Yuuzoo' s Ron Creevey is upwardly mobile

• THE AUSTRALIAN    NOVEMBER 15, 2013  12:00Am

  RON Creevey has known the highs and lows of life as a serial entrepreneur. He was a 20-something in the 90s in Sydney, as the internet was getting off the ground, when he became a sales manager for Magna Data, one of Australia' s first internet service providers.

  
  
  One of its early projects was helping to design the website for the Fairfax newspaper group. Buoyed by Magna Data' s success, and several million dollars richer from selling his interest in that company, 30-something Creevey founded a catering company with friend Mark Cramer-Roberts, another dotcom boomer who had been part owner of Magna Data.
  
  Called The Cabinet, it rapidly became one of Sydney' s largest catering companies, serving iconic venues such as Luna Park, and with investors including nightclub owner Justin Hemmes, stockbroker Peter Burrows and financial services company Challenger, then part owned by the Packer family. But it flew too high and crashed in 2005 with debts of $16 million.
  
  In 2007, with many lessons learned, Creevey went back to a sector he knew better - new media. But instead of the internet, he focused on the growing market for applications for mobile phones. He teamed up with former chief executive of Nokia for Asia-Pacific, Singapore-based Thomas Zilliacus, to create a new company called YuuZoo.
  
  It drew on Creevey' s experience with website design and media and Zilliacus' s expertise with mobile phones. It began by selling ring tones and wallpaper for mobile phones and then expanded into providing specialised social network sites for mobiles, and a mobile phone-based payment system called YuuPay. The business now turns over more than $30m a year with clients including the Asian arm of the National Basketball Association of America, the Miss World organisation, along with Hearst Media and NBTV in New York.
  
  Now Creevey, 41, is set to reap the rewards of a backdoor listing on the Singapore Stock Exchange later this year - a move that he says could value YuuZoo at more than $400m. " It is exciting to see something that you designed on a blank piece of paper to be traded at a value in excess of $400m. It' s beyond how much money you can make out of a deal like that it' s the satisfaction that a lot of people would never get-the joy of being able to see a business all the way through to a major exit."
  
  Focusing on the social networking and e-commerce side of mobile phones, Creevey sees himself at the forefront of digital media. " Mobile has made the internet global. In the early days of the internet we were playing in a market of 400 million broadband users. Now we are competing in a market of five billion handset users. And most of those handset users are experiencing the internet for the first time. Some countries never had the internet boom. But there is an internet boom in Africa and Southeast Asia and China happening now and it is being driven by mobile."
  
  YuuZoo provides specialised social media sites for mobile phones with e-commerce options for companies, organisations or organisers of sporting fixtures, concerts and other events.
  
  " If the [NBA] team in Singapore is deploying for a major competition in The Philippines, we will create a focused NBA social network based around those two particular teams," Creevey says. " Consumers join it and the NBA retains that user information, serving up their ads and selling their merchandise. It is an NBA-branded social network. It looks and feels NBA."
  
  With nearly 40 million registered users in more than 160 countries, YuuZoo makes its money from content sales, app development, mobile advertising and transaction fees from YuuPay. The $30m turnover last year generated earnings before interest and tax of about $6m. Creevey says it is forecast to turn over about $40m this year with another increase in earnings. " It has been pretty strong from day one," he says.
  
   
  
  Creevey grew up in the western suburbs of Sydney.  Leaving school at 17 he went to work in a stockbroking firm. " I wanted to make as much money as a stockbroker but I didn' t have the qualifications. The next big thing was to start inventing things and coming up with ideas."
  
  When he joined Magna Data in the mid-90s, he was working alongside internet entrepreneurs Jason Ashton, Mark Cramer-Roberts and Vivian Stewart. They built the company up to an annual turnover of $8m with 4000 corporate clients. In 2000, listed company Davnet offered Creevey and the other three $4m each for their share of the company. It was then, after the bursting of the dotcom bubble, that Creevey and CramerRoberts decided to set up a catering company. It grew rapidly but collapsed a few years later. " The business wasn' t funded correctly," Creevey says.
  
