If starting your website replatform or redesign is on your to-do list for 2024 and you just can't get started, don't hesitate, this is not one you can sleep on in 2024. Make sure you chat with the team at Convert Digital. They are a leading Shopify Plus partner with teams in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Convert Digital have developed amazing sites for great e-commerce brands such as Camilla and Mark, Naked Harvest, Gander, Cocoa Black, Two Times You, Super Dry and more. Don't take my word for it, head on over to convertdigital.com.au to view their work or reach out directly to the team on hello@convertdigital.com.au. Welcome to the checkout. We catch up with previous ad to cut guests and ask them five quick questions to get to know them better and leave you with a little extra inspiration to get through your Friday. Here's your host, Bushin. Today's checkout features Danny Chia from Kelly Partners Accountants, an ASX listed company with branches in Australia and expanding globally. Apart from being a rugby league international for Lebanon, Danny is a partner at the Northern Beach's branch in Sydney working with around 50 e-commerce brands, including his wife's with turnover running from $50,000 to $50 million. Danny, thank you so much for joining us on the checkout. We had a great chat on our main episode around all things that you're doing at Kelly Partners empowering e-commerce business owners to get to know their numbers and to take the right risks. So that was fantastic. We're here to learn more about you. Five quick questions. Let's go. I'll learn more about you after the dinner we had, actually. You've got the real stuff then. What is the weirdest thing that you've ever bought online? I can't stop that story, not even close. If I'm going to be 100% honest, and it's probably bad, I literally don't buy anything at all from the shops. My missus buys all my shit for me, rightly or wrongly. Probably the weirdest thing is I don't shop for myself as a fully grown man. You've seen the numbers, you know, shop online, you know, all the margin in it now. I don't shop full stop. Anything I have to buy, she saws it out for me. Again, I'm like overwhelmed and shopping. Hate it. Maybe that's the account. Maybe it's the hate spending money, maybe it's the account. Yeah. All right. All right. All right. Number two. Which retailer has most inspired you recently? I've got probably two clients as well. I'm going to say Muscle Republic. So Vic at Muscle Republic. I don't know if you know, if you know. I know all of them. I haven't spoken to Vic there. He's probably worth having the chat with you to be honest. But just we've probably been on the journey since he started. We've definitely been on the journey since he started and watching him go from sleeping on his warehouse floor to where he is today, and still kind of going as hard as he goes every day. He's quite inspiring to watch, like, grateful to be on the journey with him and we've had a lot of fun kind of watching that. And probably the poison cheat up, I know that Pauli would have mentioned them to you guys when he was on. They've been clients for a lot, we actually introduced Paul to them. So being in clients for a long time and watching Jake, same kind of thing, like he started that brand 12 years ago, went to nothing, shut it all down, rebuild it back up again, and what he's doing now. And I think the thing that's inspiring about Jake is for someone that's so tough and this like a series, actually really nice, like soft guy when you talk to him, really in touch with who he is, but also very like strong headed on the way he approaches business. Like, he has an idea that's always so different to what everyone else is doing, and like, I'll argue with him all the time, because I'm, you know, numbers and whatever, I'm like, doesn't make sense. But he's so like, sure of himself and it's obviously working. And I love those stories who doing phenomenal numbers and things when you're looking into them, but they don't chase the headlines. Yeah. Yeah, it's great. Yeah. So yeah, so probably those two, you know, and you mentioned step one in our main episode, whichever one can go back to from a publicly listed ASX growth perspective, some phenomenal numbers in there. You called them out as one of the highlights, literally unbelievable in terms of their numbers. So I use them as a benchmark when we're benchmarking other brands now. So yes, definitely like step one. I recommend for E all e-commerce owners, like every six months, step one, a door, cogon, book, topi, they have to publish their financials online and like an investor summary online. And as part of that investor summary, they literally go into like what strategies they're doing in markets. So like you can't get the better insight into what's going on. It's free. It comes out every six months with new data like you need to know certified, certified. It's all the, like no, it can't be bullshit. Yeah. Gross margins are actually correct. Yeah. So if you need, um, if you want to get a bit of a free lesson, like they're easy reads and yeah. That's such a good tip. And it's often got like above and beyond stats in there, like customer lifetime value and stuff. I know a door beauty go into a lot of depth around their customers and their, their lifetime value, which probably they're not, I don't have to, but they want to put it out there. No, they, well, they're trying to keep the share price up. That's right. Like everything they're putting in those decks is meant to be, you know, put the business in a good light. Yeah. So they're always trying to kind of promote the good things they're doing, but it obviously gives you a bit of insight into what other brands at all, what the biggest brands in the country are doing. Love it. Great tip. Danny, name a piece of tech that you or your business couldn't live without going back to Jess's business, the little homey, the early days of that we, um, we, we got, we sell, we've ordered a thousand books, landed it in big muscle republics warehouse. He let us kind of put them there. It was only one pallet. So he let us dump it there and we shipped them out over a day. Like they're all pre-sold. It was awesome. She ordered 10,000 books and those 10,000 books while they're on the container coming year or sold out. And by the time they landed, it was all increased out by the time they landed. We were two days away from going to Greece for a wedding for six weeks. So we had two days to pack 10,000 books, hire the Kennedard storage warehouse, had all our friends come