Business Expert on the Budget, the Housing Crisis, and Intergenerational Inequality
5/27/202650 min
Naomi Simson is the founder of Red Balloon and co-founder of the Big Red Group.
In this conversation, Naomi breaks down how she built a business that now delivers an experience every 16 seconds to small businesses across Australia and New Zealand.
Simson also delivers her unfiltered assessment of the recent federal budget, arguing that too many changes implemented too quickly will cripple business confidence during an already challenging period of technological disruption.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsMark Bouris· Host0:00
Naomi Simpson, welcome to Straight Talk. It's about time you come on my show. [laughs] It's crazy. We've known each other for about a million years. We've spoken lots of things together.
Naomi Simson· Guest0:07
I don't think we need to reference the million years. We're getting wiser- It's true ... Mark, wiser.
Mark Bouris· Host0:12
We're, uh, we've, we've known each other for wiser years- Yes. [laughs] ... or whatever the words are. But welcome, and thanks for coming into the studio today.
Naomi Simson· Guest0:17
Good to be here.
Mark Bouris· Host0:18
It's good timing too, like, to get someone like you in here to talk about some of the stuff we saw in the budget. I'll just park that for a moment, though. But just, if we could just introduce you first. So, you know, my first recollection of you is when you did something quite disruptive when you launched Red Balloon- Mm ... which was, uh, an e-commerce business, but like, I don't know if it was described as e-commerce in those days. But w- um, how many years back now are we talking about?
Naomi Simson· Guest0:44
That's 25 years ago.
Mark Bouris· Host0:45
25 years ago. So around the same time I did Wizzit. Um- It is ... it is around the same time.
Naomi Simson· Guest0:50
It is. Yeah.
Mark Bouris· Host0:50
And, uh, exactly, exactly the time I did Wizzit, actually. I, I, I was... 26 years ago, I started that. Um, what was disruptive? I mean, we could look at it now and say it's not that disruptive, but what was disruptive at the time, Naomi?
Naomi Simson· Guest1:03
Well, um, believe it or not, we were at the very beginning of the internet way back then, in 2001.
Mark Bouris· Host1:09
Yeah.
Naomi Simson· Guest1:09
And, you know, there was no such things as social media, smartphones, digital cameras, nothing. And, um, I think sometimes people wouldn't mind going back to that time. But it was a very simple concept. The fact is that there's a lot of small businesses who find it very expensive to find customers, and that's not changed. You know, it was