2. GetCapital

Revenue: $4.5 million
Growth: 948.6%
Founders: Jamie Osborn, 44
Head office: Sydney, NSW
Year founded: 2013
Employees: 43
Industry: Finance and insurance
Website: getcapital.com.au

After realising the small business lending space had been lacking in innovation for years, Jamie Osborn was determined to use his financial services experience to offer better financing for Australian SMEs.

Osborn founded GetCapital in 2013 and the business has grown quickly, notching up a three-year revenue growth rate of more than 900%. The rapid growth has landed GetCapital in second place in this year’s Smart50.

However, as the business continued to grow, Osborn found finding good quality staff to join the startup was a challenge.

“We learned that you need set a strong organisational culture from the start. You need to give employees a vision and a set of corporate values that guide all decisions,” Osborn says.

“So much in a startup is fluid and changing that if you don’t have strong guideposts, it can come unstuck very quickly.”

Osborn aims to motivate staff by involving them in shaping the business’s future, claiming it is the best way to keep staff focused.

“We are very transparent within the business and because of our culture of experimenting and iterating – we value highly ideas and input from all staff,” Osborn says.

GetCapital now has 43 employees and is hoping to continue to dominate and disrupt the financial sector for Australian and international SMEs, expanding into New Zealand this year and setting sights on Singapore for 2017.

GetCapital’s immense growth can be in part attributed to its partnership with Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, which launched in November 2015 and provides Australian importers and exporters with line of credit finance through Alibaba’s e-Credit service.

The success of the partnership has lead to GetCapital expanding its partner program; the business now has agreements with Qantas’ Aquire Business Rewards program, accounting services provider Xero, and foreign exchange platform OFX.

Osborn is a firm believer in applying a minimum viable product (MVP) approach to all areas a business covers, saying that GetCapital “adopts a MVP approach to everything”.

“Businesses need to balance getting the fundamentals right with moving quickly,” he says.

“Get a functional version working and then iterate to get it to the standard you want and your customers expect.”