Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the hipages Group Holdings Ltd FY 2022 Investor Briefing. All participants are in a listen-only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question, you will need to press the star key followed by the number 1 on your telephone keypad. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Roby Sharon-Zipser, CEO and Co-Founder. Please go ahead.
Thank you for the introduction. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us this morning. I'm Roby Sharon-Zipser, the CEO and Co-Founder of hipages Group. Today I'm joined by Melissa Fahey, our Chief Finance and Operations Officer. As many of you already know, hipages Group is Australia and now New Zealand's largest online tradie marketplace and SaaS provider, creating effortless solutions that help trades streamline and grow their businesses and delight their customers. We efficiently connect users with up to three trusted better trades at speed. For our tradie customers, we provide them with the type of work they want when and where they want it. Additionally, we provide trades with tools to help manage and run their businesses. We have a simple purpose: transforming the trade industry, building better lives for everyone, and our vision is to be the most trusted partner in the trade industry.
There is quite a bit to cover this morning. First, I'll provide an overview of our results. Melissa will take you through the financial and operational aspects in more detail. I will provide an update on our strategy, including the next evolution of our strategy, which I'm very excited to share. We'll then cover what we're currently seeing in the market and the outlook for FY 2023 before opening up for Q&A. FY 2022 highlights. Turning to slide 7. I'm very proud to report a resilient performance this year. We grew through one of the most difficult periods in the industry's history while investing in our product and technology to strengthen our position as the number one online tradie marketplace in Australia and New Zealand. We made significant progress in our strategy, completing our transition to a subscription model.
We also continued to invest in our people and technology, which are key to driving our growth moving forward. Our brand investments continued to deliver good results with record brand awareness on both the consumer and tradie side. Importantly, in the current environment, our efficient operating model enabled us to deliver improved cash flow, and we also maintained our strong balance sheet. Moving to Slide 8. This year was a challenging one for the market with the ongoing impact of COVID, including government-mandated lockdowns, which meant trades were unable to work for extended periods. The onset of the Omicron outbreak and extreme weather further delayed the industry's recovery. To support our tradie customers, we took quick and decisive action by introducing industry-first COVID Safe Badges for fully vaccinated trades, as well as subscription offers such as temporary contract pauses, short-term discounts, and lead credit extensions.
As lockdowns eased across Australia, COVID-related supply chain disruptions triggered a global wave of inflation, increasing the cost and availability of key materials and labor, putting trades under more pressure to preserve their profit margins. At the same time, record consumer demand from households still cashed up from two years of stimulus and restricted discretionary spend are keen to upgrade homes where they are spending more time for both work and play. Saw trades at full capacity, facing a significant backlog of work with demand far outstripping supply. For a marketplace business like hipages Group, whose platform's primary purpose is to connect trades with residential and commercial consumers, this represented a perfect storm, with our tradie customers either unable to work at all or too busy to take on more work. Against this backdrop, I am extremely proud of our performance.
The strength of our business model and team has shone through, having delivered growth through one of the most difficult periods in the industry's history, while investing in our product and technology to strengthen our position as the number one online tradie marketplace in Australia and New Zealand. I'll hand over to Melissa for the financial and operational update now.
Thanks, Roby. On slide 10, you can clearly see that hipages Group continues to deliver profitable growth and sustainable positive operating cash flow. Our financial profile illustrates our proven unit economics and operational leverage in the business, even in a year like FY 2022, where the market was impacted by events outside of our control. Slide 11 shows the financial highlights for FY 2022. MRR grew by 5%, driving 11% growth in recurring and total revenues, with the transition to our subscription model now complete. Gross margin remained robust at 85% and EBITDA of AUD 10.7 million was delivered at a strong margin of 17%. The business delivered an NPAT loss for the year of AUD 900,000, which was a significant improvement on prior year loss of AUD 6.2 million.
Subscription trades up 11% to 34,600, with hipages Australia returning to growth in Q4. Strong ARPU growth continues, up 11% with hipages Australia up 16% as we attract higher value subscribers. Over 1.6 million jobs were posted on the hipages platform during the year. This was all delivered while maintaining a strong balance sheet with cash of over AUD 13 million and no debt following our inorganic investments this year. We were pleased to deliver a positive free cash flow in Q4 and have a clear path to sustainable free cash flow. Moving to slide 12, which looks at our ARPU growth. Our subscription-only product continues to drive strong ARPU growth. ARPU grew 16% to AUD 1,789 for hipages in Australia.
