There’s no surprise that the events of the past year have shocked a lot of businesses all over the world. Adrienne Minster, CEO of Rated People—a Frog Capital portfolio company and the UK’s leading trade service marketplace—shared in an interview with Senior Partner Mike Reid how they shifted their business model to stay agile while remaining focused on customer experience.
One of the biggest transformations made at Rated People was to shift the business to a subscription model. “We flipped from a 30% recurring revenue model to now more than 70% or 80% recurring revenue in the business,” she explained. “That’s really been an important part of what’s made our business particularly resilient through all the bumps and twists and turns this year.”
Minster added that this new business model has allowed them to continue to invest in bringing work to their trades customers which, of course, was very helpful when there was very little work available. “I think one of the advantages to our model in particular is that trades people are in control of how much work they want to do on our platform and therefore we can really help accelerate the growth of their business.”
Asked about growing the same business model in the UK market, she said: “We really try to look at global benchmarks and measure our progress against theirs. Of course we do pay attention to what’s happening in the UK market but we’re constantly learning from other geographies and we try to take what we believe are best practices or learning from mistakes that may have been made from other markets, and then adapting it for what’s right for our business.”
