Charlie Gunningham's still on the lookout for opportunities despite the local success of his web-based business
MEMORABLE moments are something we all cherish.
On the night that aussiehome.com was conceived just more than a decade ago, founder Charlie Gunningham had two of them.
That was the night Mr Gunningham and his wife, Lisa, spent the night on stage at the Regal Theatre as the randomly chosen victims of internationally renowned entertainer and comedian, Barry Humphreys.
In what could have been a humiliating performance for both of them, the then schoolteacher and MBA graduate believes Dame Edna Everage sensed the sensitivity of his Singaporean-born wife and left them in relative peace to enjoy a dinner on stage as the comedian tore into other audience members.
“We had the best seats in the house, 40 minutes on stage,” Mr Gunningham says.
“Not once did he take the piss out of us.”
It was certainly a night to remember, and yet there was more.
“That night I got home and, of course, I remember it was that night, Nick was on the answer phone; he had the idea.”
Nick is Mr Gunningham’s MBA buddy, Nick Streuli, and the idea was online real estate, the germ that became aussiehome.com, the first internet site listing Perth property.
The pair, both foreigners new to Western Australia, had been seeking a business idea for some time. Mr Gunningham admitted that a return to teaching, at private boys school Hale, following his MBA had been difficult.
His studies at UWA had proved helpful but Mr Gunningham attributes a significant amount of aussiehome.com’s shift from concept to start-up to the assistance of one of his University of WA teachers, Andre Morkel.
Professor Morkel forced them to refine their ideas into a presentable shape.
“He then tapped us into his network,” Mr Gunningham says.
“The money was raised in two weeks.”
“A couple of MBA grads with a dot.com idea; it was almost to our advantage that we were not from here.”
Others from their course also assisted.
Mr Gunningham recalls the advice they received from visiting US-based professor, Jack Pandrai, a popular e-commerce lecturer at the MBA course, which helped them focus their business model.
“He asked ‘who is your customer?’,” Mr Gunningham says.
“We said home buyers, tenants, real estate agents.
“He said ‘no, don’t be greedy, work out who your client is – it is the one that pays the money, so build your system for them’.”
In the era of the internet where everything was free, the aussiehome.com founders chose real estate agents.
Rob Druitt, the immediate past president of the Real Estate Institute of WA, was a fellow MBA graduate with a real estate background who also provided sound advice for the fledgling internet entrepreneurs.
“He told us not to create any extra work for real estate agents and, if we could, reducing work for real estate agents would be even better,” Mr Gunningham told WA Business News.
With their initial funding set and a core market to focus on, the pair set about understanding what they had to do.
“We had wine and cheese nights in the early days and asked for their (real estate agents) problems, then we would try to solve them,” Mr Gunningham says.
“Most people don’t get aussiehome.com.
“It is the back end that really does it, in some ways it just about runs their office.”
But even the best business plans change. New to the internet and sharing the technology hype, the pair’s ambitions for aussiehome.com are reflected in the name, which has a national feel rather than the local flavour that evolved.
“One bit of good fortune was having started in Perth,” Mr Gunningham says.
“By the time we got to Melbourne in 2001 we realised we were too late.”
Interestingly, Mr Gunningham believes opportunities still lie elsewhere to replicate the aussiehome.com model, pointing to Singapore as a market with much less internet penetration than Perth.
Having worked as a school teacher in the South-East Asian island nation, he is fond of the idea of starting a business there, developing from a small base the company has in Indonesia.
However, a $5 million IPO attempt in 2007 to expand aussiehome.com to other markets, including South-East Asia, failed.
And while the expansion did not take place, leaving aussiehome.com as a niche player in WA with 150 of the estimated 450 independent real estate agents as clients, Mr Gunningham is not worried about being the local player amid the national giants.
His six-person office is active providing other online services to WA business through Aussie Web Solutions. The business also has a small programming team based in Delhi. He believes that the experience of running a commercial online business allows his firm to offer services to clients inside and outside the real estate sector much more cost effectively.
Mr Gunningham says he is appalled at some of the prices he sees WA businesses pay for web developers.
He puts a lot of time into things he feels passionate about. He is the inaugural chairman of eGroup, a new WA association for online entrepreneurs, and has a long association with the Graduate Management Association, the alumni organisation for UWA business school graduates.
"Without the MBA none of this would have happened," admits the school teacher
What are the unique challenges of your job?
I think the unique part of my job was (and still is) to explain to my clients the power of the new media, which is constantly evolving, often misunderstood and completely underused. It was especially hard in 1999 when we were trying to convert people onto web advertising. Today, 70 per cent of property enquiries come from internet sites. Nowadays, I have to show them what can be done with internet marketing, how to harness the power of social media sites, etc. Then there's selling to real estate agents - they are hard-nosed sales people themselves but in fact it's been a delight, and still is.
How would you like to be remembered?
Yikes! As someone who was honest and open, cheerful, hardworking and always brought useful new ideas to my clients, and also made sure the environment at work was one of 'happy productivity' where people were challenged, could perform and get personal rewards
Top business tip?
I'd encourage anyone with an idea, to really go for it. The cost of failure is not high in WA, and you'll learn; so there's nothing to lose really. Remember, that backers actually like people who've had a few failures, as they've learned a lot. So, go for it.
Three desert island items?
My iphone, a constant supply of Indian food (can't live without it), and a fantastically large hammock.
If you could have dinner with five famous people from history, who would they be?
JFK, Winston Churchill, Gandhi, Jesus, John Lennon.
