Marc Schneider is the CEO of Zebit Inc (ASX:ZBT), a California-based eCommerce company that is dedicated to changing the lives of over 120 million U.S. credit-challenged consumers by giving them access to a broad set of products and the ability to pay for those products in instalments over six months.

What’s your journey in becoming a Chief Executive Officer?
I have been in operations for over 30 years across a wide variety of businesses and industries, with a focus on turnarounds of failing companies, scaling companies for profitability, and start-ups which have their own set of challenges including building a viable product with constrained resources. Becoming a CEO was never part of any overall master plan, as I felt being a President and COO in running daily operations was truly my calling.

In fact, when I co-founded Zebit in 2015, that was my role. It was not until my co-founder transitioned out of the organization that the Board decided to promote me to the CEO role.

Fast forward 3.5 years in this role, I still maintain my daily ops responsibilities as it’s something I really enjoy. The next phase however is to hire a COO whom I can pass the baton to, as we continue to scale the business toward profitability, which is our goal in the next 12 months.

Tell us a bit about your business and how you are commercializing?
Zebit is a new business model focused on providing both eCommerce and a custom credit solution to a credit-challenged consumer base (47% of adults and 120M people) in the U.S. to allow them to have a one-stop shopping experience and the ability to float their payments over six months. We have spent the last five years building our own big data set to allow us to make informed credit decisions to this consumer base, so they can buy what they want without the overhang or fear of interest, hidden fees or penalties common to other credit products that trap consumers in a never-ending cycle of debt.

Over the last five years, we have built scalable acquisition channels to acquire consumers cost-effectively and bring more awareness to Zebit, and we have built out a full eCommerce experience and our own proprietary payment system. We continue to scale the business with the inflow of capital from the recent IPO.

How are you managing with the current COVID-19 pandemic on both business and personal front?
In mid-March our entire workforce went virtual to manage the business without any hiccups. That said, not being together physically, in my view, dampens continuous learning of the employee base and can stifle innovation that flows from that learning. Other than that, we plan to continue to operate Zebit virtually until Summer of 2021 after a vaccine is widely distributed here in the U.S.

On a business front, we continue to upgrade our machine learning models to address risk and are benefiting from those enhancement as the U.S. economy tries to recover.

What’s the most exciting thing about running your business?
The most exciting aspect of building Zebit is to achieve what others think is impossible.  The status quo in the U.S. and legacy solutions dictate that you must be predatory to successfully service a credit-challenged customer. We don’t believe that and are breaking those stereotypes with predictive machine learning risk models.

Once Zebit becomes profitable, I believe the naysayers will be proven wrong and I cannot wait to declare victory on that front.

How do you measure success?
I look at three success metrics – customer retention and repeat buying, employee retention and commitment to the mission, and expanding contribution margin of the business to break the plane of profitability. 

What do you think is the most important quality of being a Chief Executive Officer of a listed company?
Transparency with the market in terms of the strategy, execution, and KPIs of the business to allow investors to make smart, long terms decisions around their capital deployed.

What is your favourite book?
My favourite business book is The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen.

Two aspects – all businesses and industries can be disrupted and once you disrupt something, don’t assume others won’t come in to take what you have created away. 

What message do you want to send to our readership in Asia?
Don’t allow stereotypes of consumers or their past performance with other business models, dissuade you from thinking that disruption cannot happen on a sustainable basis.

Zebit is not a better “mouse-trap”; it is a different model entirely. If entrepreneurs were paralysed by comments such as “you cannot do this,” we would not have experienced much of the advancements that we enjoy today.

Zebit is revolutionizing how eCommerce and credit redelivered to 120M people in the U.S.

Get on board now, because there is going to be massive upside as we continue to scale.

How can people connect with you?
Email: (Media Relations)
Zebit’s Website: https://zebit.com/

WhiteHawk Limited (ASX: WHK) has been awarded a fiscal 2021 option extension of US$1.5 million (A$2.1M) under an existing 7-year contract.

The contract with a US Federal government Department was for a 1-year contract with 6 option years.

WhiteHawk has been advised that the option for the next financial year has now been exercised, which is worth US$1.5 million to the company over the 2021 financial year, that is a significant increase on the US$400,000 in revenue awarded to the company under the contract for the 2020 financial year.

The company sees this as validation of its cybersecurity technology and value to the US government in combatting cyber threats.

WhiteHawk is the first global online cyber security exchange enabling small-to-medium businesses to take smart action against cybercrime, fraud and disruption,

The focus of this contract for WhiteHawk has evolved from cyber risk technical and management services, scoped at US$400,000 to US$750,000 per year, to now lead developer of a comprehensive online Cyber Security Marketplace, with an automated cyber risk review and solution option mapping, for a breadth of US Federal Government entities.

The company’s revenues continue to ramp up and have more than doubled to approximately US$585,000 in the first half of 2020.

On an annualised basis, this was broadly in line with the company’s revenues for 2019 which were just above US$1 million.

Consequently, on a year-on-year basis this contract alone represents about 150% of the previous year’s revenues.

Could further contract extension be on the way

The contract extension underlines WhiteHawk’s product capability and service level execution to perform on all current contracts to achieve further government option year contract extensions and to engage with future customers seamlessly and effectively throughout the current global pandemic.

It is worth noting that this comes just a fortnight after the company announced the automation and scaling of two key product lines, the Cyber Risk Scorecard and CMMC that were added to the online maturity model, enabling scalability across thousands of companies, an added attraction for organisations looking to extend contracts.

It is little surprise the company is now gaining traction in key markets as it continues to improve its product offering. Behind WhiteHawk is a CEO well-versed in US national security.

Executive Chair of WhiteHawk, Terry Roberts is a former deputy director of US Naval Intelligence and a 35-year veteran of the US national security and cyber intelligence community. She was also a Department of Defence Senior Executive and an Executive at the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute.

Ms Roberts has a knack for securing contracts at the highest levels of the US government.

She highlighted the benefits of the group’s real-time, end- to-end automated product offerings in saying, “We are discovering that our unique end-to-end automated approach to identifying, prioritising and mitigating cyber risks via an easily assessable online platform is increasingly attractive to both government and industry alike as it provides near real-time servicing of their stakeholder organisations or clients.”

WhiteHawk’s share price is up circa 50% this year.