My biggest mistake: Luke Anear, founder of SafetyCulture

As founder and chief of Queensland-based tech unicorn SafetyCulture, Luke Anear has done a fair few things right. Yet back as a fresh-faced entrepreneur, he took a few wrong turns.

Founded in 2004, SafetyCulture helps businesses and organisations to operate safely and efficiently, giving staff the opportunity to highlight any concerns or room for improvement.

Today it’s used by more than 28,000 organisations around the world. But the product didn’t get that kind of traction right away.

In the end, Anear had to rethink every ‘traditional’ sales rule he knew. And it paid off in spades.

The mistake

It may seem counterintuitive, but Anear tells SmartCompany his biggest mistake in business was trying to sell his product.

He and his team had created something they believed other businesses would want, rather than creating something they actually needed and letting it speak for itself.

In the early days, from around 2004, SafetyCulture had a team of telemarketers contacting businesses to offer up physical documents on how to run policies and procedures, he recalls.

In 2007, the business moved entirely online — a move that would change the way Anear thought about business forever.

“It completely changed my life. And it changed the life of all our staff,” Anear says.

“I made the decision after that that I would never go back to selling anything to anyone again.”

The context

These were the early days of SafetyCulture and the early days of web marketing.

“I didn’t understand digital marketing, I didn’t understand SEO,” Anear admits.

When it came to reaching customers, the ‘traditional’ way was to get out there and find them.

“You knock on the doors, you walk the pavement or you give them a phone call.”

These traditional methods were all Anear knew at the time, he explains. They were the best ideas he had.

Over time, he started to learn more about how he could use the web to help customers find the business, rather than the other way around.

Soon he realised this was a “beautiful way of doing business”, he adds.

“It’s way more enjoyable.”

The impact

Operating within these ‘traditional’ bounds of business meant SafetyCulture was expensive, and exhausting, to run.

“The amount of time and energy that goes into running a sales team is enormous,” Anear says.

It was also proving difficult for the founder to hire the kinds of people he wanted in the business. The best employees don’t want to spend their time trying to sell things to people who neither want or need them, he explains.

Ultimately, SafetyCulture may not have grown to the $2.2 billion success story it is today if Anear had not made a change.

“I was exhausted,” he says.

“I knew running the telemarketing model was not the future.”

The fix

Things turned around when Anear and the team launched their web browser, initially as a way to reach customers more easily.

Once they swotted up on SEO, search marketing and Google Ad Words, it became clear this also allowed customers to search for what they needed, and stumble across SafetyCulture organically.

When SafetyCulture released its now-flagship inspection product iAuditor, the App Store provided yet another avenue for attracting business.

“Customers don’t want a product or feature, they want a solution to their problem,” Anear says.

“We were constantly finding more and more customers every day that were coming to us online from all over the world.”

The change made the business more efficient, with less time wasted on fruitless outbound marketing efforts.

It also had a positive effect on the culture at the startup. By shifting the focus to the solutions, Anear was finally able to hire people who wanted to be part of a solutions-driven company.

“You’re going to attract people who genuinely care about problem solving, and who genuinely care about customers and helping people, rather than people who are motivated by money,” he explains.

“You end up with a more fulfilled team.”

That in turn has an impact on the kinds of investors and customers the business was able to attract, which inevitably led to faster growth.

The lesson

The lesson Anear would pass on to other founders is a simple one: “Don’t sell products to people. Position your product where customers who want them can find them.”

This may sound like something easier said than done. But Anear says today’s technology allows for it.

Within a day or so, anyone can build an ad campaign, advertise using Google AdWords and start selling a product.

It’s perfecting the product and the user experience that’s the tricky bit, he says.

“I think it is quite easy actually to find your customers to do it at scale,” he adds.

“You can actually take a product to market easier than ever now.”