Filling a market need

carsales.com’s continued success and growth in the market is largely due to theentrepreneurship that commenced with Greg Roebuck, which has continued with the incubation of creative ideas within the business. Greg was shocked by the inconsistency of information provided in traditional classified advertisements. As an entrepreneur, he recognised an opportunity and did something about it!He launched a business that immediately raised the quality and quantity of information available to buyers and sellers to achieve a sale. The continued diversification of the business from automotive products into a range of aligned channels, markets and geographies such as the sale of industry equipment further typifies entrepreneurship – looking for new ideas, managing the risks involved, but achieving commercial success. Underpinning this is innovation, which will be covered in detail later in this case study.

Seeing a market need is one thing but the capacity to meet that need relies on sound business planning. Figure 2 provides the application of some of the key elements of a business plan that would have applied to carsales.com when the business was first conceived back in the mid 1990s.

Figure 2: