Andrea’s career started when he was 18 years old in the digital industry. He worked in Italy, Spain, France, Germany, UK and Australia for companies like Microsoft, Mapfre, and Travelex. He founded two digital and technology companies in Australia.
Tell us a little bit about your company – what is Backy Check all about?
Backy Check provides background checks services and it is an AMICI Tech’s brand, a company born in Australia as a social enterprise with the main purpose of supporting the charitable organisation SnowBell Project to become self-sufficient in their fight against child sexual exploitation.
Backy Check is driven with a profound sense of social responsibility, to not only support our charity partner but focus to make our community a safer place by providing background check services using an Azure cloud infrastructure developed in-house, with efficient and highly automated processes to ensure affordable services. Ultimately, we offer our services to improve organisations onboarding processes and encourage prescreening proceedings.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you started your company?
Cinthya and Andrea came from Peru and Italy respectively to Australia almost 10 years ago to build a new life, starting from scratch. Working in the corporate world for years, Cinthya decided to initiate a for purpose project to give a different meaning to her career in technology and development, and along with Andrea who shared a similar vision, and after some research, started Backy Check with services strongly linked to the charity they have been supporting and in view of the room available in this market, and the impact on care organisations.
How do you plan to grow this company?
The plans to grow are simple and written in our business plan since day one.
Building a solid and advance platform allowed us to reduce our operational cost, reduce operational risks and have a competitive and fast product in the market. This competitive advantage helps Backy Check to acquire more clients and retain our happy clients.
Our growing plan is to expand our services choice for our clients now we have five products, but we are already developing other exciting unique services for our clients and prospect.
Another plan of expansion is to enter NZ market soon and maybe other markets to follow.
Finally, we are tech people in our hearts, and we want to expand our services beyond background checks, to other shores, as in the data industry, platform and website development, eCommerce, and check-out services. Always with an eye on safe and security for our community and local businesses.
What was the biggest problem you encountered with your business and how did you overcome it?
The biggest problem was related to a financial and brand aspect. The investment to develop this project was incredibly small compared to what a company would need to have to develop from scratch such solution, so the project was effectively budgeted to accomplish our goal. Counting with a few skilled developers and Cinthya’s great experience in the field designing and leading the development project, Backy Check moved forward to be live, but it took a year to launch our services, building a brand at the same time with Andreas expertise in digital marketing and web technologies, but no big investors in the scene.
What were the top mistakes you made starting your business and what did you learn from it?
Sometimes doing too much yourself is not the best answer. At the beginning of the development, we trusted on help provided for a low cost supporting our Azure server, but it backfired. Our domain server was not set up properly and consumed lots of resources and caused also delays and headaches. After hiring a local IT support provider, the problem was resolved.
How do you separate yourself from your competitors?
Our competitors are big global corporations, listed companies, or established companies with huge investments supporting them. In short, they have some big money they can leverage compared to us.
What differentiates us from them, is our technology. We were able to develop an advanced product without wasting so many resources thanks to our deep knowledge and decades of experience in working in corporations. We saw how much money is wasted in some projects while working for corporations, and we just wanted to optimize the spending and deliver a better technological product. So, we save a lot of resources on the development phase, and we save a lot of operational costs, allowing us to be more competitive on the cost side, more secure, and faster for our clients. On top of giving 10% of our profits to charity. Something our competitors will not ever be able to do.
We are social. As just said Backy Check gives 10% of the profits to charities, no one of our competitors can do this and help the community they are operating in.
We have unique products. We entered the market with a unique product, the online identity check. A signature product which uses the applicant’s email to define a risk fraud of dealing with this online identity. Moreover, we can help our business clients that are hiring to match the applicant’s skills and resume with their online social profiles. This is our first signature product, but we will be soon live with other new exciting ones.
What is one thing that you do daily to grow as an entrepreneur?
Be open to any idea. Try to free your mind from our embedded preconception and really think about any issue, solution, product, idea, comments with an open mind. You may find that something you thought was not doable it can be done. And this can be as little as solving a small problem, as big as finding a new product or solution that will help your client or the community to succeed.
What is the one thing you wish you knew before starting your business?
We plan thoughtfully the business, and so far, everything is going exactly as intended.
However, we are learning a lot while working, as we are exposed to new fields and tasks we were not performing before, we feel this is a normal path and it is not something unexpected.
If you only had $1000 dollars to start a new business, knowing everything you know now, how would you spend it?
With such a small budget, the best thing to start a new business is kicking your services as a sole trader using the best of your skills, get some help to start a website, enroll in freelancer agencies and use the budget for a little bit of marketing and tools needed to do your job. For instance, as a software developer, I could need some licenses. After building some brand and budget, a sole trader could turn into an incorporated agency involving more people to participate and forming a team.
What’s your best piece of advice for aspiring and new entrepreneurs?
The key is patience and perseverance! With so many constraints new entrepreneurs come across, it is very important to contemplate the fact that some things will take longer than expected, that the development of new technology or services cannot magically happen, and that it requires effort skills, and time, so patience is a must virtue. And the most important thing, not to give up! Perseverance will allow you to finish your project and take it where it needs to be.
If you had the chance to start your career over again what would you do differently?
I would probably try to get at the stage of opening my own businesses a lot earlier than what I have done. Working for other companies gave me the opportunity to learn a lot, however, I feel I could have learnt as well by diving into my own challenges.
I would have moved to Australia few years earlier as well than what I have done. Australia allows people with the right mindset to have all the opportunities to succeed.
What would you say are the top 3 skills needed to be a successful entrepreneur, and why?
I think an entrepreneur needs to be a dreamer, someone with an open mind, who is capable to believe in an idea that other people cannot see, or they think it will not work.
Resilient, someone who does not stop in front of issues, because every day there will be tons of problems, but navigates through them and keep learning from failures and challenges, turning them in experiences to use later.
An entrepreneur needs to move fast and work efficiently. In fact, the faster you move the quicker you have a product in the market, the more capital you save or make, the quicker you keep developing a better solution for your clients and beat the competition. Also, on the daily tasks, an entrepreneur needs to get things done and keep moving on the task list… fast.
How can we get in touch with you?
On our website, at backycheck.com.au, you can find all the information to get in touch with us.
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