Sendle | James Chin Moody
Conversation with James Chin Moody
James Chin Moody is the co-founder and CEO of Sendle, a company that makes sending parcels for small businesses super easy. Sendle is also Australia’s first technology B Corporation and the first 100% carbon neutral delivery service. James is a game-changer who through great technology, design and teamwork has built a strong shipping and logistics network that makes a huge difference to their customers in Australia and the United States. We chat to James about their incredible approach to sustainability and the future of shipping in Australia for small business owners.
“We’ve sent deliveries far enough, we’ve now crossed nine billion parcel kilometers… That’s the equivalent of sending a one-ton truck with a parcel in it from here to Neptune and back”
James is totally in sync with our beliefs here at One Wild Ride - that business can be a force for good in this world.
With this strong belief James has ensured that Sendle had a strong sustainable approach from the get go. The first step was becoming Australia’s first technology B Corporation, which sets the highest standards of ethical practices and corporate responsibility.
Sendle’s approach to sustainability is so refreshing, they really look at all aspects - from their carbon impact, packaging and energy source. Recently Sendle even launched the first off-grid supply chain for their client, Bonds. The fleet is powered from the solar panels on the company's storage hub so that the electric vehicles can deliver to destinations around Sydney all day (for at least 10 hours from the first charge).
What is also impressive is that the company has a heavy focus on supporting small businesses who otherwise pay more and get less for their shipping. Sendle offers a premium service by unlocking shipping networks, services and prices normally reserved for bigger companies.
In a few short years, Sendle has already enabled over half a billion dollars of small business GDP in Australia, supporting small sellers to compete with the big guys. It has done this at the same time as becoming Australia’s highest rated national courier, with an NPS 50 points higher than the national average.
During COVID-19, Sendle has helped tens of thousands of small businesses in Australia and the United States make the shift to eCommerce for the first time.
We hope you enjoy this chat with James, Sendle is really a remarkable contender in the shipping industry and its focus on small business has helped create a more level playing field at the time when they need it most.
Mentioned in conversation…
The environmental approach that sets this global delivery service apart
How they ensure a sustainable focus throughout their business, from delivery emissions, to packaging and energy approach
How small businesses will thrive coming out of COVID19
The recent shipping integration with Shopify and what else is next for Sendle
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Full Podcast Transcript - James Chin Moody, Sendle
Pru:
Hey, James. Welcome to the show.
James Chin Moody:
Thanks for having me, Pru.
Pru:
I'm so glad that you're here, particularly because it seems like everyone is talking about Sendle right now and for all of the right reasons. There's so much going on at Sendle. I've got so many questions lined up to pepper you with because you're doing some incredible stuff, not only around the logistics but around all of the sustainability of the COVID stuff so plenty of juice to dive into today. I thought it would be helpful for our listeners to get a little bit of background because you've been quite busy in building your career to date. It's been a very dynamic career path. I was hoping that you could walk our listeners through where you started and some of the roles that have led you to where you are today.
James Chin Moody:
Yeah, it has been quite a winding road you might say. Originally, I'm a satellite engineer so I had nothing to do with logistics at all. I was part of the team that built Australia's first satellite in 30 years called FedSat, and this is around about 20 years ago now with Australian Federation. We launched that. It was great. It taught me a lot about building things that last and also a lot around systems and how systems work.
James Chin Moody:
After that, I actually worked with a friend. We took a company that was previously doing data processing, and we merged it with a satellite data company and really the focus was environmental intelligence, which is really where I got very deep into the environmental space. We did a lot of work with around the drought at the time, really looking at how we could use data to improve both Australia's agriculture but also its environment at the same time.
James Chin Moody:
From there, I went to the CSIRO. I was seven years, started off at the land and water division of CSIRO, amazing journey, some of the smartest folk I've ever met and ended up looking after all of the external engagement activities for the CSIRO, everything from business development to international activities to government relations to indeed the future. Really trying to appeal to the next 10 or 20 years and see what might hold in that world before then and leading and deciding that I wanted to go back to building, which was when the Sendle journey began.
Pru:
Incredible. You've definitely accumulated a long list of accolades along the way, which I'll share for our listeners in the intro when I go back and do that. Along the way, it becomes really apparent to me as I was prepping for our interview and looking into your history and what you've been doing that you're really dedicated to positively impacting our planet and really where innovation collides with that. Along the way, you also authored The Sixth Wave. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about that?
James Chin Moody:
Yeah. I'm a complete nerd basically. With all that, I did a PhD in this wonderful topic called innovation theory, which is really looking at the theory of technological change and how effectively technology shapes economies, societies, business. One of the things that was really interesting as I started to peer into that, and you might remember at the time I was doing a lot of work in the environment movement, was this theory of what they call Kondratieff Waves or long waves of innovation. These are waves that generally they can last for 30 to 40 years. They start with a lot of disruption, a lot of business model innovation, a lot of new technologies coming along. They eventually coalesce around what they call dominant designs, whether that's AC power or Microsoft Windows, and then they actually end with a global depression.
