How Zeller drives growth through brand storytelling

Josh McNicol, Director of Growth at Zeller, joins Mark Jones to discuss how a strong brand story can be the throughline your business needs to drive growth.

Josh McNicol, Director of Growth at Australian fintech Zeller, has always been a generalist. 

His commercial background covers marketing, sales and demand generation performance, but it’s his passion for brand storytelling as a tool for building customer trust that underpins his new role at Zeller.  

“I task my team with two key objectives: building the brand and growing the business. You can't do one efficiently or effectively without the other,” Josh says.

“We can launch social or performance marketing ads, but we really need customers to look at us and see a credible brand that they can trust with their cash flow, payments and money.”

Since entering the market in 2020, Zeller has reimagined business banking by integrating financial services and providing easier access to payments technology for merchants.

It’s a highly competitive industry, but differentiating the brand and finding the right levers to drive growth is a challenge Josh and his team have embraced unphased.

“We shouldn't need to pivot our business or pivot our approach every five days to respond to a competitive dynamic,” Josh says.

“Focus on what we do well and where we know we are winning, whichever vertical or sub-segment of merchants that might be, and go really, really hard at that.” 

Josh also says the impact Zeller is having on businesses that have struggled with access to payment technologies or managing cash flow, particularly throughout COVID-19, is an important part of the brand’s story and value proposition.

“The finance sector can sometimes feel very commercial, very corporate,” he says.  

“Being able to build access for new entrepreneurs and business owners, particularly those who are just getting set up and taking a risk, is how I see Zeller making a difference.” 

Hit play on this episode of the CMO Show to hear more fascinating insights from Josh.  

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[Credits]  

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The CMO Show production team 

Producers – Candice Witton 

Audio Engineers – Ed Cheng & Daniel Marr 

Got an idea for an upcoming episode or want to be a guest on The CMO Show? We’d love to hear from you: cmoshow@filteredmedia.com.au  

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[Transcript] 

Participants:
Host: Mark Jones 
Guest: Josh McNicol 

Mark Jones: 
In my view, a market is greater than two competitive players and less than 10. 

That is, there are two or more competing parties. And when you get too many players, some merge, and others go bust.  

So how do you negotiate a new market, essentially a clean slate?  

You might have preconceived expectations about how the market behaves or will behave, or do you set your own expectations? 

Finding the right levers to pull that drive growth is a challenge that goes beyond incentives – it's providing and communicating something that customers will find value in better than anyone else. 

But unless your audience sees your brand as credible and trustworthy, you’re of course going to struggle to scale and grow your business. 

So what about you, are you spending your time focused on your competitors, or are you focused on what you do and making sure you're doing that really well?  

Hello friends, Mark Jones here. Hope you’re well. 

Welcome to The CMO Show. It’s so great to have you with us for another exciting episode. My guest today is Josh McNicol, director of growth at Zeller.  

Now, if you’ve not heard of Zeller is an Australian-based fintech, aiming to reimagine business banking. It’s goal is to provide easier access to payments technology and integrate financial services. 

From Josh’s perspective, he is managing a cross-functional team that works across Marketing, Sales and Communications. We talk about his career spanning B2B and B2C businesses, and how that informs his positioning of Zeller, and we talk about how to use storytelling to build the customer experience. And it’s really interesting, when you are building a new market segment or establishing yourself as different in a broader market, understanding that story is really, really critical.  

I hope you enjoy our conversation. 

Mark Jones: 

Josh McNicol director of growth at Zeller. Thanks for joining us on the show. 

Josh McNicol: 

Thanks for having me. 

Mark Jones: 

Now, I actually want to kick off with a little quick skip through your work experience, and that is unfortunately, a bit of a pun, Australian Ballet is in there. You see what I did there? Temple and Webster, Herringbone, Sydney, you've worked with Nora, the National Online Retailers Association.

