Our Story

The “White Label” product offered by Fast Rabbit, was created to solve problems. Gavin Waring, the founder of Your Business Angels, and his business partner Anne Park, saw a need for this product whilst running their accounting and B2B consulting business.

Your Business Angels was created over 23 years ago with an offer for businesses that faced problems or a crisis with the Australian Taxation Office, a bank or was floundering financially. Most businesses at the core had hardworking stakeholders and a saleable product, but they needed guidance and help to move forward.

Over the last 15 years we have seen the elimination in manufacturing and the core of how a small business has changed in Australia. There has been a growth in service industries and the rise of the reluctant business owner. The way to have a job is to be a contractor and put your skills out for hire.

An apprentice coming out of the training would find themselves now a “subbie”. IT consultants are subbies through contracting companies. The building industry is not so much a builder and contractors, but a cobweb of businesses that sub to each other. The landscape has changed. Many of the 2.2 million businesses are made of business and stakeholders who had no desire to be in business.

At the same time cloud-based accounting arrived.
Gavin and Anne embraced it immediately and then the problems started.

Consider this for a moment. If you design a car in a wind tunnel, the engineers will all build the same car. The rules of aerodynamics are the same for an Audi, Mercedes Benz, Mazda and Toyota. Each manufacturer has to take what they learnt in the wind tunnel and design a product that differentiates it in culture, price and performance. Logic says that these variations are ridiculous, we are only allowed to travel at fixed speeds and Australian Standards dictate so much of a car’s make up.

Yet we seem to have a choice and can travel down the freeway in a $19k car or a $300k car, both at 100km per hour, the air-conditioning on, and the music up and in both cases in reasonable comfort. We have a choice. Apples and oranges to compare.

In the case of cloud-based accounting the choice is extremely limited. There is Xero and there is MYOB. No matter what additional packages, services, the care, the number of phone calls to the ATO – that extra distance you go, a business owner seems to see very little difference in the offering.

We had to create a unique offering that was very different to cloud-based accounting.
And it worked.

The nature of many of our clients was that any other accountant would call them a D class client. There is a logic from most accounting firm consultants that say, get rid of your D clients and find more A. What if we could convert all our D class clients into A class clients? Imagine this.

If you could find a way to complete accounts and do it in a way that the client pays attention at the right time, and not ignores your phone calls and you could complete the BAS every time without the risk of complaints (again) about late lodgement. Imagine there was a smooth process that worked every time. Imagine your client had a great income, used very limited resources, and you could offer a great price while making great financial returns on that client. Then you could value those small and difficult clients because they wouldn’t be difficult any more and financially would be worth it.

We had to create a unique product that would achieve our financial goals of our business, make space for growth without spending more on resources. And it worked.

If you have to do something you can become resentful. If you didn’t come from a business culture, hadn’t read “Rich Dad Poor Dad’ then being in business would be confusing and difficult. Most of our clients have problems with the taxman or banks or running their business because the business culture is so far away from their culture. Many would ignore what we tried to teach them about profit and loss, compliance, staying up with the taxman and teaching them that the money in their business bank account wasn’t all theirs to spend.

We had years of ‘well if I made that money, where did it go?”. Having dug someone out of a problem, they would be back there in a couple of years. We had to create a product that made the clients pay attention and react to the information that was put in front of them. We needed to solve a cultural, and financial problem.

Clients get older, and at a simple level they need money saved for retirement. They need to build assets and get a reward for the hard work they carry out – and getting them to buy in meant that real financial habits could change. We created a unique product that would help clients get control of their financial life and business and have a real chance for the future. And it worked.

The creation of a “race to the bottom” by the cloud-based accounting firms has meant that we had constant client churn. We also had constant staff churn for the same reason. It became a case of win a client, loose a client, and always being played of in price, even though we had worked so hard to help a client, or we worked so hard at encouraging them to do the right thing.

Imagine that our marketing was about replacement and not growth. We needed to solve the problem by creating a unique product and naming it. Giving a whole service to the client, at an extremely competitive price, we needed the client to feel safe with us (so we had to guarantee there would never be a late lodgement) and we had to have a professional work environment where our accountants could help clients instead of forever reconciling the mess the clients had made in the file. We created a unique product that would give us client retention and growth and staff retention. And it worked.