James Chin Moody:
What was really interesting at the time, and this is around the mid 2000s is we were starting to see the end of what they call the fifth wave. These waves ever since the Industrial Revolution were basically starting off with milling then moved to steam then electrification then mass production and then information and communications technologies. We were really seeing and we have seen I think the transition from the fifth to the sixth wave. Really what the book was trying to do is start to articulate the case that we are seeing a tradition of the wave. One of the central tenets of that wave, and I still think it's playing out very much so, is that really the wave where you use resources or effectively resource efficiency becomes one of the major drivers of that wave. Indeed, that's been one of the major drivers of Sendle as we built the business as well.
Pru:
Incredible, The Sixth Wave. What was the response like to that book?
James Chin Moody:
Look, lots of credit. We even had, for example, for one year, Deloitte even used it to drive their innovation agenda, which was really exciting. Really good response. I think for me, the best thing was when I meet somebody and they say, "We've actually started to use it to shape our investment portfolio" because really that was the intent, pointing out ... Again, this comes to what we tried to build with Sendle, is the central thesis is that if you can get your business model right and you can align things up in the right way, you can actually do good business and also do good for the world. In the old days, it's a really interesting thought, in the old days, perhaps some of these things were in competition. If you wanted to do really well, you had to dig more stuff out the ground or you had to chop more things off, chop more trees down or whatever it might be.
James Chin Moody:
However, in a world where resource efficiency is a driver, there's all these business models that start to unearth that say, "You know what? If we can be more efficient, if we can identify idle capacity, if we can identify waste and turn it into something that's useful, well, then actually we can do better business. That was the thing that we found. Really, The Sixth Wave was I guess you might call a theoretical underpinning for that shift, really trying to ... Again, I was a bit nerdy, but I was very fortunate that I had a wonderful coauthor, Bianca, and she was a science journalist and she helped to make it readable because she has such an amazing way with words. Together, we really created this deep theoretical underpinning I believe of how you can start to change business models to align, positive impact on the environment and society together with good business.
Pru:
I couldn't agree more, and that is definitely a central theme of a lot of the incredible businesses that I get to talk to here on One Wild Ride. I think as you said, there's resource efficiencies, but I also think from the human perspective as well, as we're increasingly becoming aware of what's happening in our world, there's also when businesses do make this transition, there is the goodwill component. There's the values alignment component. It has the technology and the resource side of things, but also the human element to it as well and the support of the market, I would say, in those ways also.
James Chin Moody:
Yeah. I think you're actually right. Again, we wrote this book many, many years ago. I think if I write it again today, I'd be probably building much more in that space as well. I think where we got it right was that these shifts saying, okay, where we got wrong is we're working too small. Really again, if you think about e-commerce, there was a recent report that showed that 72% of folk purchasing now believe that ethical considerations are one of their top three factors in terms of making a purchase decision. That's a huge shift in sentiment that's going on.
James Chin Moody:
It's not just about the environment. It is actually about the community. We'll probably talk about COVID later on, but we're seeing that shift just being accelerated like mad right now. Yeah, I think you really do need to think about what's your social license to operate? What's your role in the community? How am I helping? What are we doing to create positive impact across all the dimensions of our business? Whether it's our customers, our suppliers, our customers' customers, all the different areas, what are we doing to help create positive change?
Pru:
That is an incredible start, and I couldn't agree with you more. Also, as you said, it used to be that these things might have been in competition to each other and so you can do good or you can have a profitable business, but actually what we're seeing now is when the two come together, it's an "and" model. When you do this, this also happens. When you do the right thing, you're also going to be largely profitable. That's a really nice space that we're moving into with business.
James Chin Moody:
I think it's also about timeframes too. It's interesting even if in the short term. When we started Sendle, we decided that every single delivery, we needed to take responsibility for the carbon emissions. We've been 100% carbon neutral from day one, every single parcel we've ever sent. In the short term, you could say those things are in competition. Why would you spend the money to offset? Why would you spend the time to build this?
James Chin Moody:
I think that can still be the case sometimes, but in the long term, they align. Now we have a business where we can actually help our merchants to sell better because they're shipping 100% carbon neutral. We have a business that doesn't have contingent liabilities around when we put a price on carbon that's insulated for most areas. In the short term, they could still be opposition. Ideally not because there are all these options available to us, but I think in the long term, those things really line up as well.
James Chin Moody:
You can see businesses who don't invest in this now stand to pay the price and losing their social license to operate or fine, they've got all these contingent liabilities because they didn't think about how do they align their positive impact in the world that their purpose for being, they didn't think about that early enough and built it into their business model from day one.
Pru:
I love it. I know that our listeners are just going to be juicing up on every word here. James, for our listeners that are new to Sendle, can you tell us a little bit about how it works?