This was driven by the completion of our transition to the subscription-only product offering in Australia, as well as new trades joining at higher price points, which drove new business yields up by 12%. We also saw ARPU growth driven by our dedicated sales team targeting medium to large-sized trades. Moving forward, we expect continued ARPU growth to be driven by price increases, increased yields from higher value customers, and continued market improvements. On slide 13, you can see the total subscription trades were up 11% with a slight growth in hipages Australia achieved in a challenging market. Retention was impacted by industry lockdowns and restrictions in H1, followed by unprecedented demand to fulfill the backlog of jobs, which drove increased cancellation requests due to trades being too busy, which normalized in H2.
Roby will talk about in more detail, the next evolution of our strategy is focused on enhancing the user experience, which we expect to improve retention. Slide 14 shows our LTV to CAC ratio. It remains healthy at an 8.2x , despite the impact of COVID disruptions and subsequent marketplace imbalance, reducing the average customer lifetime and offsetting double-digit ARPU growth. Customer lifetime is expected to improve throughout FY 2023 as churn returns to pre-COVID levels. Turning to our operating expenses on slide 15. As you can see, expenses as a percentage of revenue were up 3 points to 83% in FY 2022 after increased investment in growth, driven by increased marketing and technology spend. In marketing, continued brand investment across both sides of the marketplace drove increased consumer and customer brand awareness.
We also continued to invest in our product development and technology team and architecture, which is critical for us to deliver our growth strategy. On slide 16, you can see that our significant investment in brand continues to deliver results for us on both sides of the platform. We continued our platinum sponsorship of The Block for the fourth season and also did a successful integration with Channel 9's Space Invaders program. This drove our highest ever consumer brand awareness of 60% with market leading top-of-mind awareness for consumers of 26%, 15 points ahead of our nearest competitor. Digital advertising for trades drove total awareness up to 67%, up 8 points since December of last year. Our top-of-mind awareness for trades is also market leading at 21%, 10 points ahead of our nearest competitor.
The outcome of our sustained investment in enhancing the experience and building a strong brand is increased consumer awareness and trust. As slide 17 shows, in FY 2022, 68% of jobs came from repeat consumers and 78% of jobs from organic channels. This provides us with significant leverage as we continue to grow. Now I'll hand back to Roby to talk more about our strategy.
Thank you, Melissa. Those of you who follow hipages regularly will be very familiar with slide 19, which we call our Tradie Ecosystem. This shows all of the segments of our TAM, as well as what trades spend to keep their businesses running. We have made good progress this year despite the challenging operating environment to continue to execute our strategy, including moving into property management with our investment in Bricks & Agent. The reality is we're just getting started and there is so much opportunity for us to go after with a small share of our TAM. I'm very excited to share with you the next evolution of our strategy that we refer to as hipages 3.0 on the next slide. hipages 3.0, the next evolution of our strategy.
hipages 3.0 has a significant focus on our core product, identifying that our customers, both consumers and trades, have different journeys and business needs when using our platform. Today, we offer most of those journeys, but in different forms. Our vision is to create a bespoke journey and bespoke journeys and make them as streamlined as possible when customers come into our platform. Consumers will have access to our content, directory, our core offering of Get Quotes and fixed price services, which I will cover off in more detail in the next slide. For trades, we know that our product provides the best return on investment when compared to other solutions. We also know that our product has some complexity to it. We want to simplify and improve our customer experiences and enable them to better understand the value proposition we provide.
We will do this through our continuous nurturing and lead claim experience strategies. While through our marketplace growth strategy, we will continue to grow our marketplace in both jobs and trades, while working towards keeping it in balance through our technology and operations. We also know our trades want more from our platform, and they need support in the other areas of managing and running their businesses. We see expansion services and partnerships, including joint ventures, as a way to fulfill that need. Over time, we will be providing more solutions into our subscription products. Pleasingly, we've already started and delivered to this in FY 2022, including Tradiecore being made available to trades as part of their subscription, and we have executed on our payment solution working with Stripe as a solution provider, which is currently being rolled out.
