2020: An innovation space odyssey
Published on 10 December 2020
IMAGING BUSINESS
Sharon Hunneybell started her first business at 23; a digital imaging business borne from her employer wanting to outsource her job in 2002.
“I was doing digital image processing for real estate industry, creating virtual tours, so, it was one of the earlier internet startups.
“The company I was working for at the time decided they wanted to outsource these services and I came back to them and basically said, "Why don't you outsource them to me?" And then they said yes, and suddenly, I had to register a business and that's kind of how I got started in the entrepreneurial world,” Sharon recounts.
She admits she fell into entrepreneurship; never thinking it was a career option while at school. Sharon always thought she should be following the traditional path of going to university and getting a job.
“Somehow I ended up starting something myself and then it kind of continued from there and I ran that business for four years. Then I eventually ended up moving into the corporate world working in IT, and brought those entrepreneurship skills with me,” Sharon says.
Starting and running her own business helped Sharon’s transition to the corporate world too.
She believes having the experience of running the business meant she could not help but see her role as part of a cog in a bigger picture and fostered an out of the box thinking about what her role was and what she was contributing to the business.
KNOWLEDGE SHARING
After working in corporate for a few years, Sharon moved to the Gold Coast in 2009 and was surprised there were not the same sorts of IT jobs in Queensland as there were in Melbourne and Sydney.
Sharon took on a contract for a company in Sydney, working remotely from home for the first four and a half years she was on the Gold Coast.
“After about two years, I realised I moved to this beautiful place, this lifestyle city, I was basically in paradise, but I had not made any friends or connections, because I was just at home and when I was out and about, I was out and about interstate.
“That was when I started networking, trying to find the IT scene, the startup scene, and essentially ended up joining with a few other people that were looking for an IT scene, as well.
“We started running events and activities, so startup weekends and through a group called Silicon Lakes, which is how I got started in the startup space.
“Myself and one of my colleagues ended up launching Startup Enterprise, a high school entrepreneurship program,” Sharon recalls.
Sharon soon joined a company called Opmantek, at an early stage when they were just about to hit international growth; working with them to grow and scale the company into multiple countries.
A few years into the role, Sharon found an opportunity to launch an innovation space under Advance Queensland's Advancing Regional Innovation Program (ARIP).
“That was when we decided to take these skills, this journey we have been on, scaling a business from the Gold Coast, to take other Gold Coast businesses on that same journey.
“By helping them avoid the pitfalls, learn from our successes and mistakes, and hopefully create a whole cohort of new businesses that are digital, that are building things here, creating knowledge-based jobs, and selling them overseas, and distributing internationally.
“That is the whole vision, I guess, behind the Innovation Hub. We have a saying which is the sharing of knowledge makes knowledge greater.
“So, to get all of the entrepreneurs, all the people that have had some degree of success, giving back a little to try and help the next generation have a slightly easier path, and to have that faster journey to growth,” Sharon says.
BEYOND 2020
So, as an entrepreneur and founder of an innovation space, what have been some of the lessons and successes Sharon has experienced during her journey, and what will come in 2021?
“This has just been the most incredible year and it's been so hard for so many people. So many people are experiencing isolation. I have had an unusual year.
“But it has certainly been a year that has made a lot of people rethink their lives, their priorities, how they should be spending their time, what really matters to them.
“I think a lot of people as well have really started to question the lifestyles they were leading, up until now,” she maintains.
Sharon believes 2020 has given many the opportunity to reset. The advice for next year is to avoid picking up, or reintroducing, some of the bad habits we had.
“Not putting aside enough time for ourselves, not getting enough rest, not spending enough time with our loved ones.
“The other thing I would say for 2021 not to do, is don't limit your scope for your business locally, or even nationally. What I really noticed this year is the barriers to entry for selling digital products internationally have literally dropped.
“Australia has always been seen as a little bit far away, and so in some economies they think it's difficult to do business with Australia.
“But essentially for the whole of 2020, and even though we are now opened and can kind of go back to a normal life, so many of the countries overseas are going back into lockdown.
“People still need digital services, life still needs to go on, but it is now just as easy for an Australian to deliver a service to someone in the USA or India, as it is for them to be able to do business with someone in the next suburb or the next state,” Sharon highlights.
Her tip: with those barriers now down, make sure when you go into 2021, think global for your customer base.
GOING GLOBAL
From a business-to-business sense, when Sharon’s company was scaling into the USA, they were competing against other big brand software providers; the likes of HP, SolarWinds, IBM and other household names, with huge sales budgets.
“We were trying to scale in and compete with these guys, and they're out there taking people out on expensive steak dinners, and on yachts. You do not have that same in market opportunity to be able to woo people.
“Our biggest thing when we were scaling internationally, we have a freemium model. With Opmantek, you can download two free products to use in your own business.
