Jen Geale is co-founder and general manager of one of Australia’s fastest growing companies. The business is called MTB Direct (formerly Mountain Bikes Direct) and it sells mountain bikes without any storefronts and did so with total sales exceeding \($7\) million in 2017–18, which doubled the previous year’s earnings.1 In mid-2021 the business expanded its operations into New Zealand. Reports from both 2020 and 2021 indicated rapidly rising online sales as COVID-19 lockdowns continued and people turned to the great outdoors for respite and recreation. This is a marketing and operational success in a non-traditional medium for such a physical product. The business started in 2012 with located stores but transitioned to wholly online in 2015, taking advantage of burgeoning technologies, which enabled its meteoric growth to really take off. Jen Geale embraced an online emphasis to cut overhead costs and positioned the company to compete better with international retailers in the online space. This turned out to be a stroke of genius (or luck) because when the COVID-19 lockdowns occurred the business was already doing the whole ‘work-from-home’ thing and was positioned to become a front-runner in the mountain bikes online sector. Having already grown from a husband–wife start-up to now employing 32 people, the growth horizon remains positive. Geale says, ‘…my office is just a desk in my house! We operate a fully decentralised team, with no office. Our customer service and technical staff all work from home’. Geale realised that MTB Direct’s rapid growth and expansion, employing staff based remotely across Australia and beyond, needed to be closely monitored, and that its employees needed to continue feeling like an important part of the team.2

Question
Imagine that MTB Direct’s founders asked you for advice during the early days of moving the business wholly online. What advice would you give them about the role of its people in its future success and how to set up the company to maximise employee innovation, trust and loyalty when the interactions they have at work are mostly virtual rather than face-to-face? On Geale’s part, she explains that a clever application of social media technologies has helped to harness the essential human need for interaction and human relationships in MTB Direct’s virtual workplace.