Mark Jones: 

And I think interestingly for this conversation, global head of brand at Square. That's a pretty well known brand in financial services and particularly in retail. Eventbrite and then now Zeller. So really interesting mix of consumer bit of theatre in there, and a lot of large scale businesses from the perspective of working with customers. So just give us a quick insight into some of the threads that you can identify in your career there as I've reflected that back to you. 

Josh McNicol: 

Yeah. And a good call out on the Australian Ballet. It's always that red herring that people often mention to me. I've been a marketer for the better part of 15 years now, and I'm a big believer that marketers don't need to exist purely in a B2B or a B2C space. I meet a lot of marketers in my team and people we interview and often they'll come with one faceted experience. 

Josh McNicol: 

I've just worked B2B or I've just worked with consumers. The way that we approached marketing at Zeller and similarly when we launched Square first in Australia, about six, seven years ago and we can do great B2B marketing, but with a consumer lens or with a customer focused lens. And through the way we tell stories, through the way we shoot our campaigns, through the way we do imagery, through the way we build the customer experience. 

Josh McNicol: 

And that's something that I've carried with me throughout my career. I've spent most of it working across the technology space, Temple and Webster. I was lucky enough to be their very first head of marketing, my first foray into eCommerce and helped build them to their first million members back in the day when they were a members only site. And you're now really proud and excited to see the trajectory that business has taken. 

Josh McNicol: 

I think being one of the largest online homeware destinations, or maybe even in person to homeware destinations in Australia, if not the region. And from there, traversing from the ballet to Square, which was really that pivotal moment where I found a love for combining that B2B and B2C lens. Square was a company I was at for four and a half to five years, helped to launch the brand in the market, which is where I met Ben Pfisterer, who's the CEO and founder of Zeller, who is my boss now at Zeller. 

Josh McNicol: 

And was able to travel with them to the US and lead their global brand team. For me, I'm very much a generalist in my background. So I've got skills across, commercial marketing sales, marketing demand generation performance, but the brand element, how to build trust, how to really deeply understand the audiences and tell stories that they care about, that creates that love for a brand is something that I've always found all the passion in and I was able to get that through Square. And now launching a new brand to market, a completely new brand turning really a year old, like Zeller has really helped to hone that experience. 

Mark Jones: 

Great. Now your title is director of growth. And under that you've got marketing comms, sales account management partnerships. I presume in part that's a function of being not yet a huge company, but also that generalist thing that you refer to. So I'm actually interested in picking up on that word growth as a bit of a theme for our conversation, because I think ultimately it does come down to growth. 

Mark Jones: 

When we think about marketing, when we think about setting up an environment with customers that promote sales and activity, particularly in the space that you're in, which is high volume transactions. So give us a sense of what you've learned from your career that has helped businesses to really scale. And I think probably Square would be a good reference point for that as well. 

Josh McNicol: 

Yeah, definitely. Growth, the title, it's one that's, it's popped out more in recent years and definitely brought on from the Silicon valley era of SAS companies. There's two key objectives that I task my team here with, it's, building the brand and growing the business. And we always say that you can't do one without efficiently or effectively without the other, we could launch performance marketing ads, we could run social ads, but unless people look at us and go, that's a brand that's credible, that's trustworthy that I could effectively trust with my cash flow or my payments and my money. That's going to be really, really challenging. So similarly, at my time at Square, launching that company into Australia. Australia is a market, has been monopolised by four very, very large banks, some of the largest banks in the world. 

Josh McNicol: 

So Square, when we brought that into the market at the time they were a disruptor, they were doing something different. And it's this really weird and slightly different change. Now, Zeller five or six years later, where Square is become an incumbent. Now, they're very established globally, particularly in the Australian market and now Zeller is the disrupter and we're sort of doing it all again, but with the knowledge and the lessons of what worked over those years, that we took from Square and what do we want to bring to Zeller, which is a completely new brand, a new company and a new business, a new growth model. 

Mark Jones: 

Yeah, great. Well, before we get to Square versus Zeller, and I really want to learn from your experience there. In terms of how we professionals approach some of the brand dynamics there, I think is really fascinating, but just first, what does it take today to accelerate growth? 

