We at The Business Fame interviewed Natascha Cox on embracing radical innovation to achieve vitality and remain relevant. Let’s read his insightful answers!
1. Give a detailed description of the Founder/CEO/Management’s contribution over the
company and the industry?
Bokafix’s CEO, Natascha Cox, was instrumental in helping get Bokafix’s innovative features, such as instant booking, accessible prices, and reviews, all on one platform, but her influence and skills go beyond her latest innovative business idea. From co-founding Bokafix in 2021, to bringing her medley of skills and experience across multiple industries, such as gaming, fashion, and tech, alongside experience in leadership, editorial and marketing roles. Her contribution is of undeniable magnitude, not only because of her skills as a marketer and visionary for Bokafix’s booking app but also because of the image of tradespeople she is helping to foster. As a strong advocate for social equality, and in an effort to revolutionise the home improvements industry, she knows it’s time we ditch archaic stereotypes of what a tradesperson should look like as well as the stigma associated with booking them. In regards to the latter Natascha recognises that big problems require creative solutions and fun and friendly branding to encourage it. She once worked at Mojang, the creators of Minecraft, the best-selling
game of all time, with an emphasis on creativity and world building. Venturing into the real world Natascha wants Bokafix to adopt this ethos for Bokafix’s community or ‘army of Fixers”, to allow even the most nervous of customers, access to the tradesperson carrying out their dream home improvements.
2. Kindly talk about the exclusive products or services offered by the company, and how does it distinguish you from your competitors?
Unlike other websites for booking tradespeople, Bokafix offers an app with instant booking, refreshing transparency over prices and reviews, and tracking to swiftly locate the nearest tradesperson to your doorstep, with the added bonus of no upfront fee for this service. Our competitors offer some of the benefits we offer, such as no subscription fee for customers, and robust reviewing systems but we feel most fall short of providing a streamlined end to end booking service, on both the customer and tradesperson side. We believe payment security has long been overlooked in regards to the customer side of the equation, as they are often left waiting for quotes and where to send their money thereafter. The fixer side of the equation has every right to set fair rates for hard work, but our platform provides a fairer flipping of the power from them to the customers, ensuring a mutually beneficial relationship can be managed and paid for on the app. We believe this will wash away doubts over where, when and how much of your money leaves your bank account. Furthermore, we believe people should be able to access all these benefits on a single platform, saving them hours of needless stress to find a quality tradesperson.
3. How does the company prioritize innovation and staying ahead of industry trends?
Bokafix is constantly introducing progressive and innovative features to bolster its ambition to be a progressive and forward-looking company. Beyond our steps to make booking tradespeople a more seamless and transparent process, we are looking at ways the company can fulfil other social and environmental obligations, as is required by all reputable businesses today. We already have features in place to identify and encourage booking tradespeople with environmentally friendly vehicles and soon plan to implement donation features, which will allow customers to support initiatives and charities, such as planting a tree for each booking and
supporting Girls Who Code. In short, we want to build a business that simultaneously helps the world grow in an environmentally friendly and socially equal direction.
4. What is the one thing that is acting as your motivational tool? Can you discuss any challenges the company has faced and how you overcame them?
My ambition is to give customers more power over their home improvements and to eliminate extortionate emergency call out charges. Every feature we have developed in the app is aligned with this ethos. When we first launched we saw some user experience issues and because we work in a way that allows us to adapt to change quickly and efficiently we were able to rectify these issues making the flow more user friendly and eliminating any new issues or bugs that we or our customers came across in the early days. We still work like this today, we are not stuck in our ways and we all work towards whatever is best for the customer.
5. Could you please share your noted milestones, accomplishments throughout your journey so far, along with company highlights and achievements under your leadership?
Our first major milestone was taking the app from idea to a public launch. Since then we have had over 1000 Fixers sign up to the platform and are currently at 500 customers and counting. Numbers are increasing everyday!
6. What advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs looking to enter the same industry?
Just get started. If you have an idea, tell people and if the response is positive then try a test case to see if it works. Continuous feedback and improvement is the real key to longevity so don’t be afraid to adapt to positive and negative situations with change and progress.
7. What is your leadership philosophy, and how do you implement it within your company?
Give power and responsibility to your team. Every idea is welcome and there are no silly questions. I believe in being open and sharing information to keep the team motivated and so they feel a sense of ownership over the good and the bad. Whole team meetings with regular updates on the company’s progress are a frequent practice at Bokafix.
