Nothing is more sacred to Australians than the tradie, and their ute. Logical I guess, given that an engineer at Ford in Geelong, 22-year old Lewis Bandt, invented the ute in the early 1930s for depression-era farmers unable to afford both a farm truck and a town-car to head to Church on Sundays. Tradies’ protected status within the Aussie COVID19 crisis has been remarkable - continuing to renovate our homes; keeping us safe with electrical rewiring; replacing plumbing to prevent floods and waste of precious resources; creating jobs, and building our city’s future infrastructure. Even during the depths of the Victorian Level 4 lockdown, a way to keep construction sites flowing had been figured out.
We now need to take this mindset and create an army of Australian tradespeople whose tools are mobile websites, social media, and eCommerce - rather than drop saws and hard hats. Watching Australia’s small to medium-sized businesses go into economic shock as their walk-up customer flow was cut off in March 2020 has been painful. Many larger Aussie businesses and charities have suffered as well, struggling to transition to click and collect, click to donate, or work from home as productive teams. The struggle arises from having old world tools, processes and mindsets - with lots of managers wishing the old normal would just return, so they can get on doing what they knew.
We are all going through the 3 stages of COVIDeconomics - firstly recovering from the shock; then rebuilding what is core to our work, and finally (if we’re lucky) we can refocus on new business opportunities in the post-COVID society. It’s time to adopt the tactics of a country with native digital ambition like Estonia and train an army of workers to support all our organisations to become modern digital businesses.
There are plenty of inspirational organisations that have already made the leap from the Recover to Rebuild stages of the journey, as COVID closed the doors on Australian retail back in March. At the smallest end of town, take a look at trudyricecollection.com/ - a great example of an artist with an entrepreneurial streak getting on the digital tools and building herself a top-class website to display her locally manufactured corporate gift collections and homewares, renovating her online shop with the Canadian software success-story Shopify, upgrading her customer database to customers connected, and managing her social media like a digital native, using tools like Canva.
Check out store.stagekings.com.au/ who having been bounced sideways by the cancellation of 100% of their music and arts contracts to build displays and staging in March 2020, turned their minds to what else they could create in their NSW factory. Instead of giant performance stages, they have refocused on making hundreds of standup desks every week, plus puzzle boxes, record storage units, cat climbing frames and shoe storage racks, using their computer-driven manufacturing and staff now as big as their peak in the good old days of 2019. An upgraded website, with easy payment options, and new social media management mastery has seen them become a leader and an inspiration to many fast-followers in Australian lockdown furniture. And to be clear - good enough to beat global giant Ikea at the digital business game!
At the top end of town banks like NAB have doubled down their focus on the customer, acknowledged that the old physical bank branches aren’t what people want now, and set about investing in their digital channels. Need to chat to your mortgage broker? Sure, let’s Zoom. Need that hose connector from Bunnings? Sure - click and collect at your local branch.
But each of these examples has had an unfair advantage - access to their own digital tradies who helped with the process of renovation, rebuild or constructing something completely new. In some cases like Trudy Rice, they taught themselves; in others they got help from friends, family, or professionals like ThoughtWorks where I work. We need every Australian organisation to get access to that eTradie talent, and we need a Ministry of eTradies to create an army of multi-skilled digital builders and teachers to make it happen.
Only around 10% of Australian retail is currently delivered online - and it is generally treated with fear and loathing by business owners and employees. We need to go from fighting digital to building the offline to online (O2O) world of work for everyone. We need to aim for 50% of the retail economy to happen online, and for that to be profitable and productive for those business people. Access to the kind of turnover growth that Kogan.com has enjoyed (over 60% year on year) simply because their people are good at digital, is a democratic imperative.
So let’s gather up small crews of savvy, arts-trained story-tellers and communications graduates, born native in the social media era, who can use Australian online tools like CANVA to build business presence. Let’s add some other people who are good with their hands around video conferencing, ebanking, implementing an online billing system from Xero or MYOB; then get someone else in the crew with experience making retail easy with the tools like Vend, Shopify, Paypal; Beemit; Amazon and Facebook marketplaces. Finally work alongside fulfillment experts like AusPost; and get the shopkeepers’ personal tools up to speed with smarter use of their phone and computer - not the least of which is sorting out their store of passwords - the keys to the front door of every digital shop!
With more unemployment on the way, universities struggling, and talk of a COVID generation, let’s train this army of new, multi-skilled eTradies to make ecommerce websites for Australian charities, businesses and schools, using the best in productivity software like Trello from Atlassian, and getting Australian organisations linked up with their consumers on the web. Let’s launch it on TV and the web with the equivalent of The Block doing a digital makeover, pitching Team MYOB against Team Xero; Team NAB against CommBank; and Squarespace against WIx. We can get Matt Barrie’s team at Freelancer.com to organise the whole thing - he’s on the same road to making Australia a clever country again. By the time we’re done, and we’ve beaten COVID with a vaccine, the heart of the Australian economy will be pumping again. Let’s be as clever and inventive as Lew Bandt was back in 1932!
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