In this episode of Add To Cart, we are joined by James Chin Moody from Sendle, a shipping company focused on helping small business thrive by making package delivery simple, reliable and affordable. They are also the only 100% Carbon Neutral Delivery Service in Australia and the United States. In this chat, James gives us an insight into the ‘systems engineering approach’ that guides Sendle’s operations, what it’s like to take on a national institution and why being humble and honest is at the top of the list when it comes to success in business.
“You can either be 80% good for everybody or 100% good for someone.”
James Chin Moody
Questions answered in this episode include…
- How do Sendle send packages cheaper and greener than Australia Post?
- What’s the part of fulfilment and logistics that retailers struggle the most with?
- What are the key qualities you look for when growing your team?
100% for someone
We have this belief that the only way to be really, really good for somebody is to really know who you want to be good for.
So, you’ve got this choice, you can either be 80% good for everybody, right? Or you can be 100% good for someone, right? You can be 80% good for 100% of the market which unfortunately is what our competitor in Australia has to do. Right? And they’re trying to serve everybody so, they can never be a 100% good for anyone…
…versus Sendle, we want to be a 100% good for the needs of small and micro-businesses in Australia and the U.S. and we’re going to build for them, and we’re going to do it passionately and with a 100% laser focus. And they know that, and that’s why they know that we’re going to be better.
The flick of a switch
It’s one of those things, I think if we’d known how complex it was going to be when we began, maybe we wouldn’t have begun. But it’s a very complex thing to do in order to absolutely focus on the whole merchant experience and then the receiver experience and making sure that’s seamless. It’s one of those things to make something simple often requires a lot of complexity.
Think of the light switch on the wall right now. Right? That’s an incredibly simple thing. You flick a switch and on goes the light. Right? And if you think about it, that’s a level of sophistication. That’s a sophisticated technology right there because behind the scenes, you have an entire infrastructure, a power grid, and then transformers and generators and all that’s just to make it so that it reliably you flip the switch and on goes the light. That looks simple but behind the scenes it’s complex. And that’s the beautiful thing about technology, that’s what it’s there to do.
100% humble
We have what we call the ‘five Hs’ in Sendle which are the things that we recruit everybody by and we try to live by and that is, in order, humble, honest, happy, hungry, and high-performing. The reason why there is an order is because we want high performers and folks who are ambitious and hungry, but we have to be more humble and honest than we are ambitious and hungry. Getting that balance right is really important.
I think that humble is ultimately putting others first. Right? And it doesn’t mean that you don’t have an ego or that the team doesn’t have an ego, but it’s in service of something bigger than yourself. And back to why are we B Corp? We’re a B Corp, because I actually think that businesses should know why they exist. We exist to create economic opportunity for small business, we exist to show that you can be 100% carbon neutral and have a fantastic business at the same time and in fact, you can do it by unlocking capacity and shifting the network ultimately to looking at carbon intensity.
And so, being there in service of something bigger than yourself is actually really powerful and a great way to both run a business but also just to live. And so for us, humble comes first.