“And then you can upgrade to either enterprise versions or you can add new features to those products.
“Effectively our path to entry internationally was we would monitor where are people downloading these products, and where are the highest level of activations of the premium versions, and then we would look for a really good name. Our salespeople would be interacting with them,” Sharon outlines.
When they found a good anchor client that looked like they were going to adopt their paid products, her team would typically try and put someone in touch with them and effectively run a strong pilot.
“We would have our in-market person there holding their hands, getting them through the pilot.
“Once the software's up and running, we would do a case study around that, and that customer then became our reference client.
“From there we would then add some engineers into that space, just have a small support team, and then we're away in that region,” Sharon says.
She reflects how interesting the process was, when their first and busiest region for Opmantek turned out to be Mexico.
At the time, there was little knowledge, not just in the Gold Coast, but in Queensland and Australia as a whole, as to how do you set up a business to operate in Mexico.
These were the things the company had to learn along the way.
BLUE SKY THINKING
Sharon reflects on her journey, and how much she and the world has changed in the process.
Five years ago, her old boss from her early days processing digital images for the real estate industry, connected with Sharon on LinkedIn; sending her a message saying, "I still remember that day."
“My job was to create image packages for the real estate industry. We would send out professional photographers, who would take photos of the space of the house, and then we created virtual tours.
“But we had retouching technology, so if the photographer had gone out and it was an overcast day, we would add a blue sky or whatever…completely normal practice now.
“But I remember it was a Saturday morning during the days before mobile phones and I got a call from my boss and he said to me, "Have you seen the newspaper today?" I said no, and he said, "I think you should go down and get the newspaper and then ring me back."
“I picked up the newspaper and there on the front page was this great big headline that said something like, "Real estate scam" or something, and it had a picture of an original house, and then it had a picture of the retouched image I had done.
“What I had done is accidentally cut out some power lines that were across the sky when I replaced the sky, because it had really dark clouds.
“They were basically reporting we were deceiving people because they couldn't see the house was under these power lines,” Sharon recalls.
The three-page print article (which ironically labelled Sharon as a Photoshop genius) inspired A Current Affair and Today Tonight story on television.
Luckily for Sharon, she was relatively protected by the company and contracts in place outlined clearly what I was supposed to do; including subbing in ‘blue sky’.
“It makes me laugh because I remember being so devastated, and questioning my ethics, whether I have been doing something really unethical by adding a blue sky.
“Of course, now, you jump onto Instagram and nothing's real. Everyone expects nothing is going to look like it does in the picture. It's definitely a different world now, but at the time I was quite devastated,” she admits.
So, what did Sharon learn from the experience and how did she move forward?
“I learned to first, certainly when I went into my next roles, really start asking myself, "Should I be doing this?"
“It was just like a warning, to always be conscious of what you're agreeing to do, and to make sure things sit well with you.
“One of the biggest things I've learned in my life and in business is whenever you make a mistake, you kind of always know you're doing it at the time.
“There's always a little uneasiness inside that you try and ignore, or you tell yourself you're just nervous, or whatever it is.
“It's very easy to talk it away, but most of the time you kind of know well in advance something doesn't feel right,” she cautions.
MARKET WATCH
Sharon admits another significant lesson learned was the error of not watching the market.
Through her first digital imaging business, Sharon moved into printing on mugs and t-shirts; even setting up a shop for her goods.
At the time, no one else was offering this service, so Sharon was able to make a good mark-up on all personalised products, such as a mug with a photo of someone and a special message printed on it.
“You could charge $30 for that. I had the business going for ages, but I was not watching the market and I did not see the shift in the world to big businesses buying in bulk and importing from overseas.
“It felt like overnight I went from having this great business that was doing really well and people would come from all over to get these personalised gifts and things made, to every single Officeworks and Kmart in the country offering this service and making the same products available at the cost it was costing me to make them,” Sharon reflects.
Sharon ended her once prosperous business that was now going nowhere.
“Always carve out some time in your schedule weekly or fortnightly, or at the minimum monthly, where you're trying to understand what the world is doing around you in your industry, or in other industries that might be a threat to your business,” she counsels.
FALSE SENSE OF SECURITY
In a similar vein, Sharon admits when looking ahead into 2021, one of the things that concerns her as someone observing the business world, is a possible false sense of security thanks to JobKeeper payments.
She suggests there may be a lot of businesses that are probably not sustainable at present.
“They may have been sustainable before COVID, they are probably not now, but people have a false sense of security because they have these payments that are coming in.
“A lot of people will not be making the changes now they need to make to be ready for those to drop off when we get to March,” Sharon predicts.
To those businesses, Sharon advises against complacency going in to 2021.
“Imagine now you don't have those payments and start planning, changing, whatever you need to do, to make sure you're going to be able to take your staff and your business forward, when they aren't there anymore,” she suggests.
