Everyone loves a David-and- Goliath story, but in the real world such stories rarely end well. It’s one thing to be a plucky start-up company elbowing in on a much larger, well-established competitor. But annoy the big competitor too much and you’re likely to be squashed like a bug. That threatened to be the fate of Sendle in 2015, when James Chin Moody’s one-year-old shipping service found itself in court against Australia Post over its slogan: ‘Post without the office.’
He admits it was a bit cheeky. But it also encapsulated what Sendle was all about. It was a door- to-door delivery service that was more like a peer-to- peer network than a large logistics operation like Australia Post.
“That court battle was the first time two things happened,” says Chin Moody now. “Firstly, we had to make that decision: are we going to stand up against a monopoly? That part of the decision didn’t take too long. But the other thing we learnt was that, yes, Australia Post does deserve a true, fully- fledged competitor. So off we went!”
Chin Moody’s smiling face will be familiar to anyone who watched The New Inventors TV show, which ran on the ABC from 2004 to 2011. As one of the judges on that program, each week he compared the use, purpose and viability of inventions and voted
on an ultimate winner. The slightly cruel effect of TV stardom, though, is that it eclipses his extraordinary list of professional accomplishments. A trained engineer who wrote his doctorate on complex product systems in the space industry while running systems engineering at FedSat, Chin Moody has also been an Australian representative to the United Nations Environment Programme, held various leadership roles at CSIRO and has sat on numerous boards. He is also an author and has been named one of the 100 most influential engineers in the country.
“If there are two threads through that eclectic mix of jobs I’ve had, I’d say it’s around problem-solving and around purpose,” he says.
“I love solving problems. Because problem-solving is really fun. But I also think a really deep part of what drives me is the question, ‘How do you have a positive impact on the world?’
And that’s a question I ask whether I’m building a satellite to help launch Australia’s space industry, or joining the CSIRO where I was really about trying to help us be competitive on the world stage in the long run.”
Solving problems is built into the DNA of Sendle. The company was born by accident. Originally Chin Moody had started a company called TuShare, which was designed to give people a quick and easy way to give away unwanted items via the web. Informal social media groups exist to do the same thing, and the purpose of TuShare was explicitly to reduce waste.
It involved the recipient of the item paying a low set fee for delivery of whatever the item was, and TuShare would organise the delivery. They achieved this by writing an app that tapped into the networks of partner couriers and using any excess capacity they had to offer simple, flat-rate deliveries. But then Chin Moody and his partners Sean Geoghegan and Craig Davis noticed something strange happening. People started using them as a low- cost courier.
They realised they had stumbled upon a problem that many businesses, particularly SMEs, had. And no-one had a solution because Australia Post had a monopoly hold on the national market.
“My co-founder Sean is particularly good at this, at taking big problems and breaking them down into smaller problems, then solving them bit by bit,” says Chin Moody. “So we became our own first customer. Sadly, Australia Post couldn’t give us what we needed, which is a really cheap, simple, carbon-neutral way of sending parcels from anyone to anyone. In the early days, we realised there were very few other real choices. And in those very early days, Australia Post just ignored us completely.”
The first hundred parcels, he says, were all manually delivered and tracked. Now, of course, there are millions of parcels and the process is automated and managed online—but it came back to that simple principle encapsulated in the old aphorism: How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
It’s an old-fashioned but tenacious idea, that companies can either do good or make money, but can’t do both. Chin Moody first encountered that idea back when he was chairing the United Nations Environment Programme Youth Council. “Throughout the early 2000s, a lot of that started to shift,” he adds. “People realised you can be a good business but also have a positive impact. And those business models are things like taking waste and turning it into something useful.”
Since part of the vision for Sendle was for the company to be carbon-neutral, Chin Moody was keen to aim for B Corp Certification from the earliest days. B Corp Certification is a third-party certified standard for social sustainability and environmental goals. “For us, it was all about lining up that purpose, which is levelling the playing field for small businesses, doing it in a way that takes responsibility for all the emissions, and aligning that with our business model,” he says.
“The reason I like B Corp is because their motto is, ‘Business as a force for good’, and we’re very much aligned with that. Joining the B Corp movement was a way to build that into the business from day one. And we have to go back every three years, front ourselves up to B Corp and get reaccredited so we make sure we’re doing what we said.”
If that added a layer of difficulty to the already difficult process of starting a company, Chin Moody never let that deter him. “What’s the best time to plant a tree?” he asks rhetorically. “The answer is 10 years ago—and the second-best time is today. So if you do it from day one, the more it returns later on, because purpose is what sustains you on that journey. It’s what sustains the team. Purpose and culture don’t scream out at you at the beginning when you’re starting a company, but the further down the path you get, the more important they become.”
It was that confidence in the purpose of Sendle that helped Chin Moody and his partners stare down Australia Post, and a year and a half after that initial court challenge, IP Australia found in favour of Sendle— that the ‘post without the office’ slogan was not infringing on anyone else’s copyright. Over that time, Sendle grew from plucky start-up to an international concern, expanding first to the United States, and more recently, Canada. While international growth is an intimidating prospect for anyone running their own company, for Chin Moody it comes back to that problem- solving approach.
“I think the United States is a completely different market to Australia,” he says. “There is an oligopoly rather than monopoly. So it’s a bit different. We still believe that within that oligopoly is not enough choice, and it’s really hard to access. There is a huge amount of infrastructure in America that cannot be accessed. The model’s the same in Canada, but we only launched there last October, so it’ll be a bit of a wait and see.”
But perhaps the greatest advantage of this twin focus on problem-solving and purpose is it allows Chin Moody’s role, as the co-founder, to grow with the company. “I think the one thing you very quickly realise in any business is you will go through this transition,” he says. “You might start off being the driver of the business and that’s great. But ultimately your job is to take off hats and put them on the heads of really good people. That lets you focus on bigger problems. And the purpose you’re trying to fulfill is answering, why should this business exist? And what problem am I solving? If you can do that, you are 80 per cent of the way to getting that business off the ground and flying.”