Running head: NAOMI SIMSON, A SUCCESSFUL ENTREPRENEUR

NAOMI SIMSON, A SUCCESSFUL ENTREPRENEUR

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NAOMI SIMSON, A SUCCESSFUL ENTREPRENEUR 1

Executive Summary

The report analyses the entrepreneurship traits of Naomi Simson and the impact of her

background on her career. The report discusses the position of her company RedBalloon in

market, its competitive advantages and some issues that need to be solved. The purpose of this

report is to discuss the entrepreneur’s background and its impact on her business career. The

company’s strategies reflect her personal traits. The way she found the idea and recognized the

opportunities are described in this report. The report concludes with its future direction and some

recommendations for the wellbeing of the company.

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Table of Contents
Introduction: .................................................................................................................................... 3

A successful entrepreneur, Naomi Simson ..................................................................................... 3

Background of the entrepreneur: ................................................................................................ 3

Entrepreneurial traits:.................................................................................................................. 5

Opportunity recognition and idea development process ............................................................. 5

Competitive advantages: ............................................................................................................. 6

Recommendations: ...................................................................................................................... 7

Future direction: .......................................................................................................................... 8

Conclusions:.................................................................................................................................... 8

References: ...................................................................................................................................... 9
NAOMI SIMSON, A SUCCESSFUL ENTREPRENEUR 3

Introduction:

The report analyses the role of Naomi Simson as a successful entrepreneur of Australia.

The chief focus is her development from a very humble past life. She is the business owner of

RedBalloon and is known as ‘red lady’ worldwide. Her pursuit of dreams and positivity has left a

great impact in her business as well as in the minds of the startup businesspersons (Hunter 2013).

She shares her ideas, resilience that helped her in soaring high. As a leader, she is passionate as

well as generous to her employees, which has made the company the best place to work.

The analysis discusses Naomi’s personal life and its impact on her career, her personal

traits that guided to design the company strategies, her opportunity recognition, and the

company’s competitive advantages and finally the minor problems that must be solved.

A successful entrepreneur, Naomi Simson

Background of the entrepreneur:

Naomi Simson is an entrepreneur from Australia, blogger and businessperson. She is the

founder of RedBalloon (Redballoon.com.au 2017). RedBalloon is an online experience gift

retailer that was originated in Australia. It operates under Big Red Group, its parent company.

She has achieved awards like Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2011 and the

Lifetime Achievement Silver Stevie Award in 2013.

Naomi was brought up in Melbourne. Her father has been a mechanical engineer. Naomi

says that in her childhood she always found her mother working with computers. This kind of

upbringing made her independent. At that time, majority of the women usually stayed at home

and did not go for work outside. For Naomi, her mother’s passion for work has immensely
NAOMI SIMSON, A SUCCESSFUL ENTREPRENEUR 4

influenced her to work full time. Her mother taught her the importance of work and kept her

busy with casual jobs for which she used to be rewarded with extra pocket money. The

successful entrepreneur as a child was very curious that had influenced in building company

strategies. She questioned the method or process of a work and explored the alternative way to

complete it more efficiently. Despite having earnest passion for art, she studied commerce as her

mother, her trusted advisor had suggested her.

Naomi Simson started her career in corporate marketing and had working experience

with IBM, Apple Computer, KPMG and Ansett. She began her company in her house with

meager amount of investment and grew to 46 workers by 2011. She was an innovative

entrepreneur with all the features that innovation theory discusses (Bridge and O'Neill 2012).

After six months of its launch, the company was contacted with Fuji Xerox, Qantas, Telstra,

Commonwealth Bank and Westpac using the experiences handy on website for incentive for the

company’s sales force. After these companies signed up with RedBalloon, it experienced

immense success and by 2012, it sold 1.7 million dollars of gift experiences. She has been the

CEO of RedBalloon until 2011 and then stepped back from the operation of the business. In

2016, RedBalloon launched Radii, which was the small business reward platform. In this year,

Naomi found Bid Red Group that became the parent company of RedBalloon. Beside these, the

Bid Red Group operates Radii, the Huddle and Wrapped. She is a risk taker, which according to

entrepreneurship theory must be in an entrepreneur (Kuratko 2016). The theory of social

change marks that an entrepreneur needs to have good intention for social change (Santos 2012).

