Interview: The app solving the biggest bugbear of small business

Published Dec 18, 2024, 4:30 PM

To grow a small business, you’ve got to master so many individual skills. And sole operators are doing it all themselves: the bookings, the invoicing, all of the paperwork, the marketing… and not to mention the job itself.

Now MYOB has developed an app specifically designed for sole operators - sole traders, freelancers, contractors, consultants, side hustlers and the self-employed.

MYOB Chief Executive Paul Robson talks to Sean Aylmer about the launch of the new Solo by MYOB app - the first of its kind to be based entirely on a mobile phone.

MYOB is a supporter of Fear & Greed

Welcome to the Fear and Greed Business Interview. I'm Sean Alma. We're big fans of small business in this podcast. To grow a small business, you've got to master so many individual skills, and when it comes to soul operators, you're doing it all the bookings, the invoicing, all the paperwork, the marketing, not to mention the actual job itself. Now, moyob has developed an app specifically designed for soul operators, sole traders, freelancers, contractors, consultants, side hustlers, self employed. The app is called Solo Solo Solo by moyob, and it uses a mobile phone to take away the hassle of admin entirely. Paul Robson is the CEO of moyob, which is a great supporter of this podcast. Paul, welcome to Fear and Greed.

Sean, thank you for having me back. And we are also big fans of smaller medium businesses.

Absolutely. Now, I want to get to solo in a minute, because to me, the bain of my existence is finding time to find sit down in front of my computer and kind of do all this sort of stuff. But just before we get to the app itself, you guys you deal with small business as medium sized businesses all the time. How much pressure is small and I suppose soul operators particularly, how much pressure are they under right now?

Yeah, I mean sure.

We definitely are in a very unique position in that we serve primarily the smaller medium business segment across Australia and New Zealand, and that is literally hundreds of thousands of.

Small and medium sized organizations.

And in that position, we have a very very unique view of how they are performing. We can see that through direct data feeds of kind of use on platform, number of invoices created, number of receipts that are being kind of processed, et cetera. So we can see a whole bunch of data confor of the system, and we anonymize that data and we provide that as a survey report. We call the perfectively the mob Business Monitor. And right now now it may not surprise any of your listeners to know that the small business community is under significant pressure. And there's two or three factors that are most important in the word that are creating the largest amount of that pressure. The first one is cost of living and the cost of just doing business. On the cost of living side, there's less disposable income in the economy, less people going out and buying that extra coffee, having that extra breakfast out, or buying another product or service from a small business, and that's a little worrying coming into a holiday period such as now. On the cost of business side, it really is the cost of capital, interest rates, it's the cost of some of the input pieces like electricity. So they are being hit a little bit from both directions right now, less kind of money in the market being spent on goods and services, and it's more expensive to run and operate a business that it is today than it has been the past.

And is this the cross industries.

Interestingly, I'll give you two breakdowns. Sure, I'll give you a buy sector, and I'll give it to you by state. It's standard across all states with the exception of Western Australia. So Western Australia is the only geographical state region that we're seeing small businesses actually doing better than the other kind of regions. And by sector, the two sectors that are performing better than the others right now are agriculture and that's been driven a lot by just livestock prices and crop prices and the other one is a health and well being and the health and wellbeing piece has been driven by two pieces, one generally an aging population and secondly just the level of immigration that we have into the country at the moment of propping up both of those two, the ones that are being hurt the most will be of no surprise. But really is hospitality, retail the areas that are very quickly impacted when there's an impact of disposable income.

So let's go on to sole operators. Why do sole opera actually asking a question out the answer of because I'm in this exact but why is it that we do everything so manually? Why is it that we rely on spread?

Well, it's probably worthwhile defining what a sole operator is. First true, a sole operator, generally speaking, is someone who is running a non employing entity. That's how we generally kind of define that that operator. It's not necessarily someone whose entire job is doing that functional or creating a business, because in many cases, a sole operator is someone running effectively a side hustle. There may be someone working in an established organization or a large corporation, or working in a government department that he's doing something on a weekend. Could be anything from creating something that they're selling at a local market. It might be someone who has a hobby farm. It might be someone who's providing services. It might be a freelancer. It might be a creative person who is, you know, sculpting in the backyard or selling paintings. It literally covers so many spectrums of industries, but the main definition is an entity that is not employing and effectively has The person who is operating the entity is the person running the entity, and as you.

Said a second ago, they're generally.

Not very focused on using digital technology, and in many cases that's because of the way they started that entity. They've started, usually doing something on a very small scale, and it may build up over time. The scale may increase over time, but before they know it, they've got puts and takes, ins and outs of that of the business happening. But they never set up the digital foundation in the first place, and so that results in them in some cases running their business with a shoe box full of receipts and an Excel spreadsheet, or they're generating invoices using Microsoft Word or a PDF, and so they start having all these different kind of functions around their business. And one of the other things that's super interesting is small businesses that are running as a sole operator in many cases don't differentiate their bank account between the bank accounts they may be accepting their salary into and also the bank account that they're operating the business in. So they therefore, and why is that important? It means that sometimes it masks the ability for them to really understand the cash flow of the business that they're running.