Mark Jones: 

And I think this is a really interesting one, because we have an expectation now. And I think in part by the influence of VCs that expect technology to accelerate growth. We have this expectation that we will be able to achieve things in a far shorter runway than we ever have in the past. And that from your perspective must be an enormous pressure. 

Josh McNicol: 

A good pressure and a good challenge. Whenever you're launching a new business and we've been lucky to raise about 181 million dollars so far. We've got some amazing, investor partners, some of those who have been with us from since the very early days, some of those who have joined in our recent series B. Finding the right partner who believes in your vision, and isn't kind of immediately throwing pressure on you to hit us a number day one.. It's a dual relationship. You've got to be accountable to what you've committed to through the fundraising process, but the  same side, making sure that we're finding partners who are aligned with our longer term vision. We see Zeller as a company that will grow and endure for decades and decades and decades. 

Josh McNicol: 

So finding partners in investors who align to that vision has been really, really important for us. The pressure you mentioned though, it probably becomes more from the internal, right? In terms of what the pressure and expectations I set on myself and my team and that unlike, a more of a corporate organisation, I'll use the Square example. We were effectively taking a brand in a business that was well established in the US, plunking it down and localising it in Australia, in a new market and then running with it. 

Josh McNicol: 

So there're already preconceived expectations from your HQ about, well, this is what we think that Australia's going to do. Zeller, we're starting with almost a clean slate. So we set our own expectations that are constantly looking for that double digit triple digit month on month growth with whatever we do. So finding the right levers to pull, to actually drive that growth is that's probably the challenge you refer to, right? It's like, it's not just about discounting or offers, or promos or incentives it's providing and communicating something that our customers find value in better than anyone else does. 

Mark Jones: 

So tell me then about the exit from Square, what was the spark that started all of this? 

Josh McNicol: 

It's all for us for different reasons, right? I think that there's a number of us from previous companies that we've worked with a number of us from Square, now work at Zeller, two of our primary founders, Ben and Dom are both ex Square. I have a number of people who came across from Eventbrite and now work in my team or on other teams at Zeller as well. For me personally, what drew me to Zeller and away from a more traditional path was that idea of building and launching a new business from the ground up. 

Josh McNicol: 

Whenever you come into a new business, a new marketing team or a sales team, you often have that baggage of this is the way we do things, or this is our tech stack or our marketing stack, or this is the way that we work with creative. That's just the way it happens. But when you are launching a new brand, building a new business and making all those decisions, none of those excuses matter because you are making the decisions on everything you do. So for me, that's been quite freeing, because I'm accountable for everything and my team is, and we all are in the business because everything we are doing doesn't come with that baggage of this is just the way that marketing or growth happens at Zeller. 

Mark Jones: 

Yeah. No, it's an exciting new opportunity. What then makes Zeller different? What's your selling point? 

Josh McNicol: 

Yeah. So there's a couple of things, right? The main one is that, on average business owners use 10 different pieces of software to manage their operations, manage their finances. We're building a multi-sided FinTech to manage all of those, that's everything from, banking through to expense management, payments online, in-person, invoicing. We believe that the days of having to go to one provider for your point of sale, one provider for your online payments, one for your EFTPOS one for your bank account, should be over. And typically it's just the biggest enterprises in the country or in the world should get that benefit. But our belief, really truly spurn from the idea that even the smallest business owners, even micro business owners should be able to go to one provider and get everything they need to manage their finances and accept payments and get paid fast. 

Josh McNicol: 

And with this, what we really see is the difference with Zeller. You can't get that from a bank where, 80% of our customers come from a bank, often people look at Zeller and look at Square and go, oh, you must be competing in the same playing field. And interestingly, ironically for us, it's actually not the case. Square plays more in this kind of micro coffee shop space. We're sort of winning with pubs, and restaurants, and bars. So we inevitably, we end up competing more with the banks and no one's really doing it, in the way we are, which we're really, really proud of and hoping that, that'll continue. 