James Chin Moody:
Yeah. Basically Sendle, we're a career, we're a parcel delivery company. What we found is that actually, when you really look at parcel delivery, we realized there was one segment of the market that was very much underserved, and that's the small business part of the market. There are all these small businesses out here, and to be really frank, they're paying a lot more than they should and they're getting a lot less.
James Chin Moody:
We actually found this quite accidentally. We're originally a giving marketplace. Effectively, you might think of it as a place where you give things away. I had two young children, my co-founder, and what we realized was that needed a really good logistics service, but basically everything was so expensive to ship things around and really inconvenient. What we found, and this is going back to that question of efficiency, we found that the real issue is that there's not heaps of trucks on the road. There's plenty of trucks driving things around. It's just that those trucks are actually part empty.
James Chin Moody:
At Sendle, we found a way of actually unlocking the capacity of these large enterprise networks that are generally only reserved for the really big guys. We found a way to unlock that, connect it together in really interesting ways, to the point where we can now deliver a parcel to anywhere in Australia and indeed anywhere in the world. We can do that, and we have a price guarantee that we can actually do it cheaper than aligning up with the post office. We'll pick that up from door to door. These days in the world of post-COVID, we'll do it absolutely contactless. We'll pick up a parcel from your door and deliver it to anywhere in the world. That became ...
James Chin Moody:
What was interesting is we realized there's this huge need around small business parcel delivery, helping those small businesses to thrive, to level the playing field with big business. At the same time, in the other side, we found a way of unlocking capacity and making the entire network more efficient. That's what Sendle became.
Pru:
Absolutely incredible. It's interesting. I was just talking to Trent Innes from Xero. Same thing with Xero. They just saw this huge gap in the market of why isn't anyone servicing small businesses well? They make up this huge component to our economy, and yet they're just not getting a fair deal on most things. That's what really props up a lot of our economy. I'd love to know, prior to Sendle coming around, really it was Australia Post that everyone was reliant on. What makes Sendle different I guess, really radically different from Australia Post?
James Chin Moody:
The really interesting thing that we've been able to do, and to your point, you can't be everything to everyone. You can either be 80% good to 100% of the market or you can be 100% good to even 20% of the market. You have to make a choice. This is what companies like Xero and others do. They have a choice.
James Chin Moody:
The first thing to really say is we are the only courier that's 100% built to the needs of small business. Everything we do is about trying to serve folk who may only have a few things to send every day or even one thing but we are built for them. What that allows us to do is to really ... We've got flat national rates. We have a price guarantee that we're cheaper. We're the only 100% carbon neutral national delivery service. We have support that's built around the needs of small business. What really we found that by focusing just on a few folk, you can be so much better for them. That's what set Sendle apart.
Pru:
Amazing. You've had some really rapid growth since launching. Was it word of mouth? What was really key behind that growth? Was it just that the small business market had been serviced so poorly for so long? Was that what was sitting behind the growth?
James Chin Moody:
Yeah. I think it was a funny combination. When we started, as I mentioned, we were just a giving network. I was actually the primary carer for our two boys at the time. My wife had moved on and she was doing a really massive job, and so I was looking after the boys.
James Chin Moody:
My co-founder and I, we were building this business, which is all about helping people reuse stuff in their home. To start off with, believe it or not, it was actually some eBay sellers who started to use that giving network. I don't know if you call it hacking, but basically, they'd sell something on eBay and then they pretend to give the item to the same person and will be like, "I will put something on here and say for Pru, and you are the only person who could request it." It was basically taking advantage of the shipping rates that we had and the fact that we were door to door and the fact that we're carbon neutral. They really liked that. They were the ones who originally showed us that there was an opportunity here.
James Chin Moody:
As we started to dig in the space, as you say, it started off, it was just word of mouth. We launched Sendle as a standalone business. Within two months, the volume was basically more than the volume that we're doing in the marketplace after 18 months, and it just took off from there. Really, I think the first thing is they call it product-led marketing or whatever you might call it. If you have a product that adds real value to customers, well, then, folks start telling each other about it. Of course, after that, then there are other things like partnerships and things like that that we've been building over time, but really at the very heart, it's about can you create something that's great for customers.
Pru:
Exactly. People absolutely align with it. We've mentioned this marketplace, which sat before Sendle, so I feel like I need to rewind a little bit because, like you said, this is where it spurred on from. Take us back a little bit. This is to share. When you were at home and, like you said, you were the primary caregiver for your two kids, what were you actually doing then? Talk us through that.
James Chin Moody:
Yeah. The original, I had finished up at CSIRO. My wife and I both had taken some time off to recharge and we had basically about a six-month-old and a two-year-old at the time. I think we realized because you can have it all but you can't have it all at the same time, so to speak, and it is all about taking turns and it's all about doing things the right way. We realized that to raise the family and to do things the way we wanted to, it was time I was going to become the primary carer for the next five years. Really, I looked at the ... I realized that what I loved to do was build. I love building things that actually have a positive impact in the world. My thought process is all back to again thinking about where is there idle capacity? Where are there things that could otherwise be used that are currently waste? We came to the idea of creating a network of people just giving things to each other.