WORKSPACE ODYSSEY
While Sharon runs a workspace similar to the SmartHub, the Gold Coast unit is more of an incubator space.
As more members move back to work as COVID restrictions relax, Sharon has already noticed the demand for having permanent space or having offices has nearly dropped off completely.
“Nearly everyone has got themselves quite comfortable with this balanced lifestyle of being able to work at home.
“That's not just in the startup space. That is when we are talking to our partners, so large accounting firms, huge companies are still doing half of their workforce are at home, half of them are coming in.
“I think that's going to continue. I sort of expect almost like workspace is going to become more of a social and a learning space, and then people will be working from home when they're trying to get key tasks done,” she predicts.
Sharon has also noticed more and more people are willing to ask for help, and a huge shift to digital.
“Companies that were previously only face-to-face, that have moved to digital for COVID, are now realising because that has saved them enormous amounts of overhead, it's a great channel to market, so they're looking now to create the right processes to broaden up their marketing channels, to get their messaging right, to be able to operate with far more of their business using online channels than really any other,” Sharon explains.
STARTING A BUISNESS IN THE NEW YEAR
What advice does Sharon offer to anyone who may be interested in taking an idea and turning it into a business in 2021?
Answer: reach out to someone who has done it before you.
“That can be through an incubator space or from joining Facebook groups. You want to have a support group around you, as you are launching this new initiative, especially if you've never launched a business before,” she advocates.
Sharon says while starting a business can be exciting at the beginning, everyone who undertakes the journey starts to see after the first three months, the journey is harder than first thought; particularly when leaving paid employment.
“You're seeing your money deplete, your savings depleting, you lose confidence in yourself, the conversations you thought you would have, the customers you thought you would have haven't turned out the way you thought they would.
“People do need to have a support network around them, even if it's just to help understand this is something everyone goes through,” she advises.
Having a support network is also helpful for goal setting and accountability, according to Sharon.
She advises to set yourself goals around where you want to be at, the conversations with customers, particular revenue targets, and work backwards.
“If you know you want to hit a particular target, say, "If I want to be making 10 grand a week in six months' time, then my average customer is paying this much. How many customers do I need to sign up every week?” she suggests.
Sharon also adopts the ‘10 before 10’ approach; whereby you schedule in ten key business priorities and do them by 10am.
Another go-to toolbox trick for productivity is having a to-do list.
“You need to know the things that you need to get done, and the next thing from that is something called the Eisenhower Matrix.
“The idea is you then take that list of tasks, and you work out is this urgent and important? Is it urgent and not important? Is it not important and urgent? And is it not urgent, not important?
“You separate that up, and then from there you work out, "Okay, these are the things I need to do immediately,” she illustrates.
Sharon is also part of an online community called Peak Persona, who run ‘Done Days’ for members; intervals of twenty-minute blocks of time to complete your to-do list in.
“You've got your tasks there, so you just pick a task and you do it for 20 minutes, no breaks. Have some concentration music playing, no phones, no messages, you just do the task.
“Then at the end of the 20 minutes, you stop, you have a drink, have something to eat, have a break, then you go back in,” Sharon explains.
Through this process, Sharon says she can get what would normally be an eight-hour days’ worth of work done in a four-hour day, because you are doing those concentrated chunks of work, with little breaks to refresh in between.
Productivity hacks such as these, coupled with a supportive team at the Gold Coast Innovation Hub has enabled Sharon to really start looking at what do we want to be focusing on for the hub for the future.
“We've been working on a lot of international partnerships and we've also been working on creating a lot of investment readiness type strategies, and programs, as well as different support structures we can put in place for people to access funding.
“Not necessarily investment, rather venture debt, or loans, but making sure they have the right structure within their business and security within their business to be able to fund their venture in a more appropriate way,” Sharon reveals.
Sharon Hunneybell is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer at The Gold Coast Innovation Hub (GC Hub); a not-for-profit organisation founded in 2017 by industry groups and key Gold Coast innovators.
The GC Hub aims to drive commercial success and to foster innovation and digital business creation within the Gold Coast and broader Australian community.
After many years of research into world class innovation cities, it was clear the primary ingredient in creating an innovation ecosystem is to create density – to bring much of the ecosystem together to foster collaboration and innovation.
The SmartHub encourages entrepreneurs and business owners to adopt technology and modern based business practice to make the entire business journey more profitable, more enjoyable, more effective, and more efficient.
Being part of the SmartHub gives local business owners opportunities to meet with and learn from mentors, to help them learn the discipline required to succeed in business.
The SmartHub is currently offering free membership now (usually $51 a month or more depending on level of membership). If you would like to learn more about becoming part of the SmartHub, contact us via the following channels:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SmartHubRockhampton/
Email: smarthub@rrc.qld.gov.au
Phone: 07 4936 8444