Mark Jones: 

Okay. So you've got that integration piece sorted. And the business model, is it any different to Square? It's the classic sort of clip the ticket model, right? 

 Josh McNicol: 

It is. Yeah. It is. No contracts, typically if you're a business owner in the past, you'd go to a bank, you'd pay a monthly rental fee for the privilege of having this clunky terminal in your store. And then you'd pay variable rates on that. We just take a flat percentage, a really low affordable percentage. And if you don't use Zeller, it doesn't cost you anything to use, but that payment kind of thing is really just the start of our product roadmap in the coming months. 

Josh McNicol: 

So it's everything from the ability to sign up for a free enhanced transaction account online, somewhere to store your money and send it out and pay vendors and suppliers, it's lending and credit products. So the product we've launched over the past 12 months it's a payment solution with an embedded card and account, but I think what's more exciting is what's coming next. And with that opens up different routes to monetisation and pricing as well.  

Mark Jones: 

Yeah. And once you get the traction there, you can start adding value. What's the lesson that you've learned from Square? I'm really interested in market dynamics.  market is greater than two and less than 10 as an old adage that I really believe in. 

Mark Jones: 

And so when you are growing out a new disruptive space, these things are really quite relevant. It's one thing to be an incumbent, but isn't that also the goal. You want to scale and grow your business. So give us a sense of how you see the brand maturing and evolving because you can't be disruptive forever.  

Josh McNicol: 

No. When it comes to competition, the one thing I always think about, and it's something we used to say back in the early days of Square is, don't spend your time just focusing on your competitors, focus on what you do and make sure you're doing that well. And that's your core focus or your north star. And it's something that I think about at Zeller a lot. I also lead the sales team here at Zeller and they're constantly talking about, oh, this competitor's doing this or this bank's doing that, or Square's doing this. And I was like, well, we know what we are doing well, we shouldn't need to pivot our business or pivot our approach every five days to respond to a competitive dynamic, focus on what we do well and where we know we are winning, whichever vertical or sub-segment of merchants that might be and go really, really hard at that and do that really, really well. 

Josh McNicol: 

And I think that serves us well. it means that you stay focused on your roadmap and what you're building towards. The word incumbent's an interesting one, right? I think it's got this natural connotation of it sounds old school and slow moving. And while yes, the idea of scale, we've signed up over 12,000 businesses in our first year. On average 50 to 80 businesses a day sign up for Zeller across Australia and through Officeworks our retail partner. 

Josh McNicol: 

And we've got so much runway ahead of us, but making sure that we don't lose sight of what makes our product great and what our customers love, the fact that they can come to us for multiple products, the fact that you get great service and the average call wait timer is under 30 seconds. I think those are the things that you potentially risk losing when you become the incumbent, is what makes the service personal, the brand really special to each individual and, that's worth it.  

Mark Jones: 

Yeah. Got it.   

So just to pick up on the Officeworks, it sounds like that's a really key part of your growth as a channel. 

Josh McNicol: 

It is. Yeah. We have been in Officeworks since day one, and I think what makes it unique is that, rather than having to go to a bank branch, go apply for a terminal and wait two weeks for it to be delivered to you and installed, you can go into any Officeworks store around the country, pick up a Zeller terminal, sign up online or on your phone and I think it's about five minutes, 28 seconds is the average. And it gets you started immediately. 

Josh McNicol: 

It's such a unique proposition and way to access customers only in major Metro cities, but also in those regional areas that are underserved by banks with ATMs and branches being closed has really helped to stimulate our growth and Officeworks have been a fantastic partner for us. We launch exclusively with them and they've taken on board all of our products, which for a brand prior to May last year, wasn't selling anything to the public, I think was something that we are really privileged to be part of and recognition of the product. 

Mark Jones: 

Yeah. I think that's an interesting lesson to share. And one of the reasons I ask too, you reference the growth in regional areas. And I want to understand from your perspective, tell me about the heartbeat? What's going on for the small business owner across Australia at the moment. Obviously, it's going to vary, but what's your view on how Australian small businesses are changing? 