James Chin Moody:
For anybody who has got young children, they'll probably realize that there's a pressing need there. The amount of stuff that you own pretty much doubles by weight over the course of about a three-month period. After years, you then spend the next little time trying to work out where to give it, how to make use of it so it doesn't end up in the bin. That was the central idea.
James Chin Moody:
Funnily enough, in hindsight, what we had done is we've chosen a logistics use case that very few others have really tried to tackle before, which was this idea of very small scale friction-less because the irony is that if you're giving something away, you won't tolerate any pain. You won't tolerate any faffing about with the logistics. We used to joke that our competition was the rubbish bin. How could you create a logistics service that was as easy as using the bin? That's pretty [crosstalk 00:18:54].
Pru:
Absolutely.
James Chin Moody:
It's a stiff competition. Yeah. Really all of our focus from that business and still leads the legacy today was how to remove all the friction out of getting an item from one person to another and working with folk who are sending very small scale logistics. Those are the pieces that taught us how to do the delivery that we now do.
Pru:
I love it because otherwise, here you are with all of your kids' clothes that they grew out of in three weeks and you want to give them away, but you're the one that ends up having to go to the post office and line up and pay the fees which are maybe even worth more than what the shirt and the pair of pants are actually worth. It's a hindrance to the sharing economy.
James Chin Moody:
Yeah. Really the idea was if you removed the friction enough because the sharing economy is always this trade-off on one side where you've got to offset maybe some inconvenience, sometimes not but together with additional resources' utilization. That's a central, what would you call it, equation of the sharing economy. Yeah. For us, the whole thing was to try to remove as much pain and as much friction as we possibly could from the delivery experience.
Pru:
Amazing. Just how big is Sendle now?
James Chin Moody:
It's been an amazing journey. It was 2015 when we launched. We now operate in Australia and the US. Probably the best way of describing it is we've sent enough parcels or sent delivery far enough, we've now crossed nine billion parcel kilometers. We're chasing Voyager. That's the equivalent of sending a one-ton truck with a parcel in it from here to Neptune and back.
Pru:
Wow.
James Chin Moody:
[crosstalk 00:20:53] It's been an amazing journey. We're very excited because again, we think of our purpose as shipping that's good for the world and we measure our impact and there's really around a couple of dimensions. One is are we helping small businesses to thrive? We've underpinned around a billion dollars of small business GMB in Australia. Really trying to help those small businesses thrive. Our other way of measuring ourselves is are we helping to transition transport and logistics towards a more sustainable way of operating? That starts with 100% carbon neutral parcel delivery, but also it's trying to look at areas like packaging. We launched the first compostable packaging both in Australia and the US, for example, from a courier. Those are the areas that we've been operating in.
Pru:
Incredible. You mentioned that you are in the US. Was it November last year you went into the US and right before the Christmas rush but you also had the boldness to set up in Seattle which is the home town of Amazon?
James Chin Moody:
Yes. It's interesting. We-
Pru:
Coincidence much, James?
James Chin Moody:
What was really interesting is Seattle is an amazing city. I've spent a lot of time there now. Really culturally, the pacific northwest in America is amazing. It's awesome. There's this very, if I dare say, everyone is so thoughtful and really polite. It was quite amazing. When we looked at the west coast, and for anyone setting up any Australian businesses, looking to set up in the US, a lot of things can change, but the one thing you can't change is timezone. For us, it had to be on the west coast. When we looked up and down the west coast, Seattle was a clear winner because of the cultural aspect because, yes, it's a good center of e-commerce and logistics in America right now, but also the folk. We're very deep into making sure that we've got a culture in the business that we think of as 5H, humble, honest, happy, hungry and hyper-performing people, and we found that Seattle was full of those folks.
Pru:
Incredible. How was it launching into the US?
James Chin Moody:
Daunting. The market in the US, just e-commerce, is somewhere around 25 times the size of Australia. That's a daunting thing. I guess what we stayed focused on is the fact that the same need exists there that really small businesses are paying more than they should and they're getting less than they deserve. As we stayed focused on that, our product really started to emerge. We've been very fortunate that the market adoption there has been really, really strong and really positive.
Pru:
Incredible. I want to flick our lens over to good business because this has been obviously a passion of yours and sits right at the core of Sendle. An alarming stat that I read was that over 10% of global carbon emissions actually come from transport and logistics. It's a huge amount, isn't it?
James Chin Moody:
It is, particularly when you think that with COVID, with the shift to e-commerce, that's about to ... In some models, it's going up by 50% or even doubling in the short term. We realized that when we were building Sendle, one of our central tenets, you might say, was taking responsibility for the deliveries but actually taking responsibility for, again I'll nerd out for a second, the externalities that you create when you deliver a parcel.
