In the ‘Hot Seat’ with Paul Bennett

Paul Bennett, Co-Founder & CEO at Perchpeek

Paul is one of our awesome Episode 1 CEO’s. He loves his sport, he’s super positive and he wears his Perchpeek merch with pride.

Find out all about what makes this CEO tick…

1. What’s your name and where do you come from?

Paul Bennett & I’m that well known hybrid of half Serbian & half Irish

2. Give us a quick overview of your company and what it does.

Perchpeek is a digital relocation platform that helps anyone, live anywhere. From Seattle to Singapore, we guide people through every stage of their relocation & make it the enjoyable process it should be!

3. What’s the next big idea that nobody is thinking about yet? Why is this so important?

A global government. It’s been bandied around a bit before but issues such as Global Warming, Global Tax & Global Poverty would be so much easier to solve with a supranational body. Whilst it’s super unlikely to happen and riddled with issues, it’s importance grows daily as we live in an increasingly global world governed by increasingly outdated national institutions. Many of the biggest problems faced by the world simply can’t be solved at a National level

4. Looking back to the day you founded the company, what is the one thing you wish you had known before starting off?

Don’t be afraid of pivoting quickly. When you start, everyone tells you how amazing your idea is and there’s so much social capital invested in making it work. However, at that early stage, you’re learning so much every day and it’s natural that your idea will evolve & improve

5. How do you define success for you / your company?

Are our customers happy

6. What behaviour or personality trait do you most attribute to your ability to achieve what you have achieved so far?

Positivity

7. What’s your top idea to improve diversity in the workplace?

Dip into the Global Talent Pool…

8. What is the best advice you have ever been given and by whom?

If something ain’t right, do something about it. One of my first Manager’s used to say it a lot and it perennially holds true for me. We so often have more ability to shape our surroundings than we think and the power of taking positive steps is incredible

9. What was the most useful resource (networks/books/websites/blogs) you used when starting out?

It’s so basic but all the Y Combinator blogs / essays are terrific

10. What is the single most important thing you’ve done to increase the value of your business?

Pivot the business from B2C to B2B/B2B2C. We immediately found ourselves in a much, much more scalable & valuable market!

11. What has been the hardest decision you’ve had to make in your entrepreneurial journey?

Discussing legal contracts. They are always super painful, unnecessarily long & feel mainly aimed at helping lawyers (sorry lawyer pals)

12. What will be the biggest change to how we lead our lives in 15 years? And what won’t have changed?

We’re on the cusp of it now but lots of the world will have a lot more location freedom and so we expect it will become very normalised to spend time living in multiple places. What won’t have changed? In person socialising – in spite of the rise of digital everything if there’s one thing the pandemic’s proved, it’s that IRL socials ain’t going anywhere anytime soon

13. Tell us something we don’t know about you?

That I host a sporadic podcast with my brother where we discuss a dizzying array of different sport

14. If you could be offline for 3 days – where would you go and what would you do?

I’d be heading straight to the Alps for some trail running. There’s nothing better than mountain air to clear your head and provide perspective on the world!