We see so many more opportunities to expand here. In terms of the business enablers, we see an overall technology investment delivering a technology uplift and business transformation program, providing efficiencies and improvements across the business, resulting in meaningful improvements in productivity and effectiveness of our people. We've also invested in our data capabilities to support the business and our team to help us make better decisions and building better solutions for our customers, both for consumer and tradie. Slide 21 talks about capturing consumer intent. A core element of our strategy is more effectively capturing consumer intent to enable us to deliver tailored consumer journeys to enhance the experience on both sides of the marketplace.
By developing a better understanding of the intent of the consumer, we are able to send them on a journey that suits their needs and to price the leads more accurately, providing more value for our tradie customers. In instances where a consumer may simply be looking for a price guide before undertaking a job, we can send them to our cost guides. If a consumer wants to browse profiles of tradie businesses and review content about those businesses, a directory journey is more appropriate. If the consumer is more progressed in their thinking and wants to be connected with up to three trades, we can offer them our quote service, which is hipages' core offering. We can go even further with a double accept, where the consumer can further curate the list of trades based on their preferences.
This goes all the way up to a fixed price service where we know the consumers have the highest intent, and we can price the job accurately using the rich data captured through our marketplace. The outcomes of all of this is providing better value for our tradie customers, enhancing our trust and reputation with consumers, and ultimately increasing our take rate and driving higher ARPU. Tradiecore. In FY22, we successfully rolled out Tradiecore, our job management solution, which is a key part of our evolution to a SaaS model. Since launch, we have delivered enhanced functionality and new features, including scheduling, self-service options, and personalized documentation, which have all been well received by our users. Tradiecore uptake has benefited from a free trial subscription for hipages customers, and engagement has been strong.
With over 15,000 jobs created in FY 2022, 86% via the hipages lead integration technology. In FY 2023, we will continue to roll out new functionality, including a payment system we have designed with Stripe in the second half. As we process more data through the platform, the insights we can provide our tradie customers will expand significantly. Moving to slide 23 on Builderscrack. During the year, we also made our first strategically significant acquisition in Builderscrack, New Zealand's leading online trade marketplace. This made us the trans-Tasman market leader. Since the acquisition, Builderscrack has continued to perform well, delivering strong EBITDA growth and cash flow while retaining its market-leading, top-of-mind awareness among New Zealand homeowners.
The team has made some key hires in marketing and sales to accelerate their growth and implemented a new tiered pricing model and product functionality, which drives increased yield per job. We are very excited about the future with Builderscrack and have been really pleased with how the business is progressing. In terms of our outlook for FY 2023 on slide 25, our business exited Q4 with good momentum, with registrations improving and credit notes normalizing as balance continues to return to the marketplace. We expect the impact of rising inflation and interest rates to further balance the marketplace, which will drive growth due to the counter-cyclicality of our business model as trades now need to compete harder for jobs.
Looking ahead, we expect H1 revenue growth rates to be similar to H2 FY 2022 before accelerating to the mid-teens in H2, with churn remaining elevated above pre-COVID levels before normalizing in the second half. We expect the EBITDA margin to be slightly ahead of FY 2022, with H1 impacted by timing of marketing expenditure, principally our sponsorship of The Block. We will continue to invest in technology to execute our growth strategy with higher level of capitalised development spend to continue in FY 2023 to 2024 before reducing in FY 2025. We will also continue the rollout of our Tradiecore functionality and further strategic initiatives to build out our ecosystem.
Importantly, the efficiency of our operating model enabled us to generate positive free cash flow in Q4 and give us a clear path to sustainable free cash generation while giving us the freedom to invest, to execute our growth strategy while maintaining a strong balance sheet. As I look back on this year, I am incredibly proud of our team for delivering a strong result in a challenging environment, and I'm looking forward to executing our plan in FY 2023. With that, I'll open to questions.
Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star two. If you're on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. Your first question comes from Sophie Carran with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Thanks for taking my questions. Just a couple from me, please. I guess first on the guidance, on the revenue guidance, could you break that down a little bit more just around your expectations for new tradie additions? Then you've mentioned churn is going to be elevated in the first half, but maybe just your expectations around churn and then also on ARPU growth, please.