James Chin Moody:
I actually think there's a really big opportunity right now for all logistics companies as they're all rethinking themselves with a giant shift to e-commerce to also say, okay, can we take responsibility for our delivery as well? What can we do to start offsetting the negative externalities in our business? Which one of them? One of the biggest ones is the carbon emissions.
Pru:
I couldn't agree more. I think as we do come through COVID, the world is just recalibrating itself at the moment and there's a huge opportunity. I think over the past few months for businesses, they've had to have a good look at themselves and particularly as ... I really think that we've learned to live with less, and also that people are just more, I want to say considered in the purchasing decisions that they've made because they're buying less at the moment but they're buying better. There is a real opportunity there for business. As we say, we're not going into this sustainability or profit. The two can really go together really well. I definitely hope that that moves ahead.
James Chin Moody:
I think one of the things, and this is where I get really excited, yes, it might have been the case 10 years ago that it really was making a choice. In fact, we've been trained. It was interesting. In the early days of Sendle, we actually didn't talk much about being carbon neutral. We just did it. One of the reasons was because we found if we talked about being carbon neutral, everybody assumed we are more expensive. It was really sad.
Pru:
Yeah.
James Chin Moody:
We had been trained that way, to think of sometimes being sustainable is a luxury. You check out of the flight and asked if you want to pay extra for being carbon offset, all those things. In the early days, it was always like we're just talking, you'll save money on your parcel. Do you agree? That was great. We let folk know once they were using us, by the way, here's a logo. You can actually tell your customers yourself that you are now shipping 100% carbon neutral. It was almost like if we said that too early, everyone would just switch off and say, "Oh, this is too expensive." I think the world is changing in that way. If you think hard and you look around and you find opportunity and waste and idle capacity scenarios, sometimes you can actually get a more sustainable but also more efficient solution.
Pru:
Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. I have to ask. I'm sure our listeners are wondering. How do you achieve environmental sustainability in an industry that is as highly polluting as shipping?
James Chin Moody:
We look at it, like everything, there's no real silver bullet, silver buckshot you might say. We look at it first as can we make the entire logistics industry more efficient? We start by we're filling idle capacity. This is where we save money as well in networks without compromising quality, mind you. We really do look at how we can get capacity and even, for example, one of the hallmarks of that was even when we speak surge in e-commerce over COVID, our delivery performance while it went down a bit was maximum one day suffering. We were really able to use that idle capacity in our network. That's the first thing, look for efficiencies.
James Chin Moody:
The second thing that we did then after that is anything that remains, we made sure that we offset. We took responsibility. We built it into the product. Indeed, our customers actually get to vote every year on where they would like offsets to go because it's not an optional thing. It's just part of what we do.
James Chin Moody:
The third thing we're doing actually, and this is again what you get to do when you start to hit a certain scale, is we're now also trying to see where we can swap out parts of the network for even more sustainable options. We're really proud. Just a week ago, we launched the first ever 100% off the grid fleet. With one of our providers, Bonds, we worked with them. We now have a fleet which is completely off the grid. They're harvesting energy from their roof to their depot. They use that to basically charge their electric vehicles. The fleet has enough charge to be able to travel all around Sydney for 10 hours or more without having to go back and recharge, which is pretty phenomenal. Again, it's great.
Pru:
That's incredible.
James Chin Moody:
It's off the grid. What I love about that, it's actually identifying the fact that there was an idle asset that they had, which is the roof of their building. They were collecting all this heat and not doing anything with it. Now they utilize it in their building more efficiently. They're now independent of any fuel price fluctuations. Their business is more robust. Of course, from our perspective, it actually helps us to further push down on our promise of moving towards 100% carbon ... not just 100% carbon neutral delivery, but actually closed circle, circulate parcel delivery, which is what we really want to get to.
Pru:
What I love about that is then it also helps the small businesses who are all trying to improve their sustainability as well. One thing connects to the next, connects to the next. It's an incredible offering. How clever, like you say, the idle capacity sitting there, not just the empty trucks but the sun coming on to the roof as well. Who thinks of their roof as idle capacity?
James Chin Moody:
Yes. It really is true. Once you start looking at ... There's this great saying called waste equals opportunity that waste is unsellable production is the other way you can think about it. There are whole businesses that are built on this idea. As a little aside, I remember there was a beer company in Canada. I looked into it at one stage, who realized that they could use their waste process from brewing beer and they could use it to grow mushrooms. There came a beer mushroom company. The mushrooms changed the waste so it could become fish food. It became a beer, mushroom and fish food company. For companies to really think about how they do that.
James Chin Moody:
Yeah. If you put your waste goggles on, you can identify waste all through the chain and it becomes a matter of, well, can we utilize this? Maybe not now. Again, there's a question of scale with some of these things, but definitely you can work towards it.
