Jaxsta (ASX:JXT) – Jacqui Louez Schoorl

Through the entrepreneur’s journey of research, product ownership, development and scoping, to raising capital for the Jaxsta platform, the role of CEO formed along the way. I have been fortunate since our listing (Dec 2018) to stand with a strong Board and C-Suite Team. Our CIO Phil Morgan and our Chair Linda Jenkinson are like minded souls and collectively we share a vision for the company and it’s ultimate success.

The Team, our Board and the incredible music industry partners we work with give me the confidence that Jaxsta is well on its way to becoming a highly successful industry player.

Tell us a bit about your business and how you are commercializing?
Jaxsta (ASX:JXT) is the world’s largest official database of music credits. As well as being an iMDB (International Movie Database) meets LinkedIn for the music industry. We have over 42 million pages of credits (compared to Wikipedia’s 6.5 million English pages), crediting over 105+ million entities (people + companies), covering over 27 million releases (songs, albums). Over 100,000 new credits being ingested into the database 7 days a week.

We have two key future revenue streams:
● Jaxsta Pro – B2B subscription membership – the LinkedIn of the music industry including profile claim, music chart alerts, key market/territory information, industry calendar and much more

● Commercial API and bespoke data solutions – solutions for the smartspeaker industry, DSPs (digital service providers – music streaming companies) and all other manner of businesses that need accurate music data

As the site and audience grow, we have future revenue streams we expect to roll out including:

● Site advertising
● Automated industry reports

How are you managing with the current COVID-19 pandemic on both business and personal front?
We are one of the companies for whom COVID-19 is providing an opportunity. With millions of musicians and industry professionals at home in insolutation, we have been able to launch our free B2B subscription model resulting in record traffic and membership numbers.

Fortunately at Jaxsta we are an online platform and business so our entire Team is able to work from home during the pandemic. We have managed to run the company with minimal impact.
The health and safety of our Team is always of paramount importance. We closed our office rather early to ensure our Team, their families and flatmates were less exposed. The Team have thrived working remotely and have delivered two significant deployments to the platform including the launch of Jaxsta Pro Free.

Early on we set up daily Zooms (first 8 weeks) as everyone adjusted to working from home, especially those in the Team who were in complete isolation living alone.

Our HR Manager and C-Suite Executive Team have all done a great job of looking after our people which has included an anonymous survey to check-in, to see what is working and what’s not. We pivoted and adjusted our Team’s rhythm based on this feedback.

Zoom fatigue is a very real thing. We have just recently rolled out ‘no meeting Fridays’ so the Team can have a full day to just flow, stay in the zone and ultimately have a day of significant output. It’s working really well.

Last week our HR Manager presented our ‘Back to Office’ success plan to the Team so they understand the how, why and when of returning to the Jaxsta office.

Personally I’ve been enjoying spending time with my husband in Los Angeles. We both typically travel a lot for business, especially the last three years so staying put in one city, one country for longer than 2-3 weeks has been a nice change.

It’s been nice to properly organise our LA apartment as I’m normally not here for longer than two weeks at a time flying between meetings and US cities when I touch down.

Working out, Masterclass and Podcasts have been my daily go-to survival kit and on the weekends, cooking, reading and more Masterclass. Scheduling Zoom dates with my friends and family on the weekends have been a must.

What’s the most exciting thing about running your business?
Being able to build the culture of a company, whilst positively impacting an industry and delivering success for the Company are my passions. It’s inspiring to build a platform that we know already is creating positive change in the music industry and will long outlast our personal contributions to it. Working with a first class Team to build the best product in the business which is beloved by our customers whilst working to ensure financial discipline and the ultimate business strategy to ensure Jaxsta’s global success.

How do you measure success?
Good health is everything, coupled with the love and support of your family and friends. Success is defined and measured by the strength of our relationships and the positive mark we leave behind, long after we are gone.

Building Jaxsta to be one of the best companies to work for, who provide the best customer service experience and driving value growth for our shareholders by having the right people in the right roles will be our ultimate company success story.

What is your favourite book?
I will read at least 40-50 books a year so this is a truly challenging question for me to answer. Aghh!