With little time or money, the odds were stacked against Tim Lee on paper.
When he was 22, the South Korean immigrant first came to Sydney on a working holiday with limited English skills and big dreams.
Lee picked up work as a tiler in Bankstown in the city’s south-west and quickly improved with his second language.
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But it was a side project he quietly worked on late at night which eventually allowed him to create a sense of freedom for his family and build a business with a billion-dollar success story.
Lee decided to learn coding, business and marketing entirely through free videos found on YouTube, often with a coffee in one hand and a toddler crawling in the other.
Armed with his smartphone and curiosity, the video-sharing platform became his university.
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As he gained experience in his trade, he went on to open his own tiling business, which taught him firsthand the struggles small business owners face daily.
His new side hustle helped him figure out how to eliminate common problems teams face.
At the age of 32, he decided to call time on his tiling career.
“I didn’t want to do it for the next 30 years so I decided to quit,” he said.
Lee set up his business Bookipi in 2018 to offer businesses a simplified bookkeeping platform to save time.
While he had high hopes for the business, it initially didn’t make money for the first few years and he was supported by his wife on his journey.
But he soon secured his first investment in 2020 and achieved growth.
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Lee said he then turned his passion project into a $1 million business in just two months after he decided to monetise in 2021.
The bookkeeping system is now being used by 524,00 businesses in more than 170 countries.
The product has generated $46 billion in invoices since 2020 and has a team more than 120 employees.
Lee’s success is no mean feat, with statistics revealing many Australian small businesses fail in their first year.
In the early days, Lee himself failed six times but each setback gave him a valuable lesson.
“What I learned was in order for me to build a solution it took a bit of time,” he said.
“When I failed the second and third time, I realised even though I had great ideas, no one was going to use them.
“I decided to build things quickly instead of perfectly.”
Lee’s advice to fellow small business owners is a finished product is better than a perfect product.
“Execution is way more important than planning to me,” he said.
“Once you start, you get a lot of feedback and you have customers.
“There are opportunities you can learn from them.”
The other key ingredients are working with good people and having fun along the way.
“If you have smart people and if they’re nice, then the company will grow dramatically, that’s my philosophy,” he said.
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