Pru:
I can imagine that all our listeners are doing exactly what I'm doing at the moment, which is looking around my studio here thinking, "All right. What is idle around here that I could be making the most of?" It's such a unique way to look at things because it's not about necessarily creating something new. It's about using what's underutilized already. Yes, some good thinking behind that one. I love it.
Pru:
Now, Sendle is also Australia's first technology B Corp. A lot of the businesses that we interview here are B Corps, which is an incredible organization obviously. Being the first technology B Corp through the process, did you have to rewrite some rules or put some extra rules in there? How is the experience of going through that?
James Chin Moody:
Look, I value the B Corp process a lot. I think the reason why we became a B Corp very, very early on is because we wanted to ... Again, it's one thing to say stuff, but it's when you take action and build it into the core of your business. One of the things I liked about the B Corp model was not only becoming accredited as a B Corp but if you can, and we managed to do this, you actually write being a B Corp into your very constitution. What that means is you actually say that when you make decisions, you're doing it on behalf of all stakeholders, not just shareholders. That's written into Sendle's constitution.
James Chin Moody:
For me, it was a way of really, at the very heart of the business, saying you know what? We thrive when we do positive things for the world, and we're going to build that in from day one. Yeah, it's been a great journey with the B Corp community in that. As we say, we serve a lot of B Corps. Interestingly, one of our investors is Giant Leap who invest in B Corps. That's helped with that.
James Chin Moody:
It has also helped us, funnily enough on the other side, we originally had one investor who wanted to invest in Sendle, and one of their conditions was that we would un-B Corp-ify. I don't even know if that's a word, but we would not be a B Corp. It was a million dollars, but it was probably the easiest million dollars to turn down because really, it just showed me that we weren't aligned and they would not have been a good investor. Being a B Corp has absolutely helped us as a business to become stronger.
Pru:
Absolutely, and put that framework around things. I think we're really seeing the rise of the private sector taking a lead in climate change in Australia. I know Sendle did a pretty good campaign even with Australia Post around trying to get them to offset. Why do you think it's taking so long for the industry to change?
James Chin Moody:
Yeah. Change is a hard thing. Going back and nerding up for a second. Particularly for the winners, there's a saying in innovation theory which is success is the biggest inhibitor to innovation. Right? [crosstalk 00:35:06] That's when you're a market leader. One of the things that prevents you from changing because you feel like you got dominance. You don't have to do it. What's the pressure? What's the thing that makes it happen?
James Chin Moody:
I guess this is the role of an upstart of a company that's a challenger or whatever it might be, is that you actually can influence change. Yes, we're 100% carbon neutral. We want our impact to be much greater than that. How do you become climate positive or whatever you might call it? Which is by helping influence some change in industry. We believe that if we can save money and be 100% carbon neutral, well, why can't everyone do that and in other key industries? That's part of our mission as well. We're not ashamed to call on the market leader to do the same. I would love it if there was no daylight between us in this particular dimension because I think it's something that all the logistics industry should basically be doing.
Pru:
Yeah. I couldn't agree more. You are 100% carbon neutral, but then you are going above and beyond, which we haven't spoken about just yet. Can you give us a bit of insight into some of the current regeneration projects that Sendle is involved in?
James Chin Moody:
Yeah. The interesting thing is, again, it's really fun when our customers or our merchants vote on what to do. They often choose things as well that have even further positive externalities. For example, there's the Myamyn Conservation Project. That's an Australia one, which is not just about carbon offsets, but it's actually a giant biodiversity project as well. We invest in Cookstove projects which are not just about again offsetting carbon but they're around female empowerment because it's generally women. It's in the communities that we're supporting that are actually ones who are ... Also, health because indoor air pollution is one of the greatest killers of folk in many communities. We love that we're trying to again find not just one thing but as you mentioned already, Pru, these things start to line up in positive ways as we go.
James Chin Moody:
I think we've also taken the next step. As I mentioned earlier, we've got compostable satchels now. We put a whole other value into what we call the Unlimited Satchel where you use the compostable satchel. Not only again as it great for merchants to share with their customers because this is worm food, but also we've managed to make it so you can actually put as much into that satchel as you can without having to weigh it.
James Chin Moody:
There are all these things that we've done to try to go above and beyond. We think about being 100% carbon neutral is just the beginning. It's really about logistics as that platform from which you can start to do a whole lot of other things.
Pru:
As you're taking here, James, I'm curious. I want to know, I guess the first question is how big is Sendle at the moment in terms of headcount and employees? Just because a lot of our listeners are business owners, you guys are just innovating every step of the way, so how do you really breed that internally at Sendle?
James Chin Moody:
Yeah. In terms of Sendle, we're around about 100 people, but we leverage the capacity of thousands and thousands of drivers. One of the other things we do is we partner very closely and we see them as part of our entire Sendle team in fact. Their wellbeing is also part of what we really look at as we continue to expand. How do you stay ...
