TradeSquare Learning

Q&A with Jack Delosa of The Entourage and TradeSquare

Tradesquare
Posted by Tradesquare on Jan 31, 2021 11:49:11 PM

Jack Delosa is the founder of Australia’s largest training institution for entrepreneurs, The Entourage, which has a community of 470,000. Since 2010, The Entourage has added over $2 Billion in value to their Members' businesses. Jack is also an early investor in TradeSquare. 

The following is a transcript of an interview with Jack Delosa on ausbiz's Startup Daily

 

SD: Give us the pitch, tell us all about Trade Square and how it works.

JD: TradeSquare is a very fast-growing movement in Australia right now. It's essentially a digital platform that connects Australian businesses with wholesalers and retailers, and suppliers, predominantly Australian driven, to connect everyday SMEs with the products that they need in a way that is faster, safer, more secure, in a way that relieves the administrative burden, and in a way that's far cheaper than previous supply chains.

I saw with the last guest that you guys were talking about international supply chains. We undertook a really interesting study of SMEs at TradeSquare. And we asked the question, since Covid, do you have the same degree of confidence or lesser degree of confidence in international supply chains?. And of course, 94 per cent of Australian SMEs have now got less confidence in the international supply chain than they did previously.

And so this is a really exciting platform that's gained incredible traction right around the country that connects everyday SMEs in Australia with the products they need from Australian wholesalers that previously might not have sold to a lot of these businesses, because the SMEs might have been too small. This platform is solving that problem in a way that's really meaningful for Australian business.

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SD: Is (TradeSquare) a continuation of some of the events that we saw at the beginning of 2020 when you had the bushfires? You know, there was the Buy from the Bush campaign. Are we just seeing a continuation of people wanting to support Australia and the best way that we can do that is through our pockets?

JD: That's exactly right. The best way consumers can vote for Australian business is with their credit card. But it's not enough for business just to be an Australian business, you also need to be in the right place, offering the right products to the right customer at the right time. And so much of the traction that we've been getting with TradeSquare, I think speaks to that. This is a digitisation of how businesses buy from wholesalers and providers.

If you can imagine, particularly in regional areas, and particularly for First Nation and indigenous type businesses, historically, it's been, I need to reach out to wholesalers and suppliers myself, which is a really intimidating process, particularly if you're still kind of in the early stages of a business. I then need to vet them, and how do I know how to do that, if I haven't got experienced in doing so. And then, we see 90 per cent of SMEs, managing their stock and their supplier relationships through spreadsheets, which is not the most efficient or effective, or accurate way of managing a business.

And so, with TradeSquare, it sort of brings all of that together under the one roof. It removes all of the administrative burden. So people are no longer managing supplier relationships and wholesale relationships over spreadsheets, they're doing so through a platform that streamlines that all through trusted suppliers, and at prices that were previously unreachable and almost inapplicable to small to medium businesses in Australia.

So how do we drive economic recovery? We do so by connecting Australian businesses with other Australian businesses and enabling them to trade in a way that's cost effective and time efficient.

 

SD: What's in it for TradeSquare? What's it going to cost me if you've convinced me and I want to sign on the dotted line.

JD: It costs the sellers nothing to sign up, and it costs the buyers nothing to sign up. Imagine we're a platform so we're a facilitator. Now we take a percentage of the sale if and when it occurs, and that's on the seller side. But again, I think a large part of the reason we've had you know, now 1,000 brands and over 100,000 products that are trading really successfully on the platform, is because the barrier to entry for buyers and sellers alike is nil.

 


 

Interested in learning more? Listen to Jack Delosa's interview on the TradeSquare LinkedIn page, here.

 

Topics: buy aussie now, buy australian, wholesale christmas, marketing, sales tips, sales, e-commerce, wholesaler australia, b2b, sme

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