It can be found in Naomi as she dreams of making the world a better place. For her exceptional

ideas Naomi Simson has become one of the top 10 business executives and held a power profile

in Australia in 2015.
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Entrepreneurial traits:

Naomi Simson is an advocate of female entrepreneurship (Baum, Frese and Baron 2014).

She has inspired many aspiring entrepreneurs by her characteristics and perspective. Her traits of

entrepreneurship are:

 She follows her passion to bring innovation in business. To her, only honesty and

hardship can reveal the way to success.

 According to Naomi Simson, anybody can start a business but to run it persistently, one

should include new ideas and people to cope up with the changing world of business

(Espíritu-Olmos and Sastre-Castillo 2015).

 She searches for better and simpler way to run the company (Altinay 2012). Her purpose

is to make differences by contributing in development of the world.

 Naomi Simson is endlessly positive in her life and wants to surround herself with positive

energy and people.

Opportunity recognition and idea development process

During the period of working as marketing manager with Ansett Airlines, she came

across Peter her ex-husband and business partner in RedBalloon. After her first child born, she

found herself with no time and used to work whole day. She felt urgency to change her condition

therefore started a freelance marketing consultancy, Bright Marketing and ran it four years. This

time she decided to build her dream project RedBalloon. As an entrepreneur of a gift retailer,

her concept was to sell memories and experiences rather than selling gifts. She stated her

business towards the end of the internet bubble therefore, had a tough time to sign up businesses.

She took almost two months to sell her first product. From 2001 to 2012 it reported a growth of
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40% for transaction value overall. It also vents gift cards in the retailers like Myer, Target and

Big W. before 2013, RedBalloon used to deal the peak loads of traffics to sites by using extra

servers as standby or caches. Later the company has migrated its online infrastructure to

Amazon’s Web Service (Tedmanson 2012). It was because the company wanted to manage the

traffic load of $1 million sales at the season of Christmas. The company of Naomi Simson had its

first external appointment of board with Richard England as the chairman and Scott Farquhar as

non-executive director of RedBalloon.

Competitive advantages:

Bonnie Thorn, the marketing head of RedBalloon claims that the company has many

competitive advantages, which revolves round the customer satisfaction, and using technology.

The products of RedBalloon have achieved a great customer engagement. As they have a great

visual content, creativity as well as connectivity. Beside these, the company strategies are

authentic as well as organic (Van Weele, Steinz and Van Rijnsoever 2014). Campervan hire,

Rooftop Travelers, Web Prosperity are the main competitors of RedBalloon. It enjoys some

advantages that its competitors do not.

RedBalloon identifies the demands of the customers. It offers such a product that looks

on the seasonal events and trending topics such as Christmas celebration or mother’s day.

 Unlike others, RedBalloon constantly updates its product’s contents, deals and offers and

compares them with its competitors.

 The company creates authentic and relevant contents and shares them across proper

social channels that most of its competitors do not provide. The company always
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measures the results and monitors its competition. To determine the business impact

RedBalloon uses tools like Google Analytics.

 The company’s motto is to sell the personalized experience instead of selling only

products. In order to do so, the company always keeps in touch with technology.

RedBalloon has incorporated Technology in marketing as IT enables them to be more

agile and well as personalized (Kirzner 2015).

 RedBalloon takes short steps for testing and optimizing its business. By looking at the

customer facing components, such as apps, social platforms, and website and email

platforms the company collects data and work on them.

 As the advertisement and paid search has become more expensive, the company targets

the right customers to deal with and serves them the right contents as well as materials.