James Chin Moody:
Again, anyone who runs a small business knows that the challenge there is it's all about time. It's all about focus. Probably the biggest lesson that I've ever learned, that my son might ever learn, because listen [inaudible 00:39:29] being a dad. One of the biggest lessons I've learned in the entrepreneurship journey really is that focus is everything. When you're small like we are, you can move really quickly, which is one of your greatest strengths, but you also have limited resources. The antidote to running out of time is to improve your focus. The whole business is being built on this idea that we're here to serve one segment of the market. We're here for small business. We have a lot of really big businesses come to us and we say, "I'm sorry. We're not for you," because we know we can't be 100% good for them like we can try to be 100% good for the small business segment of the market.
James Chin Moody:
Yeah. Really the big lesson there is focus. Know who you're there for. Really know why you should exist, which I guess is coming right back to that concept of being a B Corp. We exist to make shipping good for the world. We exist to help small businesses thrive by making parcel delivery simple, reliable and affordable. We exist to try to transform the logistics industry and help it to become ... Take full responsibility for all of its externalities starting with carbon. If you're clear on that, then a lot of other things start to flow.
Pru:
Absolutely. I couldn't agree with you more that I think it's so exciting, this intersection of good business coming to the forefront that is exciting to the founders that are founding it now. It's exciting to the market and to consumers. Also, what I find is really exciting, because I work as well majority with small business owners, is the agility that small businesses have over the big business. You can literally have an idea one day. You can implement it that afternoon, and you can disrupt an industry within days if you really need to on the short term. On bigger scale, longer of course.
Pru:
Something really interesting that you just said there, which I think is really important for the how-to side of things for people to hear is also those restrictions that you put on yourself, so knowing that this is who we're for and this is who we're not for. Once you got that container I guess to operate within then it allows for a whole bunch more of that agility to happen inside because you're not spreading yourself and your team too thin across trying to serve everyone and doing it too thin across the board.
James Chin Moody:
I've learned this the hard way, which was in the early days, for example, touche the marketplace and you go, "If we're not growing, is it because we're not being broad enough? We need to increase the number of folk that we talk to. We should do more and we should have more features and all that thing." Sometimes the answer is actually you're just doing too much. It's a really hard thing because there's a lot of risk. This is one of the reasons why we love serving the market we're serving because these are the folk having a go, and we're trying to help them de-risk their business because there's so much risk already. Really often the answer is not I need to do more. It's actually we need to find that segment that we're really, really good for and do more of less, if that makes sense. That focus piece is often the real secret to success.
Pru:
I love that. Okay. Let's switch now, James, over to COVID. It did hit the small business quite hard in Australia and I think even harder in other countries to be honest. I'd love to know because you are so focused on small business and also on e-commerce. I'd love to know, what has Sendle done to really hone in for support across the COVID time?
James Chin Moody:
Yeah. One thing that keeps me up right now, it's jobs frankly. There's a whole lot of ... There's the COVID impact and there's a health impact, which luckily Australia has managed very well compared to a lot of other folks. I think there's a real question for me that small businesses out there who are doing it really tough, the people who are doing it really tough, that was one of the big things that I think we need to be really looking at as a country.
James Chin Moody:
At Sendle, one of the things we really looked at was, okay, what can we do as a logistics company? What are the invisible industries you might say or boring industry? The first thing we did was looked after our team and our partners, our drivers. That's a really important thing to do first. Secondly, changed our service levels, contactless delivery, contactless pickup and all that things. Thirdly, I've been looking and trying to work on how we can do things to support small businesses in conjunction with partners, for example, around Australia. That's basically our entire approach.
James Chin Moody:
One of the interesting things is for those small businesses who have been able to move, and again this is not everyone because, again, it depends what business you had, but for some of the small businesses, we've had so many that had started to sell online for the first time. They were a big boutique that was relying on foot traffic, and we've been able to actually help them to basically start to find a new channel. Hopefully, as things start to open up then they might get some of that foot traffic back again. They've actually de-risked and they've created another string to their bow as a business as well and hopefully made their business more resilient.
James Chin Moody:
Yeah, there's definitely been ... The last three months. I saw a statistic. I haven't got the Australian number for this. The US number I saw was that it took 10 years for US e-commerce penetration to go from 6% to 16% so 10% increase. That's for 10 years. Three months to go from 16% to 27%.
Pru:
Wow.
James Chin Moody:
That is a lot of change that we've seen in the last three months the same as the previous 10 years in terms of penetration of e-commerce. That's a seismic shift. It won't stay that way. I think it will come back off a bit. Again, back to your point, Pru. If there's one thing that small business does have to its advantage, it's being nimble. That's the opportunity for small business, to be nimble. Even the small businesses who have changed the way they do things, it's been amazing from gin distillery that moved to hand sanitizer, for example. Wild Spirit is a customer of ours, amazing that they were able to change so quickly. Seeing the small businesses themselves not just change the way they sell but what they sell, that's really interesting to see.