Mark Jones: 

How do they think and feel because there's a lot of uncertainty. And I think the broader application here is we got to keep staying in touch with consumers or our customers, and we’ve got to know how it's changing. And if we expect a good experience to be delivered, you've really got to stay very close to that heartbeat. So what's your sense of what's going on? 

Josh McNicol: 

Yeah. A hundred percent agree. And it's not only, what do your customers think about your product, your brand, but it's like, what is it they care about right now? What's impacting them on the good or the bad? In the regions or the outside, the metro cities, as an example, we identified really early on that we were seeing an over index in new customers signing up outside of your major metros or your major regional hubs, which was an interesting trend that we didn't expect. And at the time we weren't doing anything to directly market differently to a customer outside of Melbourne, or Sydney, or Brisbane, or Perth. 

Josh McNicol: 

But when we found, 42% of our customers were coming for signing up from a non-metro or regional area, we really started to unpack that, to understand why. And some of the things we found, and kind of addressing your original question was, you're right, the uncertainty of COVID restrictions impacting traffic to their business, particularly in places like Melbourne, where we had this ring of steel where consumers couldn't get out to shop in regional areas, impacted natural disasters, creating a lot of uncertainty around what is the impact of my trading going to be? What does that mean for insurance? But also just as well as that the economies in regional area have changed. I think during the pandemic, despite tough trading conditions, there was a 15% increase. 

Josh McNicol: 

The ABS reported for new business registrations and this massive migration of people living in cities to living in regional areas, which was reported particularly in Melbourne and Sydney. So as a result, there were these new businesses popping up in regional towns, be it in Bendigo or Ballarat, in Victoria or Orange in New South Wales that was suddenly servicing new segments of the market. 

Josh McNicol: 

So while a lot of uncertainty existed, the actual economic growth we were seeing in regional areas, which was spurning on new businesses was way above what we expected it to be. And as a result from the Zeller side of where we're acquiring customers, we saw this massive growth, which has been sustained, even into early this year, off the back of COVID with new business opening. 

Mark Jones: 

Yeah, right. How much of that is local retail sales, that micro level through to online eCommerce type operations where you can live anywhere and sell anything. 

Josh McNicol: 

Yeah. It's a mix of both. We were finding that, the customers that we are attracting, they're more bricks-and-mortar outfits. More cafes, restaurants, people setting up bars, and that's not to say, and also then selling online. And obviously the benefit of being an SME now is you can sign up online and get selling as quickly as possible, then reach either a local or a global market. So more or less on the micro side that seemed relatively stable, but more on these new business owners setting up a new enterprise on a high street, in a town or something like that. And I think that's sense of entrepreneurship that maybe was harder to achieve in a city because of high rental prices or increased competition. 

Josh McNicol: 

It felt easier for business owners who had come from the cities. We had a story of one of our merchants, Fizzle Flowers in Port Macquarie. It was a couple, one was based in Adelaide, one in Sydney, they relocated to Port Macquarie and opened a florist, just off the back of COVID. They were like, look, we're sick of being apart, and we're sick of living in this busy, expensive city. We wanted to do something and it felt more accessible to us doing that in a regional centre versus a major metro. 

Mark Jones: 

Yeah. There's some really fascinating social, cultural and economic changes going on there. And it's interesting to see that you are really effectively surfing a wave there. If I can put it in that way, that's a bit of a coastal reference really.  

Mark Jones: 

What's next? Where are you going to from here? And how do you sustain the growth? 

Josh McNicol: 

No, look, there's something exciting about it, right? And I definitely agree, how do you sustain it? That question is something that we set ourselves that challenge every week, every month. We were up 10% last week, how do we go up 20% in new customer sign ups. It's saying that there something exciting about it. The idea of constantly setting new milestones is something that I think if you can hire and find the right types of marketers, the right types of performance marketers, particularly, sales people, they just feed on things like that. But the way we sustain it is, new product, constant innovation, because it increases our addressable market opportunity. 

