that down. I hate. I just
like to have, like, a freeconversation, like, more
friendly conversation withpeople about that. So the
(36:26):
writing bit and publishing that,and that's the process, sucks a
little bit.
Unknown (36:33):
But I get, like, your people and culture, a person's
job, because otherwise it'simportant. Imagine the glass
door reviews
Roby Sharon-Zipser (36:38):
like, I know that it's important. I'm not
saying not to do it. It's justyou asked me honestly, part of
my hands being genuine. Reallyenjoy, because I actually feel
like I'm doing work.
Kavita Kerwar (36:50):
And it doesn't come it's not like a very
especially if you're like inyour case, you've grown your
business from scratch, where youhad a higher degree of control
you and you had perhaps acamaraderie with your, you know,
core team, and now you've scaledup so much, so I can definitely
understand why this is now. Thelayers of having admin and
having that people and culturespeak is probably, like, very
foreign to how you maybe theteam used to operate.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (37:12):
Yeah and we've been doing it for a while.
It's just like, I think justwriting of it all, it's like,
the formality of it is what, youknow, whereas I'm a little bit
more like, play it by a freetalker kind of thing?
I'll give you a tip at the endof the game.
Kavita Kerwar (37:28):
Yes I would like a tip. I don't know why I chose
this game.
This is my own doing. No one toblame, but must, I don't know.
Oh, this is so dangerous.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (37:39):
I'll give you a tip. So you got to find
the loose one. There's going tobe always a loose one, because
the weight gets because thewight gets distributed. So you
find a loose one, and then it'sjust easy to come out. And
that's why I did it like quite,quite swiftly with my movements,
sometimes it's hard to findthere's always one. There's
always one, because the Whitegets the weight gets
redistributed every time a brickcomes out.
Unknown (37:59):
Only like the loose ones is only when Roby touches
the Jenga, they're like.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (38:04):
Did you see there was one? You see, I just
gave you a little tip. Thankyou. Thank you so much
leadership moment. Okay, sothere's my go, right? So now I
now probably stuff it up becauseI gave my tips away. Okay, here
we go. Oh, that is good. See howeasy that was. There you go.
Yeah.
Kavita Kerwar (38:21):
T hat's amazing.
Thank you. Thank you very muchfor that. I guess the next, the
next question I had was morearound scaling, scaling your
company, and we were talkingabout, like, admin and team and
delegating as well, what wasyour biggest challenge when you
were scaling up? Because, andthis is, like, such a privilege,
because not every company thatstarts in a garage can scale up
and be on the ASX. So, yeah,fantastic, what you and your
(38:42):
team have achieved. But whatwould be, I guess, the biggest
hurdle or challenge.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (38:48):
Capital is always a challenge. Like, I
think we finished a fundraising,and you start looking for
another fundraising. And youknow, sometimes you got to ask
yourself, if this is what youwant, and maybe slowing the
growth down a little bit. Butthen you run into channel
challenges, because you have,you know, seed funders that may
be less pressure at you at thebeginning, but you don't want to
lose their money, because it'susually friends and family. You
(39:09):
move to early stage, and thenyou move into sort of, like,
some VC funding. So when you getthe VCs in, like, you've you've
got to grow. You don't have achoice, and they're in the door.
They're probably usually takinga director seat. They've
probably got some preferentialrights. If you can avoid that,
that's would be good to do. So,you know, like the scaling up
bit and getting capital. Andthen what happens in the life
(39:30):
cycle of businesses is you gothrough many stages, and the
problem is, is that you're gonnahave to make some decisions
sometimes that are superuncomfortable. And the longer
you wait to make thosedecisions, the worse the
business will be. And you needto survive, right? So you have
to have a survival mindset. AndI'm not trying to speak in, you
(39:50):
know, hidden messages and smokesand mirrors or whatever. I'm
just saying that sometimes youhave to cut costs in the
business, and particularly ifit's in technology, it's usually
people, and so sometimes youhave to. To make adjustments or
slow down your hiring or makesome redundancies. And
unfortunately, we've had to gothrough that journey because
capital isn't free. It was freefor a while, which has been good
for a lot of companies, but itisn't free, and people expect to
(40:13):
return, and they want to startto see operational leverage and
margins come through. And sobeing being able to scale up is
knowing when to be prudent withCapital Management, and that's a
key skill. And making,sometimes, what I would call,
you know, going back to thebook, the hard things about hard
things is making those harddecisions.
Kavita Kerwar (40:30):
Yeah cool. All right, let's do another one.