To continue business and earn reputation the company works closely it information

technology (Galor and Michalopoulos 2012). After consulting with IT, the company

makes decisions and moves forward.

Recommendations:

RedBalloon under Naomi Simson has become one of the leading companies to satisfy its

customers in Australia but it can decide to join forces in order to enter a global market and

develop fresh products that they cannot do alone. For example, on 2006 Apple and Nike

proposed for a joint venture to bring together the sports and music world and launched

Nike+iPod Sport Kit. This made Nike’s Revenue growth 5.3 percent to $8.68 billion. Microsoft

and skype partnership has acquired $8.5 billion in 2011. Starbucks had partnered with PepsiCo in

2015 to distribute and sell the coffee based drink and projected growth by 22% by 2020.
NAOMI SIMSON, A SUCCESSFUL ENTREPRENEUR 8

Strategic alliances with a global company will help RedBalloon in sharing capital, gaining

marketing expertise, large distribution systems, service networks as well as credibility in market.

Future direction:

Founder Naomi Simson has confirmed the changes in executive structure of RedBalloon.

It is an effort to future-proof the company as well as better focus on the changing demands of the

customers. RedBalloon has held a special event in Sydney to announce its future direction and its

new executive structure. The company has been taking new evolution plans and strategies at its

board level therefore, realignment of employees can be seen.

According to Naomi, the company has restructured its approaches to market around

grow and demand, on its business partners also on experience of customers. The creative team is

designed serve the promotional activities. The future approach of RedBalloon is to build a team

that will be responsive in each core go-to-market capabilities.

Conclusions:

The report discusses the ideology that assisted Naomi to start RedBalloon. The

innovative concepts and imagination guided her in establishing her company. The theory of high

achievement and profit that guides the entrepreneurs to lead the market and acquire the

competitive advantages can be clearly seen in her entrepreneurship. Her positivity and intention

to make the world a better place has been the chief diving force of the company.
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References:

Altinay, L., Madanoglu, M., Daniele, R. and Lashley, C., 2012. The influence of family tradition

and psychological traits on entrepreneurial intention. International Journal of Hospitality

Management, 31(2), pp.489-499.

Baum, J.R., Frese, M. and Baron, R.A. eds., 2014. The psychology of entrepreneurship.

Psychology Press.

Bridge, S. and O'Neill, K., 2012. Understanding enterprise: entrepreneurship and small

business. Palgrave Macmillan.

Espíritu-Olmos, R. and Sastre-Castillo, M.A., 2015. Personality traits versus work values:

Comparing psychological theories on entrepreneurial intention. Journal of Business

Research, 68(7), pp.1595-1598.

Galor, O. and Michalopoulos, S., 2012. Evolution and the growth process: Natural selection of

entrepreneurial traits. Journal of Economic Theory, 147(2), pp.759-780.

Hunter, B.H., 2013. Recent growth in Indigenous self-employed and entrepreneurs. Centre for

Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, ANU.

Kirzner, I.M., 2015. Competition and entrepreneurship. University of Chicago press.

Kuratko, D.F., 2016. Entrepreneurship: Theory, process, and practice. Cengage Learning.

Redballoon.com.au (2017). About Us | RedBalloon. [online] Redballoon.com.au. Available at:

https://www.redballoon.com.au/about-us [Accessed 24 Oct. 2017].

NAOMI SIMSON, A SUCCESSFUL ENTREPRENEUR 10

Santos, F.M., 2012. A positive theory of social entrepreneurship. Journal of business

ethics, 111(3), pp.335-351.

Tedmanson, D., Verduyn, K., Essers, C. and Gartner, W.B., 2012. Critical perspectives in

entrepreneurship research.

Van Weele, M.A., Steinz, H.J. and Van Rijnsoever, F.J., 2014. Start-ups down under: How start-

up communities facilitate Australian entrepreneurship. In Paper to be presented at the DRUID

Conference (pp. 16-18).