How Millennials are creating workplaces like Expert360 to sidestep career ladder

Here, the second of four Australian Millennials who have created businesses on the world stage talks to The Australian Financial Review Magazine about how they started – and about those negative attitudes and behaviours attributed to their tribe.

Bridget Loudon

Age: 28
Co-founder of Expert360

Bridget Loudon believes everyone aspires to shape the world in some form, but often the trade-offs are too much.

"It's not that people don't want to change the world – it's that you have to give up too much wealth or material things that you have accumulated and put that on the line," says the 28-year-old co-founder of Expert 360.

"If you value those things less in comparison to having an impact on society, you don't care about giving them up. What drives me is this hunger to have an impact on society."

Loudon and co-founder Emily Yue are driving change in the $US200 billion ($277 billion) management consultant market. It's an industry that hasn't changed for 50 years and where the structure is to send costly teams of consultants in to advise companies.

Loudon and Yue set up a platform where consultants can freelance their services to companies that don't want to recruit a whole team from the likes of McKinsey & Co or Bain & Co. Loudon and Yue both worked at Bain.

Within 48 hours of their 2013 launch, Expert360 had 700 management consultants signed up. This figure has grown to 7000, of which a third are based in the US. Last month the business, which employs 26 staff, opened an office in New York. Loudon is planning to relocate there.

Consultants bid on jobs ranging from $1000 to $80,000 for government and business projects, involving strategy, customer supply chains, data and analytics. A consultant's average hourly charge is $100. Companies that have used its services include Australia Post and Virgin. Expert360 adds a margin on consultant's rates.

Loudon says the inspiration for the system came about in 2011 when she and Yue, who had been at Bain for a year, noticed clients had problems that couldn't be solved within the existing management consulting structure. "Companies were saying they didn't need a full team but they did need high-calibre people."

Loudon says Expert360 works because it's not just companies seeking flexibility – consultants want it too. "The second you say I'm pregnant or I want to go part-time or can I have flexibility, you're put in this bucket that you don't fit into our conventional model," she says.

"We'll look back in 10 years time and say that was absolutely crazy. For me the purpose now is creating a workplace in which people have choice and they don't have to step off."

The start-up has received $5.1 million in funding from investors such as Frontier Ventures, r&mpersand and wealthy individuals, among them former Macquarie Bank boss Allan Moss. However, it will be several years before Expert360 is profitable.

"We're now spearheading a global macro shift in the way people think about work and in particular professional services."

Loudon believes purpose is the root of her success thus far. "If you set out to be rich you will struggle to be successful. Success and happiness are greatly constrained in building a business if you don't have purpose." Loudon says at no point will she trade her happiness in what she's doing. "Excuse my French, but f--k that."

Loudon was born in Australia, spent most of her childhood growing up Ireland, and did a double degree in commerce and French. After university, she established a clothing wholesale business, which was sold to an Irish retailer for a modest sum in 2008 just as the global financial crisis was wreaking havoc.

It wasn't her first venture. Throughout her school and university years she'd shown an enterprising streak, buying textbooks from Amazon and selling them cheaper than the university bookstore to fellow students. At school she managed a group of tutors, taking a cut of their fees.

After selling her clothing business she moved to Australia and applied for a job with Bain. "I had never really worked for anyone and I wanted to learn from people. There was only so much I could do by reading, trying, failing and succeeding. I wanted to work with people who had scars and success stories of building big businesses."

After three years, Loudon left Bain to launch Expert360, setting up a website that cost $180 and sending out 1000 LinkedIn messages to consultants asking them to sign up. In the first year, Loudon and Yue maxed out their credit cards, but were already getting interest from private equity firms wanting to use some of Expert360's consultants.

Loudon believes it's easier for Millennials to start a business than for previous generations. "A tech start-up in 1990 cost $US5 million to get off the ground. Today it costs south of $US50,000 for that same start-up."

Then there's the power of technology. A smartphone packs more processing power today than the computers that took the first rocket to the moon during the Baby Boomers' time.

"The barriers to starting something are super low – that's a big part of it," says Loudon. "Millennials, because they can change things, they question things more. They question traditional hierarchies and traditional ways of doing things."

She says her generation is less focused on working for a big name corporation. "They value skills, relationships, experience, learning more than, say, a company's brand. They realise a brand is not forever."

Loudon believes it would be very hard for a competitor to knock Expert360 off its perch because of the talent pool it has built up and its review system of consultants by clients.

"What we have is a track record of three years, good reviews, more dynamic professional profiles than anywhere else in the world. It's hard to replicate."

This is the second part of a four-part series.

For the first Millennial story, read about Daniel Gulati, who grew up in Wollongong, has had more careers and businesses than most of us will have in a lifetime and built millions on his path to New York.

The third in this series is about how Anthony Goldbloom's love of coding and statistics, and a bad case of boredom, saw him create Kaggle and land clients such as NASA, General Electric and Facebook.

The last in the series is about Daniel Weston, who played cricket for Western Australia, went backpacking in Germany and ended up building a $US30 million hedge fund in Munich in three years.

ahyland@afr.com.au

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The AFR Magazine's June Wealth issue is out Friday May 27, inside The Australian Financial Review.