The three questions there. Let me just work through what I can remember, and then if I've missed something, Melissa will pick up on the ones I probably missed. In terms of the churn expectations, I think obviously that's top-of-mind for everyone. I think it's important to call out that, you know, we look at a number of indicators in the business. Some of those, obviously, we've talked about the registrations and our outbound and inbound sales teams and how they are performing. They're doing really well. We've seen some record numbers of tradie registrations coming through. We are seeing a bit of a drag from the churn. Also more recently, we're seeing some of that ascension revenue. That's an upgrade to our product coming through.
We also look at claiming behavior of tradies, and we're seeing that coming through at really high levels back to the levels that we expected. Those lead indicators for us are strong. Claims per job are also strong. Unfortunately, the churn is dragging that growth down. What we're focusing on with our strategy, as I talked about, is to deal with that through, you know, better nurturing of customers as they come into the platform, better pricing on our leads. That could be up and down. There's a lot of work in there that we're doing.
In terms of that churn metric, the decision to leave, maybe because they're too busy, maybe because they just didn't understand the product, which we've clearly stated we know we need to improve or simplify, has already been made, and that just takes longer and is taking probably a little bit longer than we expected. That's why we've called that out today in terms of some of the outlook. Maybe, Melissa, would you like to take the ARPU question?
Sophie, in the outlook that we said, we were basically saying so for H1, we would expect a similar level of growth as H2 of 2022, which was 10%, and then expecting H2 to get to the mid-teen levels of growth. You know, we're not giving specific guidance around tradie, you know, tradie growth or ARPU growth in particular, but we do expect a growth in both of our key metrics there delivering that overall top-line revenue growth.
Excellent. Maybe just to follow up on the churn point. I mean, you made a comment in the presentation just about focusing on enhancing the user experience to improve retention. Can you talk a little bit about what you're planning to do there, please?
Yeah, absolutely. We called it out in the hipages 3.0 strategy. We've identified that we know that our product has the best return on investment. In terms of every dollar spent by tradies, they get the best return compared to other options that are available in the market. Excuse me. What we've identified is that we think we can communicate that a lot clearer to our customers and also what we actually do provide our customers through loyalty bonuses, additional credits, referral bonuses and things like that, the pause capability that we have our customers. We think we can do a much better job of simplifying and explaining that value proposition and the flexibility that's available in our subscription.
We've got a stream in the business or a team, I should say, that's focused on making sure that those key things about our product is understood. We also have a team called the Lead Claim Experience team. That team looks at our leads that we're providing them, and we are doing incredible sophisticated work in our algorithms to ensure that the price of those leads are priced accurately and fairly. I mentioned earlier, you know, that means that some lead prices may come down and other lead prices will go up. In a way, that's an indirect way of getting price increases once you identify that the value that we're providing. Just to recall for everyone's benefit, we take a very small percentage of the gross merchandise volume or value that we generate, the GMV.
To our customers, it's under 3%. It's between 2.5%– 3%. What we know is that there is an opportunity to improve on that. Further to that, there is a slide in the deck that talks about the different journeys the consumer goes on. If you are closer to that buying decision, such as a fixed price solution, the take rate can increase, and that's why we're looking at introducing those products. We also know from research with our customers, the trades and also the consumers, that they love those solutions. That's why we've put a lot of focus on building those solutions for both trades and consumers.
Great. And then just one final question around the margin guidance. Can you just give an indication of your expectations for the first half, second half split of marketing? Maybe a comment on overall marketing spend for the year as well. Does that imply the sort of first half margin will be a bit of a step back from the second half exit run rate?
Yeah. Our margins in H1 are always lower because of our marketing spend, predominantly with The Block, is in H1. You would expect a slightly softer margin in H1 and a stronger margin in H2.
Great. Maybe just what you expect for marketing overall versus this year?
It's not something we're specifically giving guidance on, but in terms of the margin, you know, we've said that we would expect the margin, you know, to be slightly ahead of FY 2022. So that gives you an indication of where we expect the overall margin to land with a slight variance between H1 and H2.