  He spent six months working out his next venture, and selected the name YuuZoo during an early morning walk along Bondi Beach. " It was about being in a zoo. The zoo is the world and we wanted to put some structure around you being in the zoo," he says. After the collapse of The Cabinet, Creevey found it easier to get funding for the venture in Singapore, where he was put in touch with Thomas Zilliacus, a long-time resident of the city state with extensive connections from his years running the Asian operations of Nokia.
  
  Creevey moved to Singapore for almost three years to help get the business off the ground but returned to Sydney to put his children in school. Zilliacus is now chairman and chief executive of YuuZoo. Creevey is an executive director and its second-largest shareholder after Zilliacus. He spends a lot of his time in New York expanding the US side of the business and other interests owned by his latest company, Moment Media. Its media assets include the rights to operate YuuZoo in the US, Canada, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil and Mexico, and a 47.5 per cent stake in The Masses, a film production company co-founded by the late Australian actor Heath Ledger. It also owns Local.mobi, which can rapidly put together targeted websites for mobile phones. It is developing websites for hotels associated with Carlton & United Breweries which can be customised at a cost of a few hundred dollars. Moment Media is also involved with NeZii, a mobile payment platform being established with Facebook co-founder, 31-year-old Eduardo Saverin, who now lives in Singapore. Creevey' s partner in New York is Robert Friedman, co-founder of MTV. Friedman is a former chief executive of Playboy and headed New Line Cinema, where he oversaw the release of the  Lord of the Rings  trilogy.
  
  " I live in a world of colour and fun and excitement and ideas," says Creevey, a father of three who now spends his time between Sydney and New York, with flying visits to Asia. " My world is like a Willy Wonka chocolate factory. I deal with people on a daily basis who are changing the face of media and entertainment, and I wouldn' t change that for anything."
  
  Outside of work he has a keen interest in sailing and has done several Sydney to Hobart yacht races. He was lucky enough to win on his first race, in 2000, on Nicorette. " There' s nothing more frightening than sailing past Bondi Beach and thinking, ' I can' t get off this thing' ," he says.
  
  Creevey says he has learned from his days in the ill-fated catering business. " I focus on cash-flow more than anything now," he says. " It is great to have a fantastic idea, but you have to manage your idea in line with your cash. I have always been comfortable to live with my own decisions, which is what everyone needs to do. If I make a mistake, I am the first one to say, ' hey, I made a mistake' and then just get on with it ... You have to understand your strengths. You have to bring good people around you and I have good people around me."
  
  One of his mentors is former Telstra chairman and chief executive of Optus and Fairfax Media, Bob Mansfield. " Ron approached me a few years ago to give him a hand with being more disciplined in the way he has gone about some of his business operations," says Mansfield. " He has been through the highs and lows of creating and owning a business venture. Ron has been focused on the mobile business. He lives and breathes the digital technical form of the mobile phone business, allowing people to create their own websites. He wants to make sure it is available to as many people as possible."
  
  Mansfield has been a director of YuuZoo and retains a small investment in the company. " There is never a dull moment with him," he says. " He is a very creative individual. He has a very clear idea of where he wants to get to, but some of it is right on the edge of technical development. You can' t slow him down ... he drives like hell to get there."
  
  One of Creevey' s next goals is to set up an " incubator" to help support and provide funding for young Australian entrepreneurs. Called Emerging Moments, it will be primarily funded by himself and other backers in his network. One of its goals will be to help talented young Australians develop their ideas locally rather than having to go to Silicon Valley. " The reality is if you are a 17-year-old guy in Australia and you have a fantastic idea and believe it would be the next best app, you would have no idea who to talk to here," Creevey says. " In Silicon Valley you can just walk in and out of cafes and you will get exposed to VCs [venture capitalists]."
  
  Emerging Moments, he says, will provide some structure and advice and help them gain access to funding. " There are a lot of people who want to put money behind good technology startups," he says. " It can be particularly attractive if they have a grown up team around them."
  
  Creevey admits that in his career he has " had my great days and I' ve had my bad days" . But, he says, " the great days outweigh the bad days" . He says he has promised his wife that Moment Media is his last start-up company. It will be " the business that will mature and grow old with me. I love the collection of assets that the business has. This is it for me ... I want to spend more time with the incubator and let somebody else come up with the ideas."