like napcave. Everyone came and packed books for us for a couple of days, got them out, but there was a massive Australia post fuck off and literally like every one of those 1500 or so of them were international orders. And every one of the international orders, money, we had to sign the slips four times every like, got lost. And we were in Greece every night, me and Jess from like everyone went out at like eight o'clock. We're the little baby. So we weren't going out partying. So every night from like seven o'clock, everyone else is going out drinking, we're on the emails doing customer service from seven, eight, seven o'clock to like one in the morning, just going through a Gmail inbox, responding to clients through that process. We found gorgeous, which is a customer service software and literally like the greatest find ever. It took our kind of customer service time from hours to second like it was amazing how that works. So gorgeous customer service is literally going to live without it. Perfect. Great tip. Great tip for gorgeous for customer service. Can you recommend a book or a podcast that our listeners should immediately get into book like inspirational story? I think shoe dog by Phil Knight, like the Knight story. Love it gives you gives you kind of a bit of a vision into that kind of work. And you know, you think business is hard today, business has always been hard. The journey to get to be a successful brand, even if it's not as big as night is hard. And that kind of reminds you that, you know, the journey that it does take the risk you need to take living on the edge forever, work in two jobs, all that stuff has always been normal. So and it's not always linear, right? It's up down. It's not a straight line. Yeah. Yeah. You feel like you're winning in the next day, you're in court like, I really enjoy that. Yeah, literally. So I feel like that's a really good book for that, like just give you a bit of a sense check. And the other one, I'd say is working backwards, which is a story on it's Amazon book. There's a chapter in there. I think it's like chapter six, it's, it's all about data and the data around how Amazon got into the detail of their website, visitors and things like that. I think it's a really good point of again, like a reality check on what it takes to build something in terms of knowing the numbers and the data. Brilliant. Great tips. Thank you, mate. Last question I've got for you. What's your biggest challenge today? Nat types on it. Like it's all people. I need more people like now to send me really shit emails that they want to work for free. So now I think if you, if you talk to most business owners, they'll say like, everyone's shit, finding good people's heart, no one wants to work, this generation is really hard. Like it's literally the same story for every generation, every person. We work really hard here on, you know, creating the environment and being leaders that people want to come and work in. We do have the challenge of it being accounting in that it's not the sexiest career when you hear about it. So we've got to kind of break that barrier down of like what being an accountant here with us is live versus what you think it's going to be like. So I think our challenge is yeah, like breaking that barrier, starting behind the April of one account it is to break that barrier of getting people in the door, our kind of business and growth, our customer experience can only grow to the extent that we can grow our talent and find great people. So we're forever on a recruitment journey. And are you trying to recruit say new grads, experienced accountants, like where do you normally like to bring people in? Good people. It doesn't like, you know, if we find good grads, we'll take the good grads. If you find good accounts, we'd like, we'd honestly, it's just good people and we can kind of, debits have always equaled us. That's not going anywhere. That part's the easy part of our job. I'm just trying to fill the gap on finding the natural, the natural kind of attributes of an accountant are necessarily what we're trying to find, I guess. So trying to find that right person that fits with, you know, who we are and what we're trying to be. Beautiful. Well, we heard a lot around what Kelly Partners stands for in our main episode. And I think that would be exciting for a lot of accountants out there who want to do business a bit differently and give that strategic input to business owners, especially in the e-commerce space. So, Danny, thank you so much for joining us on the checkout. Really appreciate it, mate. It's great to get to know. Thanks, mate. Appreciate you. To hear more from Danny, jump back into episode 425, where Danny shares what an e-commerce business baseline gross profit margin should be. He also tells us the non-financial KPIs that you need to be paying attention to and how much you should be spending on marketing. of the e-commerce business. 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In today’s Checkout episode, we’re joined by founding partner of Kelly+Partners, Danny Chiha, who shares his unique insights into the world of e-commerce accounting. Danny opens up about his surprising lack of online shopping habits, his admiration for clients like Vic Gigliotti from Muscle Republic and Geedup Co founder Jake Paco, and how the ecom platform Gorgias transformed customer service for his wife’s business, The Little Homie. He also shares his thoughts on managing teams, and why learning from business titans like Nike and Amazon is key for growth.
Check out our full-length interview with Danny here:
Danny Chiha and Natalie McDermott from Kelly+Partners: Knowing Your Numbers in Ecommerce | #425
About our guest:
Danny is the founding partner of Kelly+Partners Northern Beaches and also leads Kelly+Partners Startup. Starting his career at Crowe Horwath, he went on to lead teams at Coca-Cola Amatil as the Financial Accounting Manager where he led a successful team of 17 professionals. Leveraging over 10 years of business advisory and commercial accounting experience, Danny is passionate about assisting businesses and startups develop and execute strategies that create business viability.
About your host:
Nathan Bush is the host of the Add To Cart podcast and a leading ecommerce transformation consultant. He has led eCommerce for businesses with revenue $100m+ and has been recognised as one of Australia’s Top 50 People in eCommerce four years in a row. You can contact Nathan on LinkedIn, Twitter or via email.
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