Thanks, Roby and Melissa.
Your next question comes from Elijah Maher with CLSA. Please go ahead.
Good morning, Roby and Melissa. Thanks for the questions. There's a couple from me. Just with the price increases that was mentioned, have there been price increases to date in FY22? And, what sort of magnitude are you expecting in for FY23 when those price increases come through?
In terms of price increases in FY 2022, we actually have only done very small things like our lowest tier product. We amended, we've repurposed some of our lower tier products with some other offers, but nothing significant occurred in FY 2022 in terms of price increases. In terms of our plans in FY 2023, it's pretty interesting in terms of how pricing works in hipages. There's two levers on pricing. You've got the headline prices of subscriptions that you can increase, but then you also have the opportunity once we understand the value of the service being entered into our platform, you can change or vary the prices and potentially move into dynamic pricing with the algorithmic sophistication investments that we've made.
The lead prices can go up, which ultimately uses the credit that's available in the subscription faster and then results in upgrades. There's two levers in terms of pricing that, to summarize, we can play with. On the first lever, we have rolled out on 1 July a price increase for our headline subscription offering for new customers. Existing customers will be preserved for a bit until we roll out some further enhancements to the product. New customers are coming on at the higher prices. In terms of the pricing, in terms of leads, we have a dedicated team in hipages looking at that lead claim experience, which I called out in the presentation and answered in Sophie's question.
That will be looking at pricing our leads more accurately, and potentially moving very soon into sort of dynamic pricing based on supply–demand equations that our algorithms can work out in the complexity of our marketplace being a few hundred categories, over 600 primary categories with thousands of postcodes and regions to work it out. Those are the areas. In terms of the specific metric, we're expecting around about a 7%. Melissa, confirm 7%?
Mm-hmm.
Yield increase from those price adjustments.
Excellent. That makes sense. Just on, I guess the launch of Tradiecore and the payment options, can you give us some, I guess, feedback to date from the tradie side and how, I guess, their response has been maybe particular to the payment side of things? I feel like that would be a little bit of a roadblock in terms of some of the trades coming across and providing those payment details. Can you just give us a sense of what the feedback's been to date?
Yeah, sure. Just to be clear, we haven't got the payment solution in Tradiecore as yet. That will be rolled out. We're planning for that to occur in H2 of this financial year. In terms of just a little bit more detail on Tradiecore, we're very pleased with the uptake of the product. Remember, you know, building something really from scratch, getting that 0 to 1 is really hard, then getting 1 to 100. We're right now at this point where we've got about 827 users on Tradiecore, probably getting closer to 1,000. We're adding a few hundred every month to the platform. Really this year's about getting scale. The feedback from the customers is exceptional. It's very simple to use. You can download it on the app.
It's available on iOS and Android devices. We've gotten feedback that customers actually have a preference to have the integration with some of the accounting software to improve that reporting function that they need with their BAS and GST and accounts. That's actually our current priority. Then we will roll into payments. The payments is something that they have asked for. It's up there in the, like the top three things that they want that will improve adoption, but it's not the top one. The accounting integration has been what's been asked for the most. We're focusing on that in the coming months, and then onto payments.
Yep. Maybe just one final one just on Builderscrack, for the ARPU in the fourth quarter, things have gone backwards quarter-on-quarter. Can you just give us a little bit of color into why and what you're expecting for the ARPU in that business?
I'm not specific on the ARPU. Melissa, maybe I'll give you a chance to check that. I can talk to you a little bit about what's going on in the Builderscrack business and in the market, and that might help join the dots on the ARPU commentary. In terms of the Builderscrack business, that business is a little bit different to the hipages business. It's very much driven by job volume that comes into it, whereas hipages is, you know, obviously job volume is important to keep our marketplace in balance, but we are driven by a subscription product, whereas they work on a combination of various products. There's a bit of a subscription and jobs that converts into.
They take like a commission off those jobs and outcomes, which is something that we're looking to change over the next 24 months. In terms of that, New Zealand has been hit a little harder because they're driven more by job volume. The job volume has dropped off in New Zealand due to the economic environment there. Inflation is higher, interest rates are higher than Australia's. Sort of been happening a little bit faster in New Zealand than what we saw in Australia, I guess really due to the size of the economy and where they are in things. Melissa?
