"Growth is Good but Profit is Preferred"
Welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview with Gavin Basserabie, a passionate entrepreneur and Australian Registered Chartered Accountant. In this interview, we explore Gavin’s remarkable journey and his groundbreaking venture, ConfidenceClub, revolutionizing incontinence care in Australia.
With extensive experience spanning retail, IT, e-commerce, and biotechnology, Gavin co-founded ConfidenceClub in 2017 to address the pressing need for accessible and affordable incontinence products.
ConfidenceClub offers Australians a convenient and affordable way to access the right incontinence products tailored to their needs. As the first online retailer of its kind, ConfidenceClub ensures fast and discreet shipping, alongside exceptional customer support.
Join us as Gavin Basserabie shares insights into his entrepreneurial journey, the mission behind ConfidenceClub, and their transformative impact on the lives of Australians facing incontinence challenges.
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Table of Contents
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company.
Gavin Basserabie: A passionate entrepreneur and Australian Registered Chartered Accountant, Gavin Basserabie has spent more than two decades working across the retail, IT, e-commerce, and biotechnology industries. After learning that 1 in 4 Australians experience incontinence, Gavin co-founded ConfidenceClub with friend and business partner Garron Lipschitz in 2017.
Driven by the goal to improve the accessibility and affordability of incontinence products, Gavin has used his entrepreneurial expertise to establish ConfidenceClub as a leading industry name.
ConfidenceClub offers an affordable and convenient way for Australians to access the right incontinence products for their individual needs. As the first online retailer of its kind, ConfidenceClub’s service removes the burden of sourcing incontinence products in-store by shipping each order quickly and discreetly.
With a focus on providing exceptional customer support, ConfidenceClub aims to improve the quality of life for Australians living with incontinence issues.
If you were in an elevator with Warren Buffet, how would you describe your company, your services or products? What makes your company different from others? What is your company’s biggest strength?
Gavin Basserabie: ConfidenceClub is the next best option to a cure for the over 5 million Australians with incontinence. We provide a high level of customer support and a more convenient, discreet way to purchase quality European products at very competitive prices.
Our biggest difference is that we help customers find the right product for their specific needs. We are so confident that we will provide a better solution that we are the only provider in Australia that offers a full money back guarantee.
What advice do you wish you had received when you started your business journey and what do you intend on improving in the next quarter?
Gavin Basserabie: The advice I wish I had received – or maybe did receive but wish I followed – is to focus on the functions and tasks that make the biggest difference.
You cannot do everything and my natural tendency is to address everything all at once. You have to make peace with the fact that some things don’t need to be dealt with.
My business partner and I have committed to monthly meetings to re-focus both of our attention on the things that make the biggest difference.
Online business keeps on surging higher than ever, B2B, B2C, online shopping, virtual meetings, remote work, Zoom medical consultations, what are your expectations for the year to come and how are you capitalizing on the tidal wave?
Gavin Basserabie: Our business is a ‘poster child’ for this tidal wave. Partially as a pure online e-commerce business but also one that supported the change in the way more mature Australians shop, especially due to COVID.
While incontinence affects people of all ages – and a significant proportion of our customers are purchasing for someone they care for – a large percentage of our customers are over the age of 65.
This demographic has traditionally been slow adopters of online shopping and home delivery until COVID lockdowns and social distancing concerns became a reality of daily life for people who were more at risk.
As a result, many of our customers have told us that buying from ConfidenceClub was the first time they had ever shopped online. We have seen a nine-fold increase in our business since COVID started and we believe there has been around 10 years of online shopping adoption in 2 years.
We expect that this trend will continue and that more people from this demographic will move some of their shopping online, especially on consumables and even more so on our type of consumables – which are bulky, inconvenient, and some would say embarrassing.
Business is all about overcoming obstacles and creating opportunities for growth. What do you see as THE real challenge right now?
Gavin Basserabie: The real challenge for our business in Australia is home delivery. In our experience, Australian couriers are providing a more compromised service post-pandemic. Since COVID, volumes have surged to record levels that couriers cannot cope with, and service levels have dropped.
To make matters worse, all couriers have imposed significant price increases to some postcodes, causing delivery services in certain states and regional areas to be loss-making. We subsidise delivery but this cost for some customers well exceeds the cost of the product.
We haven’t changed our pricing, but we have seen many others passing on these cost increases to the customer. Ultimately this will impact the cost of living of regional Australians more so than those living in cities.
2020, 2021, and 2022 threw a lot of curve balls into businesses on a global scale. Based on the experience gleaned in the past years, how can businesses thrive in 2023? What lessons have you learned and what advice would you share?
Gavin Basserabie: Not sure if I have the ‘hindsight benefit’ of half of 2023 almost passing at time of writing! The experiences we have had in the past 3 years would have been impossible to predict.
As a young-ish, high-growth business the biggest lesson we have learned, and the advice I would share for the next 12 months is that ‘Growth is Good but Profit is Preferred’. Growth at all costs is very dangerous. Businesses need to focus on controlling costs as well as driving sales.
What does “success” in 2023 mean to you? It could be on a personal or business level, please share your vision.
Gavin Basserabie: We are very happy with how ConfidenceClub in Australia is going. We have a great team that is well set up to handle even more strong growth and we are managing our costs well. We have serviced over 50,000 customers and 80% of our business comes from repeat orders from satisfied customers.
We decided to expand beyond Australia and in March this year launched ConfidenceClub in the UK. It is early days but success over the next 12 months would be for us to replicate our success in Australia in the UK – and potentially in other markets we have earmarked. Stay tuned!
Jerome Knyszewski, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Gavin Basserabie for taking the time to do this interview and share his knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Gavin Basserabie or his company, you can do it through his – Linkedin Page
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