Is your business innovation-active?

“Innovation-active” – it’s not a term that rolls off the tongue, but it characterises half of Australian businesses. That’s according to recent data from Australian Bureau of Statistics which outlined the attributes of Australian Business during the 2019-20 financial year. A total 51% of Australian businesses reported being “innovation-active” – defined as either introducing a new innovation in FY20 or moving an innovation through the development process.

At hipages Group, we proudly fall within this category. We have been transforming the Australian trade industry through technology for the past 17 years. In this time, we have been helping tradies source job leads and build their online profiles, and now our ambition evolves beyond purely lead sourcing, to shaping and owning the On-Demand Tradie Economy.

We are broadening our attention on where and how we can support Australian trade businesses, through innovation of our services. This includes building technology that helps tradies easily manage their business operations, jobs and clients while optimising their marketing spend; evidenced by an early release of Tradiecore, a new service from hipages Group that will be broadly available later this financial year.

Tradiecore is our latest innovation designed to ease the burden of everyday admin for trade businesses. The easy-to-use app enables tradies to manage all of their jobs and customers in one place, so they can concentrate on their trade and winning more work. It helps with quoting and invoicing, and will soon provide trends and insights on their sales pipeline and profitability.

One in four tradies claim to have been forced to give up jobs due to the burden of admin, equating to around $120k p.a. of lost work per tradie. Tradies also spend an average of 14 hours per week dealing with their admin – time they are not spending on the tools to grow their business, or with their families. We’re confident Tradiecore will ease these burdens for trade businesses around Australia.

Feedback so far from our beta testing and early release phase has been positive and we’re making refinements and adjustments to Tradiecore based on customer insights.
Innovation has always been a key value pillar for us at hipages – yet perhaps we’ll start referencing “innovation-active” instead. After all, we always need to put energy into innovation, to stay ahead of the pace of change.