Bobbi Leach

Bobbi has over 25 years of experience in developing online business ventures and a proven track record of driving consistent growth. After graduating with an honour degree in business, the early part of her career was with a national marketing firm, where she progressed to be a vice president and partner. Clients she managed ranged from large corporate retail giants like Gillette, Avon and Smith & Nephew, to government departments health, security and natural resources. During that time Bobbi also earned her Executive MBA, focusing her studies on entrepreneurship.

Moving back to her home town of Victoria, Bobbi has been working in the tech sector for two decades, mostly with online businesses. She has held three CEO roles with tech companies in the payments industries, as well as helped found three startups. As CEO of PayMotion, her focus is to build a global brand of payment solutions that helps clients improve their online revenue. Another payments company she founded, FuturePay, provided eCommerce merchants with the ability to offer instant credit. She’s also held several senior leadership roles at other tech businesses from hosted software applications to marketing solutions for the education sector.

Where did the idea for PayMotion come from?

I started PayMotion because of a need to help small to medium-sized businesses with out-sourcing their payments, especially for those businesses that have a subscription model. Payments are complicated and most small businesses don’t have the in-house expertise to build, maintain, and optimize their payments infrastructure.

What does your typical day look like and how do you make it productive?

A typical day for me involves lots of check-ins and reinforcing the vision, strategic direction and high-level priorities of the company. The more the vision and strategy are shared and discussed, the more alignment is achieved across the company. This is especially true for industries that are dynamic and constant change is required to evolve your business.

How do you bring ideas to life?

Communication. Communication. Communication. If you don’t keep repeating your vision for the business and the direction the ship is sailing, people can get caught in the weeds. It’s important that as new information comes to light, you share that across the team and make sure everyone is still rowing in the same direction.

What’s one trend that excites you?

Online everything! I love how more and more day to day needs are being delivered and consumed digitally. From healthcare and groceries to meetings and finances, a lot of our basic needs can be fulfilled through an online experience or digital connection.

What is one habit of yours that makes you more productive as an entrepreneur?

Taking “moments” throughout the day. Whether it’s 5 minutes to step outside or 2 minutes to stand up and stretch, these breaks help with getting focused for the next meeting or clearing your thoughts for an important discussion.

What advice would you give your younger self?

To pursue your entrepreneurial interests sooner. I think the younger generation is already thinking that way – starting a business, working gigs remotely – but two decades ago that wasn’t the norm.

As an entrepreneur, what is the one thing you do over and over and recommend everyone else do?

Get in front of the customer. It’s very difficult to shape a new business or product, or stay current with customer needs, if you aren’t personally spending time with your customers.

What is one strategy that has helped you grow your business?

Partnerships are a great way to grow the business. It can be channel partners, strategic partners or vendors. All of which come with clients that are using their service and are likely a fit with your target market. The challenge is to make sure you partner with groups that will bring value to your business because getting and maximizing partnerships are very time consuming.

What is one failure you had as an entrepreneur, and how did you overcome it?

Success for a lot of businesses are about timing. Timing of when you enter the market or timing for when you raise capital. One of the my biggest disappointments was not being able to raise capital for a business we launched and started to scale. The timing for when the business started was good, but I was too late in approaching VCs to raise capital and their interest for our type of business had waned.

What is one piece of software or a web service that helps you be productive?

I really love how we’ve all adapted to the pandemic and are using tools such as Zoom and Teams to communicate even more and better than we use to!

What is the one book that you recommend our community should read and why?

Mastering the Rockefeller Habits by Verne Harnish. While this isn’t a new book, it’s been the most impactful book for me in terms of scaling my business.