Yeah.
Do you have some color on the ARPU?
I think the ARPU, you know, is the softness is really a condition in Q4 of the overall macro environment that's happening in New Zealand as well, which is more severe than Australia. I mean, I think if we look forward, there's a lot of opportunity there where their ARPU is, you know, significantly below ours. And there's the ability for Builderscrack to continue to focus on higher value customers as well. You know, a lot of the evolution of our business model can be applied to Builderscrack as well over the next few years.
Thanks for the question.
Your next question comes from Tim Piper with Barrenjoey. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thanks for taking my question. Just one quick one from me. I just wanted to clarify the FY 2023 revenue commentary that 1H revenue growth rate would be similar to 2H 2022, reaching mid-teens in 2H 2023. Just, is that the first half growth on the 1H 2022, or is it the absolute growth number to be at a similar level?
The absolute growth number on pcp. Prior year, yeah, like, 10% growth was achieved on prior year in H2 of FY 2022, and we would expect a similar level of year-on-year growth in H1 of 2023.
Great. Thank you very much.
Your next question comes from Johnny Huynh with Wilsons. Please go ahead.
Hey, I just wanted to ask about, with the marketplace returning to normal, what kind of impact are you expecting on job volumes? Also just on, what's happened with the consumer standpoint and engagement on the consumer side?
I'll take that. Thanks, Johnny. In terms of consumer sentiment, it's an interesting question because right now we're on air with our integration in The Block, and we're seeing higher than expected, even now it's still higher than expected consumer demand. The good news is we're not relying on our SEM performance or SEM marketing, which is also, I'm sure, in the results we would have shown or we'll be talking more about how that's coming down even further. It's coming through direct. That's talking to the effectiveness of the brand marketing and building the brand in the Australian market, which we saw incredible results. That's actually pretty good.
I would say, you know, when we think about year-over-year job volume, it's not necessarily about getting huge growth in there. I think that would be quite stable. I think that's probably the best expectations we would set. The reason being is just last year, FY 2022 was just so high. Like, it was just unsustainably high. I just think people were restricted, locked down. They didn't have the discretionary spend in terms of going to restaurants, traveling, so they decided to invest in making their homes more comfortable. Also the shift from working in office to home has, you know, really resulted in people making those investments, and that demand was so strong in FY 2022.
I think if we see that kind of stable, it may be even a little bit go backwards, it's actually not a bad thing. I think that's a good thing for marketplace balance. We also talked about those journeys, and sometimes just creating jobs for the sake of jobs when someone just really wants a cost guide or just wants to look around what's often referred to, terrible saying, but, the tire kicker, and just to convert them to jobs actually is not a great outcome for trades. Because at the end of the day, they really want more, I guess, serious customers.
You know, doing those types of comparisons with our strategy in terms of trying to capture that consumer intent, maybe is not a good comparison, but I think long story short, stabilization in jobs is probably a good thing for the marketplace.
Okay, great. Thank you. My second question was on the Tradiecore update and then also the percentage of Tradiecore users that aren't currently hipages users. Do you think there's like a good opportunity to convert those as well?
That definitely is an opportunity down the track. Right now our focus is to provide hipages customers with our Tradiecore solution. That's why we made the decision to embed Tradiecore as part of the subscription. That's now a value- add feature of our subscription product. You know, customers in the future will have the ability if they may not need, which is one of the reasons for our churn by the way. You know, that elevated in FY 2022 is they were too busy. Well, maybe if they're too busy, they will still need our product, but they can still retain a subscription with hipages, which includes the Tradiecore product.
I think, once we've really mastered and achieved the volumes that we're expecting from Tradiecore over FY23, looking externally to other participants in the tradie industry to use that solution will certainly be an opportunity and further upside for us.
Okay, great. Thanks. That's all for me.
Once again, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone. Your next question comes from Nicholas Peach with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Oh, hi, Roby and Melissa. I just had a question around the fixed price offer that you're in the strategy there, the 3.0. You've talked about this for a little while, but just thinking what do you need before you can start to roll this out. I imagine sort of payments is obviously cognisant that's not rolled out yet, but you're going to need that rich sort of pricing data to do that. But just thinking, what's the timeframe roughly on rolling out fixed price. And then once you do you have a sort of target, a medium-term target as to what sort of percentage of jobs might be on fixed price.