Pru:
Yeah. I couldn't agree more. I think there's so many interesting things and innovation that's been shown just on a really small scale that had to happen really, really fast for all the small business owners out there. Just the way that they do things, even some of my clients or some of the members in our programs run really large scale events that were literally shut down the week when the restrictions were first announced, when they lockdown was first announced. Before we knew it, they were running online events. I think it's really important for small business owners just to remember how agile you are and that it's a super power. That is actually the super power of small business, is that you're small, because you can just be so agile. You can action things so quickly.
Pru:
I think there's definitely a lot of really awful things that have happened through COVID, but for me, I think if business owners are willing to do things differently and willing to open their hearts and minds and be open to doing things differently, then again there's huge opportunity here to try things out. When the market is ... I guess the marketing people I should say. Customers are a little bit more forgiving as well. They can see that you're trying. They can see that you're doing something new. They know that this is the first time that you've done it. I think it's a great time for small businesses to be innovating and to be experimenting and trying new things so that ...
Pru:
Post-COVID, maybe in a few months' time or a few years' time but probably a few months' time, I think there's definitely a lot of businesses that will come out of it stronger because they do have these, whether it's an additional revenue stream, an additional product, an additional way of doing things so that when life does return to some kind of normality in terms of the distancing. You've got a business with more solid, broader foundations underneath it.
James Chin Moody:
Yeah. I hear an interesting ... When nothing changes, the big eat the small. When everything is influx, the fast eat the slow.
Pru:
Yeah.
James Chin Moody:
As you said, that's the superpower of small businesses. How can I be fast while a lot of other folk might be trying to catch up?
Pru:
Absolutely. Okay. Now moving forward, James, you've just announced at Sendle full scale shipping integration with Shopify, which is huge. I'm a big fan of Shopify. I just think what they're doing is absolutely incredible. That must be massive internally for you guys.
James Chin Moody:
Look, it's really exciting because as I mentioned, it's all about helping small business to sell better and to make a transition. One of the things that we're really excited about is that we've been working with Shopify. Now Shopify merchants can access Sendle shipment from within the Shopify platform. It's really extremely deeply integrated. Again, removed all the friction for these merchants, for many of whom shipping is not a bad thing. I create a product and a business. They don't really want to understand the intricacies of supply chain. Working with Shopify, it's so exciting that it's creating ... just removing friction for all those Shopify merchants in Australia.
Pru:
It's so great. All of our Shopify users out there, I'm sure they're just absolutely over the moon, and particularly after hearing everything that Sendle is doing internally so brilliantly just to make that, like you said, to take out the friction and just to make it an easy choice. It's an absolute no-brainer. That's exciting. What's next for you and Sendle?
James Chin Moody:
It has been a crazy three months I think for the whole world. It's really, really coming right back to purpose, help more business thrive. We're looking, this year for us is really pushing down ... The thing about being a logistics company is you can always do better. Parcel delivery is actually really, really hard because you're not dealing with bits. You're dealing with Adams and you're shipping around. Our big focus at the moment is continuing to push down in Australia, build out things like our partnership with Shopify, our partnership with eBay, really fun ways to help merchants remove friction.
James Chin Moody:
Probably one of the big focus for us in 2020 is to continue. We're just such a small piece of the US market. Yet again, US merchants have exactly the same pain that we found here for the Australian merchants. Our big focus this year is really pushing down in those two areas.
Pru:
Incredible. All right, James. Before I let you go, there are some questions that I ask all of our One Wild Ride guests here. They're rapid fire questions. For you, tea or coffee?
James Chin Moody:
Coffee.
Pru:
Fate or free will.
James Chin Moody:
Free will.
Pru:
Perfect. Do you have any kick ass daily habits in place?
James Chin Moody:
I try to make as few decisions in the morning as I possibly can, which means I'm really boring but I'll have the same breakfast. I'll try to wear basically the same stuff. I find that it's much easier, particularly when you didn't have to focus. Kids get the same meal as well. Yeah, get rid of decisions.
Pru:
Taking friction out of the morning. I love it. All right. Now, if we weren't in the time of COVID and you could jump on a plane tomorrow and go anywhere in the world with anyone, where would you go and who would you go with?
James Chin Moody:
It would definitely be with my wife. Does space camp [crosstalk 00:52:13].
Pru:
Yes. [crosstalk 00:52:14] That's the first time anyone said space on this show. Brilliant. Finally, James, who else would you like to see me interview on this podcast?
James Chin Moody:
Yeah, look. I'd give a shout out to James Grugeon actually. He started a company called the Good Beer Co. They're saving the reef one beer at a time, which is pretty cool.
Pru:
Wow. Awesome. I'm definitely going to check that out. James, thank you so much for joining me. It has been an absolute treat. I can't wait to see what's next for Sendle.
James Chin Moody:
Thanks, Pru. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you.