Wow, that that part surprises me. I suppace. The point here is that you if you have an app like Solo and you get yourself away from those microsot the word invoices and away from the spreadsheets and all that, you're actually going to save yourself a lot of time and be much much more efficient. Only when it comes to find out who's paid you know, who paid that invoice, it's actually how to chase that down unless you've got software like this.

Yeah, I mean so, in terms of numbers, there's about one point five million small business operators that are operating as non employee entities. So that's the size of the market of those one point five and by the way, that's sixty one.

Percent of business entities in the country.

So the vast majority business entities in Australia are sole operating entities, over half of that number, so call it around six hundred seven hundred thousand.

We believe our data.

Shows us are not using digital technology to run their business.

So what happens?

What's the difference if you do by using an app like Solar by moob and sold by Moobs a native, a mobile native. Think about it as like an assistant in your pocket. And what it does is it allows you to create on the fly invoices. So you can be at a bus stop, at a cafe, wherever you are and you can literally on your phone creating invoice, or you can recognize a receipt and start an accounting workflow.

The ability for you to do that on the fly means that you're staying.

Up today with the day to day, minute by minute actions inside your business. And then our data on that shows for the customers that are currently using Solo by Moob that they're saving up to seventeen hours a week of administrative burden just by staying on top of those actions as they happen, rather than leaving them and doing a whole kind of bunch of work at the end of the week and impacting on time.

And if there is one thing that small.

Small business operators tell us that they do not have anyone you're enough of, it's time.

It's time for a couple of reasons.

Sometimes to run that will many many cases, to run the business, but also sometimes they want some time back with their family and their friends to be able to continue to have that social engagement.

And so anything that gives time back, it's not just.

About the financial benefit of being able to use that time in billable hours, but it's also about giving sole operators time back in their week to do other activities.

Stay with me, Paul, we'll be back in a minute. My guest this morning is Paul Robson, CEO of m IOB. Does AI fit into this at all?

AI is really important? Obviously, the world's exploding in terms of AI.

You know, I wouldn't be running a software or a technology company unless I could talk to you about how AI is impacting the market and the world.

And certainly in this.

Solid by NYB is built with AI all the way through it in a number of different features, and I'll call a couple of them out. One is we use AI in a feature to do the categorization of receipts.

Think about solo by NYB.

Not only is a tool that allows you to create an invoice or to recognize a receipt, but it also very importantly starts the ATO ready process for account keeping that you need to do to be able to submit your tax return. So the ability to create an invoice or to recognize the receipt is one thing to capture that, it's an entirely different thing to start what effectively is the journal entry that then moves through the ledger and ultimately results in you having a set of financial statements that you can use to submit your tax return. And that process is so important. An He's deeply connected to the create the invoice or recognize the receipt, and we use a whole bunch of AI technology to kind of create those workflows. Another part of the AIP that we use, which is super important is there are a lot of people that are running businesses that aren't necessarily digitally literate. In many cases, there are also people that may recently arrived to Australia where English isn't their first language, and so we use a whole bunch of AI.

Tools to help with the onboarding journey and.

The step by step process of helping our customers understand how to use the technology, get it up and running, and how to kind of use the features inside the app.

Okay, Sarloe by miob also has a community basis to it as well. Tell me about that.

Yeah, the community piece is one of the most important things for us in this context when we research the one and a half million sole operators in the Australian market and we look to build out a product that met their needs in their requirements.

That's what we've done.

We've built out a phenomenal product that is going to save time, save money, drive efficiency, drive productivity and help digitize a smaller medium business or there's certainly display in this case the sole operate a part of the market.

We're super excited about that. The one thing that we learned as we went through that.

Discovery and build process is that sole operators are actually quite lonely, and they're lonely because they're operating solely. They don't have an office environment, they don't have colleagues to go talk to, and so one of the things that came through very clearly, our research was those customers wanted to be part of a community, to learn from each other, to engage from each other, to share tips and tricks, to understand what might be working for you over there and me over here. And so one of the features that we built out inside Solo by MYOB is.

A really strong focus on.

The community, and there's a whole portal that allows like minded customers to talk to each other, share their experiences, and engage in a community, provide that connection that you would otherwise not normally have as a solo operator.

Fantastic Paul, thank you for talking to Fear and Greed.

Sean, thank you so much for having us that it was.

Paul Robson, CEO of NYOB, which is a great supporter of this podcast. This is the Fear and Greed Daily Interview. Join us every morning for the full episode of Fear and Greed Daily Business years for people who make their own decisions. I'm Sean Elmer. I enjoy your day.