Hello,

It is Saturday today, so time for another interview! I try to stay away from political sites but this one is really interesting. So, let me introduce you to Kathryn Crosby!

Hello Kathryn, thank you very much for agreeing to this interview.

Firstly, could you please tell us who you are?

I currently live in Armidale, a small town in rural New South Wales, Australia. I have lived all over the place, moving a lot for work. I have been consulting in communication or doing short contract work for about 10 years – Candidates Online Pty Ltd is just over a year old. Prior to starting the company I only did politics as a hobby.

How, and why, did you start your career? Who/What was your inspiration?

I started my career in commercial radio as a radio announcer. I never really had inspiration – I just had a collection of things I liked doing. Although I’m sure my friends would tell you it was not the things I liked doing so much as the adrenalin hit I got from doing those things – I’m a bit of an adrenalin junkie/workaholic/stress addict.

I had dabbled with websites and online stuff for my work in radio stations – updating text and the like, but really didn’t know much about them. In truth I still don’t – I know what I want them to do and how I want them to look – and I surround myself with good people to get it done.

The connection between those two is actually stronger than it may appear – both are intensely private mediums, you usually listen to the radio or use a website alone. They are very complementary – you can actually browse the web and listen to the radio simultaneously without any conflicting demand for attention, but can’t watch television or read a newspaper and be online simultaneously (unless you are consuming that tv or newspaper through the web of course).

And whether you are designing a radio program or a website the process is the same – identify the target audience design a listener/user experience – create that experience and engage them in it in an interactive way – have them enjoy that experience enough for them to want to tell someone else about it.

So the jump to website development or web-driven business wasn’t that great personally – it was just like programming a radio station.

You currently run a website based on politics, has politics always been your career choice?

I started my career in political consulting at the age of 21 (I started in radio when I was 15). I volunteered to run a campaign for a federal election – and I was instantly hooked – there really is no adrenalin high quite like an election campaign. After that I realised how very little I knew about the world so I went to University. I hadn’t finished high school – but I got in as a mature aged student (Mature aged… at 21!! hahaha). 10 years later I’m just about to finish my MBA and politics is my whole world.

Although I had always been around politics it was not something I ever considered a career option. As little as maybe 18 months ago I would have adamantly told you that you simply can’t make money out of political campaigning in Australia. If you want to work in Government – yeah sure you can have a nice career – but policy and governance was never the part I was interested in. I loved the campaign.

My decision to create a web based political company was basically this: Australian politicians won’t pay for consultants – but they will pay for tangible things. I thought if I could get them in by providing an online database and relatively cheap websites, then they would start to like having the professional campaign advice, and would eventually be prepared to pay for it.

What were your goals when you started? Have you achieved them yet? If so, how did you manage this?

My goals when I started: not go broke? That was the real driving force.

I had a number of altruistic goals – including the professionalization of election campaigning in Australia, giving candidates with no support the kind of advice and support they needed etc. But mostly it was out of an intense personal longing to be able to work as a professional political campaign consultant and not need a second job to pay the bills.

I haven’t achieved my goals yet. Trying to create a real political consulting industry and improve the standard of campaigning in the country is always going to be a decade long goal – not a year. The goals of the company have been significantly reviewed and refined of late to define more comprehensively what our core business is – and in doing so we have shifted from an online service company that creates websites – to a real world consultancy that helps others use the web.

At any point in your career, have you thought yourself or your company as a “failure” or had any major problems? If so how did you manage to get through this and what did you learn?

Hahaha – all the time. I had 7 clients fail to pay for their websites in 07 when I first started. And because their campaigns were over in 6 weeks, they had no incentive to pay me and they no longer needed their websites so didn’t care that I shut them down. I got through it by seriously scaling down my business – closing the office and moving it back in to my living room, and taking a big loan from my Father. Lesson learned: payment in advance.

There were many occasions prior to starting the company that I thought of myself as a failure because I couldn’t figure out how to work in this field without leaving the country. So anything after that doesn’t seem quite so… hopeless. In some small way I am still living the dream.

How did/do you go about promoting your website and career?

For an election campaign cycle I use a combination of search marketing (Google ads etc), direct mail and earned media (press releases, events etc). I’m also a member of the International Association of Political Consultants and network heavily both on and offline. Linked In is great for professional networking, but I also have a few clients I’ve met randomly on facebook too.

In between election cycles I power down the business so it is humming along on minimal staff and overheads – and I don’t actually promote the business very much. I have some corporate and NFP clients that have me doing things like email newsletters that provide me a stable income for those periods.

Have you any advice to give to those currently in the position you were in when you first started?

Plan. Know what you want to do and why you want to do it – write it all out. And then cull it back to the absolute minimum. Write the rest up as goals to be achieved over the next five or more years. If you try and go too big too fast, that is the fastest way to bust.

Before going in to business, you really need to understand that most new businesses will not turn a profit in at least the first two years. Invariably any new business idea will be too big to be realistically launched so when planning – try and figure out if you have enough cash (or if need be credit) to back it up and fund its operation for at least two years. If not, then rethink the business model and probably scale it back a bit more.

Being realistic is really important. Realistic in your goals, your expectations – and yourself. No point in working 140 hours a week; putting yourself in hospital won’t get the business off the ground. You will need to work hard but remember to still have a life. A nice goal is to have dinner with the family every night (if you have a family).

And I’m not kidding: payment in advance. It is very tempting when you are starting out to do a few freebies and heavily discounted jobs so you get some runs on the board. However, you need to actually make money and you don’t do that if you are working for free. 50% down is fine, but don’t start the job until you have some cash at least. You might miss out on the odd job but at least you won’t wind up massively in debt.

The other piece of advice I would give is get a good accountant as early as you possibly can. If you have a little bit of money, spend it on an accountant who can help you properly structure your business and help you identify where you should and shouldn’t be spending. A good accountant is often the difference between going broke or not.

What plans do you have for the future?

I’m currently restructuring the business – siphoning off all the creative production of websites and advertisements etc. and refining the core business back to strategy consulting. We will still focus on online strategies: particularly social networking penetration which I have been doing an enormous amount of work on, and search, which I don’t fully have my head around yet, but I’m working on it. The actual production of websites will be done by a partner company who produce websites all the time.

We are also working with an American partner on a very large proposal to do a 2 year long party building project. If we get that I’m going to be exceptionally busy – and will be building 2 new web based applications that to my knowledge don’t exist anywhere else (well, one of them is a combination of things that I have not seen together – the other I know for a fact is not being done at all). And no, I’m not telling you what they are. Yet.

Is there anything you would like to add?

One final thought: it is important to know and understand if your business is an online business – or a real world business supported by an online presence.

My biggest mistake when I started Candidates Online was to try and make a real world service an online one – and it just doesn’t work that way. The easiest way to figure that out is to ask yourself: ‘If the web didn’t exist – would this business exist?’. My original answer to that was no – I’m selling websites. But the real answer was yes – I’m marketing election candidates. I could do that without the web – I’d just be doing it in a different medium. It might seem a tiny thing, but my business was in significant trouble until I corrected this fundamental misunderstand of what I was doing.

Thank you Kathryn.

Told you it was interesting didn’t I! Radio host turned political. What are you thoughts? Perhaps you have some questions for Kathryn?
Thank you,

Shane