Oh, my God. Okay. Oh, God, thisis something. Yes, please,
please, please.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (40:39):
Oh, I feel sorry for the next interviewee.
Why? Because I've given you thetips. I'm assuming you do Jenga
with everyone.
Kavita Kerwar (40:48):
No, this is, this has just been you so far. Oh,
wow. Maybe now I will.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (40:53):
I've increased your competency
Kavita Kerwar (40:55):
Absolutely. Thank you so much. Yeah.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (40:59):
Okay, there we go. You see how there's a
loose one in the middle there.
Kavita Kerwar (41:02):
I feel like I struggle, and there's like
latency when I do this and whenRoby does it, oh yes.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (41:08):
Nearly fell.
I was, like, a bit aggressive onthat one, but I'm playing by the
rules, which is, once you toucha brick, you can't let go.
You've got to stay on. I havenot let go. I've seen you touch
and let go, but you were tellingme that. I reckon if we play
back the video, I think you'llsee touch, let go, touch echo,
whereas you see my swiftmotions, one one motion. I'm
just saying, not accusing youanything of saying, yeah.
Kavita Kerwar (41:32):
Okay. So what's next for high pages? Anything
exciting? Yeah, yeah.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (41:36):
So, I mean, we've had a big focus in the
last half on getting all ourtrades onto a single
application. There's so manyreally cool things going on. So
for the trades, where we'regoing is building more features
in our single application. Soexpansionary services are going
to do a pretty decent investmenton providing a payment solution
for trades. They don't all paycash, just by the way, but we
(41:57):
want to give them really cooltools. So spending a lot of
advances in payments, and we dohave a payment solution, but
it's just more of a merchantfacility. We want facility. We
want to provide a broader rangeof payment options, and getting
adoption of that, and alsoadoption of the features that we
have already built. So that'sbeen a critical focus. There's a
lot of stuff to help tradesmanage and run their businesses.
We've improved our matchingalgorithms, and also, one of the
(42:18):
other things that we're doingfor the homeowner is we've
effectively improved ourmatching algorithm so the
homeowners get a faster andbetter experience. But also the
homeowner is going to enjoy thebetter outcomes of trades using
more technology so they get theyget a better experience. One
other really cool thing, just alittle AI thing, is we've got
Sarah AI being in prototype,which is effectively the
(42:42):
homeowner can have aninteractive conversation with an
LLM, answer questions about thejobs that they want to get done,
and then ultimately post thatjob and get it connected within,
within the flow of thatcommunication, which should be a
an enhanced, nicer experience.
And we're testing that as wespeak. And you know, hopefully
we'll roll some of that out soonas well. Very exciting. Yes,
there's lots of, lots of, lot ofthings. New Zealand business is
(43:02):
also going to replicate whatwe're doing in Australia. So I
could go on forever on it, butwe, like you said, we're making
some big players in innovationtechnology.
Kavita Kerwar (43:11):
Yeah, that's awesome. So if people haven't
heard of hipages, how can theyfind you guys?
Roby Sharon-Zipser (43:15):
Oh that's easy. Just hipages.com.au. if
you go to the website or justdownload, go to the app stores
and just download hipages, lookfor the homeowner app, and then
you can post your jobs away andget quotes on your jobs and see
how it goes for you.
Unknown (43:26):
It's awesome. And then you you've got a drill lying
around that you are never goingto use. You can get on, put it
on, you sell it.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (43:33):
Like you don't need it anymore, and you
know you're going to get a goodprice. And they're all vetted
and checked and trusted so andthere's ratings and there's
ratings and recommendations. Soit's all happening on hipages.
Kavita Kerwar (43:43):
Yeah, that's awesome. Okay, on a closing
note, what has been the most funpart of your journey from on
hipages.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (43:50):
Oh, wow. So, I mean, there's been a lot of
moments. I mean, like, you cango back in time when you first
made your very first sale, toall the way to listing on the
ASX, to delivering on a piece oftechnology like we just did,
rolling it all out to all ourcustomer base, and getting that
happen, and hitting just doingit on time, have been some
amazing moments in the historyof the business. Yeah, so so
(44:13):
many it's been a long journey,but keep finding new ones, and
keep getting surprised, and keeplearning along the way.
Kavita Kerwar (44:20):
Yeah amazing.
Thank you so much. Thank you somuch for coming on our podcast.
Yeah, we really enjoyed havingyou. Thank you so much.
Roby Sharon-Zipser (44:26):
Pleasure. I love having it. Love. Love
meeting you, and hopefully I getto win this game.
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