Rod Drury says every business person should aspire to take a company public once in their lives. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Rod Drury says every business person should aspire to take a company public once in their lives. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Serial entrepreneur Rod Drury has proven he can start, run and sell a successful company.
Hailing from Hawkes Bay, in 1995 he co-founded the software firm Glazier Systems, which sold four years later for $7.5 million.
Drury's next project, AfterMail, was bought by California-based Quest Software for an amount thoughtto be as high as US$65 million ($85 million).
But with his latest venture, online-accounting firm Xero, Drury has taken a new approach - he floated the company on the NZX, almost from day one.
"We realised that if we had a traditional funding round we'd get bought out by the big guys and having sold a couple of businesses before, the core team really wanted to build a long-term business from New Zealand not just take it up to a point where it sells," he said.
Although the company was still $7.5 million in the red for the 12 months to March 31, Xero tripled its annual revenue in the 2010/11 year to $9.3 million.
Drury said the company also hit a number of milestones last month, gaining 50,000 customers and processing more than $50 billion of customer transactions since launching in 2006. Although listing has its challenges and puts a company firmly in the public eye, Drury is calling on other start-ups to follow Xero on to the NZX.
"We hope there are other companies that list and take a long-term view. You have to really want to, because normally starting a small business is so hard, by the time you get the big cheque you're kind of happy just to go jump on a beach," he said.
