While the word ‘pivot’ was on many people’s lips throughout 2020, Mindi Chisholm was no stranger to it.
Back in 2010, after an abrupt end to a brand agency career, Mindi launched a business selling laptop bags for women that did double duty as stylish handbags. Though successful, dealing with the logistics wore thin. “Over time, I got sick of the bulkiness of the product. So we went into other fashion accessories, until years later, we ended up just purely doing jewellery. Not many people these days would remember that we actually started as a ladies’ laptop bag company.”
So that was her first pivot. As the business developed, it became clear that it was evolving beyond what she could do herself using Xero. Not one to sit around, when someone recommended TradeGecko (later Quickbooks Commerce) for eCommerce logistics, she signed up. “And then, very quickly, within weeks, I understood that there was no way I could set this program up myself.”
On Trade Gecko’s suggestion, she turned to implementation experts SMB Consultants, and met CEO and co-founder Jeffrey Atizado. “They were fantastic,” remembers Mindi. “The first thing Jeff did was to sit down with me and talk about my business, and how my business ran. I wished I had met Jeff before I’d signed up for TradeGecko. It was quite a pivotal time!”
But then, just 12 months later, TradeGecko advised that their product was being sunset. While this was a blow to Mindi after the time and investment, there was a bright side. “In starting over again, I was in a better place of understanding what a business system was capable of.”
And it was just as well, because at this point the pandemic was in full swing and she was already redeveloping the business, with the help of her daughter, a marketing student. As a jewellery wholesale business, with their product sold entirely in stores, sales skidded to a halt as Australia went into a series of lockdowns and businesses everywhere were forced to – that’s right – pivot.
With plenty of time on their hands, she and her daughter worked together to decide what Zafino was as a brand, and relaunched as an online business. “We were able to get our product, during COVID, into the hands of some very influential young ladies here in Melbourne who wore it. And our online business then took off really quickly.” Slowly but surely, the stores opened again and the wholesale orders trickled back, and Zafino was more successful than ever before.
But there was still the problem of the looming sunset date for TradeGecko. With the business now in a different place, the obvious thing to do for Mindi was to go back to SMB Consultants. “We went through the same process, sat down [for discovery sessions], and I remember thinking, “this is really great, because Jeff was the first person that could fully understand all the different pain points in my business.”
Once the SMB Consultants team was familiar with the new landscape of Zafino, they recommended Cin7 to replace TradeGecko, and began the process of onboarding. Though this can be daunting for any business owner – and a common excuse not to make desperately needed software changes – it was a smooth ride, says Mindi. “Because we’d done all the discovery, Jeff’s team knew all of the key things that I needed to tick off so that when we went and did the workshops, we had those lists all in place. It was very methodical, the way that they approached the rollout and the education for me. I was grateful for that.”
Now, Mindi is grateful for something else: the fact that her business is now in a position to grow, really grow, through a multichannel presence, and that her five-year plan is in good hands. She’s been able to take on extra staff, and with the grunt work taken care of, she’s now grasping that business Holy Grail: working on the business, not in it.
“Because it’s now so systemized and running so beautifully, I’m really stepping out of the business now, a lot more, and getting into the nitty gritty,” Mindi says.
“I’m finding that’s really exciting.”
For his part, Jeff considers Zafino a real success story: “It’s like 10 years of innovation and disruption happened within a couple of years. Because she was able to centralize her inventory, she’s retargeting to different markets and she’s integrating to online marketplaces. Now she’s expanding, and moving internationally.”
The guiding principle for SMB Consultants, he says, is to “make it easy for [business owners] to make sure the time they have is spent doing the right things.” Often his team have to put considerable effort into changing business owners’ mindsets around having their systems in silos – inventory here, accounting there, logistics over there – and bringing them all together, but “[Mindi] had already seen the benefits of integration and how all of these different products, like Starshipit and Pinch, working together would create a complete system.”
There were a lot of packages that had to work together. At the centre was TradeGecko, later switched to Cin7, with Pinch payments and Airwallex. Xero took care of the accounting, while Shopify and StarShipIt did orders and shipping. With nine stores, and an ambition to roll out in other marketplaces, Zafino is now on Shopify Plus. “If you’ve got a really well-running machine, a well-running system, it just means that when growth comes, you can cope,” says Mindi.
Cin7, now, is the very nucleus of her business. “Literally, every part of my business plugs into Cin7. It’s the hub.”
Mindi is adamant that, without SMB Consultants and their software implementation support, she wouldn’t have the business she does. “I think I’d still be fumbling around with Xero and getting frustrated, to be honest.”
She’s quick to point out that choosing software is not the hard part. “It’s actually onboarding it and making sure that the whole system works together. There is absolutely no way I could have done [that] without Jeff’s business doing it for me.”
Of huge value to Mindi is the enduring business relationship the two companies have built. She calls it a “true partnership”, and is certain that they will continue to grow together. “We’ve been through a lot.”
Jeff agrees. “SMB evolved, as a business, through [the COVID] period. And we realized how many good customers we have, and [are glad to have] the opportunity to continue working with them, and not just have a support arrangement once they go live…For me, the satisfaction I get is really seeing businesses grow.”
In September 2022, the power of the expert implementation partner was really brought home to Mindi. For the launch of a new piece, she teamed up with an influencer to tease the product over several weeks. On launch day Zafino sold out almost the entire product in just 15 seconds. It was so extreme that PayPal saw the sudden influx of payments as a red flag and temporarily suspended Zafino’s account – an unforeseen problem that she is not allowing to happen again.
“If I didn’t have a system in place, I think it would’ve been our undoing.” But fortunately, she did have a system. Orders were taken through Shopify, which at the time was integrated with TradeGecko, and labels were printed with Starshipit. Buyers were automatically notified of dispatch. Without SMB Consultants, fulfilment would have been a manual process that would have taken literally months.
“It was a very clear example of how, when your systems are all integrated and working together, it’s a beautiful thing.”
Founder, Zafino
Founder, SMB Consultants
Sales & Implementation Engineer,
SMB Consultants
Xero Integration Specialist,
Integration Kings
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