After 21 years of hosting Seven's breakfast show Sunrise, David Koch is stepping away from the program that became synonymous with the colourful personality known to viewers as 'Kochie'.
Although there were countless memorable moments in his two-plus decades behind the Sunrise desk, Koch said that the likes of travelling to five countries in five days, being the only show in the world to broadcast live from Antarctica for five consecutive days and broadcasting from the top of Kilimanjaro were standouts.
“It's unbelievable when you look back on it,” Koch said.
“The show is still based on those same principles as when I joined back in 2002. It's all very simple – we reckon at breakfast time, everyone's house is a madhouse, so if we can get 20 minutes of a person's time, we're grateful for that.
“But in that 20 minutes, they want to hear the news of the day, something to talk about at work or school, and to smile – and we've stuck to that formula all these years.”
Koch said that one of the most powerful things the show did was writing viewer’s comments they emailed in on a whiteboard and leaving them until that issue was answered by an expert, a visual reminder that this was the viewer’s program, not the host's.
“I remember when (Seven chair) Kerry Stokes first saw it, he said ‘I’ve paid all this money for the greatest technology in TV at the time and there's a bloody whiteboard on the set?!’.
"But what it said to viewers is ‘you’re so important that your issue will stay there, and will be there for everyone to see every day, until we answer it'.
“Right from the very start, I think that changed people's opinion of TV because TV at that stage, I thought, was pretty arrogant in that TV producers would give people what they thought they should know, rather than viewers saying this is ‘what we want to know - you deliver’.
“That was really powerful for us.”
One venture that will be taking up his time post-Sunrise is Pinstripe Media, one of Koch’s family businesses that’s been running since 2007.
Pinstripe Media is a content network and content marketing group that specialises in personal finance and small business, two focuses that the former financial journalist is passionate about as a self-professed “proud finance nerd”.
“We have Startup Daily for the startups, scale up and tech industry; Kochie’s Business Builders, which has the Channel Seven small business show off it but is a platform for business owners of businesses with 15 or under employees; and then Flying Solo, which is for solo entrepreneurs, freelancer, and solo professionals,” Koch said.
“On the content marketing side, we act for big companies and big brands who want to get to their small business customers - or small business owners in general - and we develop content for them.
“We also have Ausbiz, which started three years ago as a business investment streaming channel and is live from from 9:00am until 4:30pm, while the markets are open. We fill that niche which is basically big business, markets and investors.”
Koch said that the reason the likes of Google, Canva, Atlassian, Microsoft, American Express, Intel, Salesforce and more choose to partner with Pinstripe Media for content marketing is because the company knows small business better than anyone else.
“I'm a small business owner myself and we've been in this market for 25 years - we get inspired by small business owners every single day,” he said.
“We understand what makes them tick. We understand their pain points better than anybody else. We know the sort of content that they love.
“They don't love being talked down to. They love being part of a team. They love the stories and advice of other business owners rather than just gurus or experts on how they solve problems.”
Koch said that the diversification of the company since it was founded – beginning life as TV production company to create the first season of Kochie’s Business Builders in 2007, the group has now grown to encompass a media network that engages over 500,000 each month and includes branded content, lead generation, native advertising and sponsorships – speaks to the wider seismic trends at play in the media landscape.
“You can't arrogantly say, ‘well, if you want to digest my information, you've got to get it through a platform or through a print product or through a newsletter’. Your customer decides, so you've got to provide your information in a format that they want to use and suits them, rather than suits your own biases or with the way the company is set up,” he said.
“That's why we’ve skewed more video-focused in recent years, because that's what customers want, that's what our readers want and that’s what our viewers want."
Koch said that he finds the mistake a lot of big businesses make when attempting to market towards small businesses is believing they’re merely a small version of a big business.
“Many of them don't understand that a small business is a living, breathing, human being that's working their backside off, has a terrible dose of imposter syndrome, is trying to balance their family and their kids and their lifestyle, all along with the responsibility of many of them putting their house on the line to build and grow a business,” Koch said.
“There's got to be that empathy towards them to say, ‘we're not here to flog you a product and then run - we're here to partner with you, but to do it in a way that isn't intrusive to you’.
“That's the approach we've always taken - very practical advice to make them successful. We like to say we're in the success business. We want to make our small business viewers or our investors successful, because if they're successful, all the pressure comes off and life is a lot simpler and more enjoyable.”
Koch says that over the years, small businesses have become a lot more sophisticated and conscious that they need to access knowledge and advice from others.
“Technology has changed a lot of that. Four or five years ago, a digital presence was an opportunity. Now, not having a digital presence is probably the biggest risk to your business,” said Koch.
“That's probably the biggest challenge for small businesses - it's all about building sales and managing cash flow, but it's how you do that in a digital world, how you re-engineer your cost base with technology, as well as attracting customers and getting sales.”
For Pinstripe, the future is focused on building the content agency base, helping small business owners survive a recession.
“Many of them have never been in an economic recession and my view is one is coming,” said Koch.
“It’s going to be disruptive, it’s going to be stressful for them and they're going to need some friendly advice and guidance. For Pinstripe, the challenges and the opportunities have never been bigger.
“With Ausbiz, we've been approached to set up the model in other countries. It's one of the major reasons why I thought it was the time was right to step aside from Sunrise, because of the growth opportunities for Ausbiz are coming from areas that we never expected.
“The tech stack that we built this streaming service on is almost like a channel in a box which lots of people are interested in. We thought we'd just be a business and finance streaming channel, but now we're being asked to white label it across a whole bunch of different sectors, so that's pretty exciting and there's a lot to do.
“Everyone used to say ‘you do Sunrise, you’ve got Pinstripe, you’ve got Ausbiz - why do you do it all?’ The answer is I just love it and it’s never seemed like a job at all.”
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