Thanks for the question, Nicholas. Yeah, let me just clarify something just on that payment point, and then I'll walk through the thinking around fixed price services. Well, maybe just even before I do that, just for everyone's benefit, what do we mean by fixed price services? Fixed price services is something we actually already have available and something we've built in the platform. We use it with one of our partners, and it's for a variety of services that are what we would call relatively smallish type jobs. Certainly smaller in terms of the average size of a job that goes through hipages platform.
We, in our research, have identified jobs that are between AUD 200– AUD 1,000 range that doesn't have a lot of moving parts that you can sort of put some specifications and ranges in to determine what that price will be. For example, there are services around plumbing and electrical work and handyman work that you can develop a fixed price for. For example, we offer a fixed price toilet installation, a fan installation, a heat lamp, a lock installation with one of our partners. What we see is that there's a lot of volume of that type of work that is being generated by the platform, but we currently send it through our Get Quotes solution.
In terms of our take rate, you know, that's probably in the high single digits%, but it's probably more reasonable to expect if that's guaranteed work given to one provider, and we've confirmed that with our tradie customers, that they, you know, they would be fine to pay anywhere between 10%–15% to the provider of that guaranteed work. I hope that gives a bit of an explanation to the product that we've been talking about for probably the last six to six-ish months to the market. At this point in time, the payment solution doesn't relate to the payment solution that I've been talking about in regard to Stripe. It's more around hipages actually accepting the payment.
In terms of how we accept the payment, maybe we will use the new payment solution, but we already have a merchant solution with our banks. Just working through how that will work is something we're working on at the moment. There is also different regulatory requirements that we need to think through, particularly around whether it's an agency model, whether you know you have to advertise the licences of trades in specific categories. Appreciate that's a lot of detail, but that's the stuff that we are working through in terms of compliance and regulatory frameworks. Every state and territory has a different licensing obligation and how that gets advertised. Those are very significant complexities that we need to work through before we provide that solution.
Despite that, we are currently testing the solution in our flows to see the adoption rate of consumers. That's currently happening. It will take a little bit of time to provide the solution, but the upside is quite meaningful for the business. We'll be investing further into that over the next 12 months.
Great. Final question, just on inflation, thinking about wage inflation and staff, just what are you seeing in IT staff, marketing staff, your key sort of personnel? Are you still seeing quite sharp inflation there?
Probably a few of them are listening on the call now, so don't get any ideas, guys. I think what we're seeing globally is adjustment to the expectations. Obviously there was a period where there was no real immigration into Australia. By the way, we did a really good thing and we sourced a lot of our diversified employee base from overseas and did something quite different to a lot of organizations. That was very successful for us. I think we'll see that starting to stabilize as organizations globally are starting to make sure that they're running operationally efficiently. I think we've always been competitive in our remuneration philosophies. I think that's going to stabilize, long story short.
Maybe just a general thought, in terms of obviously you're adding heads probably into the business, I'm assuming still as you're in growth mode, but overall, what sort of level of growth should we expect in employee costs?
Yeah, that's not something that we're disclosing either. I think just in terms of we've given some guidance around where we expect the margins to go. In terms of, you know, margin preservation and cash preservation, that's what we're focused on as a business.
Yeah.
Employing and investing at the right level in terms of our team, to also deliver on the future growth strategy.
I think just to add to that, to give the market some confidence in terms of guidance, you know, we're very focused on making sure we have a healthy balance sheet. That's something that's definitely top-of-mind and making sure our costs are managed well in the business.
Great. Thanks, Roby. Thanks, Melissa.
Thanks.
There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand back to Mr. Roby Sharon-Zipser for closing remarks.
I just wanted to thank everyone for their time this morning. I want to thank the team for their support. Incredibly crazy year, I guess. I don't want to use crazy, but it's been an up and down roller-coaster ride of a year. I'm really proud of the results and the performance of the team, and I just want to thank the market and shareholders for their support. Appreciate everyone's time this morning. Have a wonderful day.
Thank you.