In the backstreets of Sydney’s trendy inner suburb of Surry Hills, Nick Lavidge is building an impressive global empire that is challenging the traditional marketing agency model.
Alley combines big data with predictive intelligence to increase customer count and revenue for online retailers. Built from nothing two years ago with only $8,000 in capital, last year Alley’s turnover was over $3.5 million up from $240,000 in its first year, and this calendar year it’s on pace to turn over $10 million.
“One thing I realised after being on the client side for a decade and working with several agencies is that’s it’s a broken model that often produces more headaches than results. The model of selling peoples’ time is not scalable and consistent. When you’re in the business of making your client’s money it’s imperative to be consistent. That’s why we invest just as heavily in technology as we do in quality people.”
What exactly does Alley do?
Nick is a big believer in harnessing the power of technology to deliver the highest ROI for his clients as well as maximise his staff’s output. By utilising big data and predictive algorithms, Alley’s Marketing Specialists are able to prospect and acquire online customers faster with less budget and a higher yield.
“We also use technology to streamline internal processes ensuring we’re using every minute efficiently. For example, after looking at our company analytics we realised that we were spending a quarter of our time on reporting, so we invested over a $100,000 to completely streamline the process. Clients don’t pay for it and now more time is being spent on their campaigns instead of pulling data to present. It’s a win, win.”
His product offerings and high service level has stunned clients, which has opened up the doors for international growth. Some of the big clients so far include myPlates which does all the NSW license plates, Netgear -a multi billion dollar company that owns majority of the router market, Oakley, Arlo and Youfoodz.
“We started in Australia because there’s an excellent eCommerce market here and it was a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. But I’d stack our offering against anyone in the world, so we’ve been rapidly expanding internationally with great success for multi-national brands in the US and throughout Europe.”
Always pivoting
Lavidge isn’t one to plod along on the same path, instead shifting his focus dozens of times to perfect and hone his offering. Originally, Alley started as an end-to-end eCommerce partner for retailers handling everything from web development to warehousing and logistics. But he’s found his niche in the world of online, which is his genius zone.
“Continually pivoting in a new direction as opportunities come along and technology matures has been a vital part of our growth,” he says. “At the end of our first year we were profitable but I felt were spreading ourselves too thin. I made the tough decision to cut all of our departments and invest everything into what we were really good at – finding and keeping our client’s best online customers. Within three months of doing that, our company revenues started to skyrocket. To this day our clients are also 100% inbound or via referrals.”
When it comes to hiring, Nick specifically hires people with client side experience.
“They have usually run their own eCommerce store or have worked for large online retailers so they’re versed from end to end. It’s important to me that they have hands-on experience on every part of the customer sales process so they can be effective strategists as well as specialists. They also deeply understand our clients’ needs, because they’ve been the client and in their shoes.,” he says.
What is the story behind Alley?
Lavidge, 30, graduated from LA’s USC Marshall School of Business with a degree in entrepreneurship and finance in 2008. He was already showing strong earning potential as a student, turning friend’s eCommerce sunglasses website into a $100,000-a-year job.
“I was only working about 20 hours a week and was studying full time. University was pretty difficult back then too. The academic side was pretty full-on.”
His first startup out of university was called Moshi and put voice control technology into household electronics. “It was similar to Siri but in a time before Siri really existed.” After a year and a half, with revenue in the multi-millions Nick and his business partner decided to sell it to a company that specialised in that space.
Nick returned to the eCommerce space with sunglasses giant Oakley, where he optimised their global online marketing before he was poached by Australian sports retailer 2XU to run their eCommerce division, which brought him to Melbourne in 2011. Nick grew the revenue-rate by over 1,000% before leaving in 2014 to start Alley.
“It’s been a wild two years but due a series of pivots we have an excellent product and team. I plan to continue aggressively scaling both and I’m excited to show our clients what else we have under our sleeves.”