Josh McNicol: 

So right now, as you correctly noted, we're selling in-person payment solution that has an addressable market, we estimate about 1.4 million businesses in Australia when we launch invoicing online payments, those that TAM continually expands and it opens up new opportunities for new types of marketing, new storytelling, new case studies, new sales people. 

Josh McNicol: 

So in the next, six months, even in particular, we've got so much new product coming that enables the marketing team to be going broader on who they're addressing, which just continually adds to that kind of really aggressive growth curve. I'd say it has a business who's under two years old, we want to keep seeing those high numbers well into the future. 

Mark Jones: 

And where are you at on the global growth ambitions/North America? 

Josh McNicol: 

So we get asked the question a lot. My response to that is always, we've got so much opportunity left in Australia, but we recognise that the problems we talk about that any business owner in Australia faces are not uncommon to what you see in parts of Europe, UK, North America, even parts of Southeast Asia. So we definitely have appetite to be looking at growth and expansion into new regions, but not to the detriment of the sacrifice of what we've got left ahead of us in Australia. And I can see, a couple of years more of great product before we look at international expansion. 

Mark Jones: 

Yeah. I was going to say just give it time.   

Now, we're at the ImpactInstitute, so I need to ask you an impact question. 

Josh McNicol: 

Sure. 

Mark Jones: 

It's great that you're making money. It's great that you're helping other people make money. But what's your thinking around the whole broader conversation around making a difference? How do you communicate that to your team? How do you use that in your storytelling? What's the difference that you can make in people's lives through possibly, and I'm imagining here, but better experiences, better transactions, less hassle have you gone down that road very far and what can you see coming that might help you shape your message? 

Josh McNicol: 

For me, it's about accessibility, historically. And it's payments often doesn't come off as a very kind of sexy thing. It feels very commercial, very corporate. I accept that this is my second company doing this, but being able to build access for new entrepreneurs, business owners who are going out, even young business owners or older business owners who are getting set up and taking that risk, that is how I see we can make a difference. 

Josh McNicol: 

Yes, there are elements of our business on the sales side where we are going after your bigger enterprises and we want to process their volume, but the merchants that we work with and that we celebrate, the ones that we tell the stories of, are those inspiring stories that really help to paint a picture to everyone more broadly in our broader team here of engineers and product people and support people to say like, this is why we're working hard to make it easier for new business owners to accept payments. Some ways that we've done that in the past kind of six to 12 months, we identified that particularly in January, we were seeing like an over index in people who were starting up and entering in new ABNs as they signed up for Zeller. 

Josh McNicol: 

So rather than look to charge them expensive rates for terminals or fees, we made it easier for them to get access through discounted or low cost, Zeller terminals, but also wrote out 10 to 15 articles of business tips getting started guides. Here's how to get your ABN set up. Here's how to think about your first marketing. We worked with industry experts and leaders to get their advice that we could then share with these new business owners. And I think through that programme, and it's something we've just continued to run now. 

Josh McNicol: 

We signed up several hundred new business owners or new starters, and are constantly feeding them new content that helps them get set up. The idea is, if you're launching a new business, this is the one way to do it, guide. So we feel that if we can compile our resources, our knowledge, but also our access to industry experts to give them tips on building a website, doing their first marketing, choosing a site, choosing a location, or even just getting set up online that can help them feel like they've got the tools they need and a bit of more of a partner that they need to get set up and running.  

Mark Jones: 

Any idea more broadly, how many first time entrepreneurs are out there now in Australia? Because what I'm hearing you describe is  a give it a crack kind of Aussie mentality, but I wonder how that's shaping our notion of who the entrepreneur is in Australia. 

Mark Jones: 

And obviously you are now part of a larger ecosystem of membership organisations, networking hubs, there's literally hundreds of organisations and thousands of people that actually focus their entire lives on supporting entrepreneurs. So you seem to be touching on a pretty interesting trend there. 

