Credit card bingo - transcription

Credit card bingo – transcription

By Fiona Boyd |

This post is the transcription of the videopost “Credit card bingo got Haul going – videopost with Scott Kilmartin“.

Fiona: Today I’m talking to Scott Kilmartin who calls himself something else and who will tell us what that is in a minute. But essentially he is the founder of a business called Haul who recycle rubbish into really funky and fabulous streetwear and products, and neat things like laptop covers and beanbags, that sort of thing. Welcome today, Scott.

Scott: Thanks Fiona.

Fiona: What do you call yourself?

Scott: Well I’ve always been sketchy on titles like founder and director and CEO and general manager, so we had one of those moments, we were about to print some new business cards about seven or eight months ago, and we had a courier come in to pick up a whole bunch of stuff pre-Christmas, and he’s gone, this place is a circus, cos there were boxes stacked down the aisles. And I’ve gone, that’s it, we’re all going to have circus titles. So we have a puppeteer, we have a strong man. We don’t have a bearded lady but I’m the ringmaster.

Fiona: That’s a great title.

Scott: A little play in getting away from that stuff.

Fiona: Scott, you started Haul as the original company ten years ago, um. Recycling rubbish back then, what a neat idea. What inspired you and how did you get started, what got you into it?

Scott: Sure, so – I lived overseas for a long time, came home, had seen these…I was living in the US at the time and had found these odd guys in Pittsburgh that were using old license plates as covers for – as literally roofs on little birdhouses and I thought, weird, quirky product but cool use of stuff, so I was looking for some things to do and I brought home a bunch of ideas and I thought, this would be a cool, creative sideline, never thinking it’d be one I’d go particularly far with.

But I ended up harassing transport departments all over Australia, trying to – one, get access to plates, because it’s actually illegal to deface numberplates, so one, get permission to do it, two, get access to plates and we started making – I made a photo album for a friend that was about to go overseas, out of a Victorian numberplate, and it was, you know, people that saw it when I gave it to them, it was one of those wow kind of moments and I thought, yeah, there might be something in this, so it really started from quite innocent beginnings.

Fiona: What was your first product, was it the numberplates?

Scott: Yeah, so we started making numberplates, we initially, I took over my dad’s garage and got some little press machines and riveting things and we started making photo albums and journals and little CD carriers out of numberplates and selling them at a market stall at Salamanca Market in Hobart.

Fiona: So you started off at the markets – when was it that you actually got all corporate and got a factory and got a store and – how far into the ten year journey was that?

Scott: A fair way because at the time I was doing a few other things, so look, we’d been going for ten years but it’s a bit of a myth, it really hasn’t been the business that it’s evolved into now for that long, it’s really only been the last probably four years that it’s been – we rebranded, initially I started and it was called Urban Boomerang, the kind of…Urban…Boomerang meaning, coming back, recycled, which I thought at the time was a great name but ended up being a bit kitsch, so we initially were making things out of numberplates was literally, I went to a trade fair and started wholesaling things in 2001, and that still ticked away.

It was still, come home, get some orders out of the fax machine and make things on weekends, but I was still, it was still a sideline, still doing other things. 2003 decided that I’d have a real crack at it, I was involved in some other businesses at the time and I’ve gone, look, this thing’s got some legs, it just needs some more products, it just needs to really go back and look at the marketing of it, and that’s when we got rid of the – um – Urban Boomerang name and rebranded it as Haul, and at that point we were making bags out of truck inner tubes, which is one of these. So this is a messenger bag, it’s kind of one of our products that’s really endured for a long time, and then I was like, now we’re going to be making streetwear accessories, what’s a name that fits? And Haul, if you like, ticked a few boxes. I wanted a short name that had some punch to it, that was somewhat industrial. Haul means to carry, we were making lots of things that carry things, photo albums to carry photos, bags that carry stuff, and I had to be able to buy a top level domain name, so haul.com was well and truly gone at that point, but haul.com.au, which was initially, and then someone didn’t re-register it and it just popped up.

Fiona: Well done.

Scott: And it wasn’t, the other thing was that it hadn’t been trademarked in any of the other areas that I thought we were going to play in or potentially would play in in the future. And so, it had everything apart from the URL and then that came up, and so…very happy.

MacBook Sleeves by Haul

Fiona: I must say, when I first saw the name Haul, and probably you would have thought this is way left field, but I thought of the Asterix books, and actually building of big structures and things, the notion of hauling stone across spaces to make a pyramid or something like that.