Josh McNicol: 

Yeah. We ran a survey with some of our merchants very early this year and particularly this cohort of new business starters and asked them like, well, what prompted you to get started? And the top reason, 31% of respondents said the reason they were starting their new business was that they wanted to be their own boss, loud and clear. It followed after things like that. Like, oh, I wanted to relocate or I had a passion, but it was just people jumping in on that idea of wanting to be their own boss. And it comes with a risk. But I think, if you don't take the risk, there's no potential reward in the end. And it's something, no different to the team who started Zeller. 

Josh McNicol: 

The trend is definitely there. And I think, look at things like what Zeller is doing, like what online website providers like Shopify are doing, it's easier to get a website, build it quickly and get up and running. It's easier to get a payment terminal that might have been five or six years ago because you can buy it at Officeworks. I think ease of access to tools like this that help people get set up is making the idea of risk lower for these new entrepreneurs. And I really like to see that continue. 

Mark Jones: 

And if I could borrow from a road construction metaphor, we were talking about surf metaphors before, we're going to go to roads. When you build a big freeway, inevitably people say, well, all you do is move the traffic jam to the end of the freeway. What this suggests to me though, is that yes, the friction is largely removed from starting a new business, getting up and running. And you're a big part of that story. What it does mean though, is it shifts the focus to competition to suddenly find yourself as the 79th flower store in the region. Turns out that wasn't such a great idea or whatever your story is. 

Mark Jones: 

You know what I mean? So the strategic thinking comes into play, brand positioning, product extension and all those other more complicated things that traditional marketers will know from having studied the profession, right? So that's a reflection from me and I wonder how you'll approach that in the future. Clearly, there's an opportunity to stay engaged with your customers to educate them and all those sorts of things. But are there some big concerns on the horizon there for you? 

Josh McNicol: 

For Zeller, no, I think that we are big believers and particularly myself, that competition, isn't a bad thing. Effectively we're building a bank here, it's not an easy task to do, but when I think about there's so much competition in the payments, in the financial services industry, not only from banks, but from Tyro, from Square, from a slew of other fintechs, like Zeller. The benefit to the end user is that it's better pricing, better service. 

Josh McNicol: 

It pushes us all to be better. Definitely not lost for me that I don't think that at the end of time or at the end of that period, that every single player who is here today will be there. I don't think that's the case. That's where you've got to make sure that you have the right brand position, the right infrastructure, the right product, that you've tested it immensely and you make sure you are solving a customer need or a customer problem. If you don't have that then there's less likelihood you could survive, but the more competition I see means better choice and more choice for merchants at the end of the day. 

Mark Jones: 

It's a great reminder in terms of the opportunity to refine your messaging, to make sure that you're in touch with customers and positioning yourself for the next season. So look, that's great. Thank you so much, Josh, for being our guest on the show today. Great to get a window into how you're seeing things and all the best as you scale up, really appreciate your growth story. And I was just reaching for another metaphor there, but maybe I'll stick with the window. 

Josh McNicol: 

Oh, yeah, you've gotten a few in today. So I’ll set you a challenge to see if you can get one more. No, I've really appreciated it. It's been a great chat. So I really appreciate being on board.

Mark Jones: 

Clearly your creativity has inspired me. So first, again, thanks very much. 

Josh McNicol: 

Thanks Mark, cheers. 

Mark Jones: 

So that was my conversation with Josh McNicol. 

I think one of the main takeaways is around a very popular buzzword at the moment – the ‘p’ word, that is, ‘pivoting’. And I think Josh was onto something when he said that you shouldn't need to pivot the business or pivot the approach constantly to respond to a competitive dynamic, but to focus on what the business does really well. 

There’s something to think about there around focusing internally while also understanding the market, but not necessarily letting it dictate every decision.  

Don’t forget to subscribe to The CMO Show on your favourite podcast app, so you never missan episode.  Also make sure to follow ImpactInstitute and The CMO Show on Instagram and LinkedIn.   That’s all from me this time, thank you for joining us on The CMO Show. As always, it’s been great to have you with us. Until next time. 

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