Scott: It’s a really – look I didn’t know about those books. The industrial stuff definitely works, so we do a lot of wordplay now in some of our communications, when we write press releases and use kind of wording on our website, swing tags about the long haul, the short haul, all those kind of things, and with them having, the trucking industry carrying stuff, and long haul being, kind of, the airline term. But one of the tricky things about that name and one of the things I didn’t – you try and do all this analysis of how a name’s going to work for you and what it means, and does it mean something horrible or whatever, the tricky thing is, often when I say it, one – especially if I’m speaking fast, often people think you’ve said the word ‘whore’. And I’ve spent a bit of time in Asia, and I’ve got to really slow down and say it really slowly, cos often it comes and it rolls out too quickly. Especially when I’m teaching, I mean simple things like teaching staff to answer the phone sometimes, it’s like, slow down, it’s going to be taken the wrong way. You get this deathly silence on the phone, so the things you…naming, you know, can be tricky.

Fiona: In terms of the early days – and maybe the early days for you is that transition, about four years ago, when you’ve gone from a home or garage-based business to, you know, a proper, out there in the world business, where you have a lot of risk, and you have some assets at play – what was the stimulus for that transition?

Scott: Um – look, we had a workshop for a while there, for a while there I had some guys working, a couple of guys working for me but I was still doing other things, so we had a workshop and stuff but it wasn’t until I decided that I was going to make a real go of it that I thought, OK, what are we going to do here, and that way, for me, the perceived risk kind of grows, cos it was like, I’d really decided it wasn’t going to be this thing I was doing on the side where, maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t but no real effect, it didn’t feel like I had, you know, the skin on the road stuff…

Fiona: …it all kind of comes together…

Scott: But then I’ve gone, I really want to make a play at this, so I took it a lot more seriously, maybe put a little bit of, I guess, self pressure on, going, alright I’m really going to have a go at this and you know, it could fail.

Fiona: How did you finance it? What did you do?

Scott: Credit card bingo.

Fiona: I know that one!

Scott: So I went and…I had a mate who worked at a bank at the time, and he told me – I remember asking some questions about, do banks check if you apply for other banks’ credit cards – now, they do, but then they didn’t. So I basically went and applied at all the big, all the kind of big four pillar banks, went and applied for credit cards, and within a day I had $80,000 in credit cards. Didn’t use them all for a really long time, but I knew that I didn’t have any bricks and mortar collateral, there’s no way they’re going to give me a loan, I’ve been living overseas for a long time, I had no work record, recent work history in Australia, I wasn’t going to get anything, so the only way was to get my parents to co-sign for a loan, which I didn’t want to do, so it was credit card bingo.

So I basically got all these cards, used one, used a small one for my personal expenses and used another one for the business, and the other ones just sat in a drawer and I paid the fifty or a hundred dollars a year to keep them active, and some of the banks rang me and said, oh you’re not using these cards, we’ll shut them down, and I’d go and buy twenty dollars worth of stuff and then put them away again.

Fiona: And it is harder to do that these days because they do cross reference. I’m so glad that back in 2000 when we started Arts Hub that they didn’t either…

Scott: It’s the classic bootstrapping, you skate because you know you can. And it was one of those things, once you’ve played your hand you can’t take it off the table, I knew that if I went applying to banks that I would basically damage my credit record, so I knew that this is the best way for me to have a crack at it and just schmoozed.

Fiona: Well done. What one piece of advice would you give a startup today? That you kind of wish you had’ve heard when you got going.

Scott: Um…get advice from lots of people but don’t listen to everyone. So I went – I learned a lot from some of the people I worked for overseas, some really interesting entrepreneurial types, but one of the guys I worked with said, look, get advice from a really broad group of people but not everyone’s advice counts.

And, you know, especially the people that love you, their advice doesn’t count for anything at all. They’ll tell you things about your product, they’ll love your product…it’s worthless. But even so-called experts – the idea that they might know the industry really well, but if you’re doing something that’s not quite a perfect fit for what their knowledge base is, they might not know what the new thing is, or how you can navigate off to the left or the tangent that you might be taking it. So, take it in, be respectful of it, but don’t listen to everyone, cos otherwise new things wouldn’t happen.

Fiona: Mmm, absolutely, and sometimes the truth is somewhere in between all that advice…

Scott: …yeah, I’d agree with that…

Fiona: …and not out of any one mouth.

Scott: I would agree with that completely. I mean look at the stuff happening right now with the Facebooks and Twitters of this world, those things…people would advise them and gone, well that can’t work, and it has, and that’s just purely, the iPod thing, you know, customers ask for more songs on a Walkman, not necessarily compressing it that way, so I think you’ve got to be a little bit careful of where the advice comes from and what percentage of that you take in.

Fiona: I think that’s a really good point to make for startup people right now. Thank you for your time today, Scott.

Scott: No problem, thanks for having me.

Scott Kilmartin from Haul joins Fiona regularly to talk about the real nuts and bolts involved in running his innovative business.

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