Flippin' the Script
I posted earlier this week about how as a founder you need to turn perceived weaknesses into strengths- how you need to creatively flip the script. As a small, bootstrapped brand, you will have lots of weaknesses and, as well as trying to pre-empt them in your pitch, you can also double down on them and turn weaknesses into strengths. The below extract from my book, Bootstrap Confidential- Building from Bedroom to Boardroom without Investors gives a fun example of this:You may be familiar with the famous 1984 US presidential debate between Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale, described as a mic-drop moment. Reagan was being attacked in the media for being too old at seventy-three, which seems hilarious given what we deal with today. However, Reagan memorably replied to a question on his age with, ‘I’m not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.’ Even his opponent laughed, and the moderator suggested that Reagan had knocked that one out of the park. This single phrase flipped the script and, with that one line, he turned a primary weakness into a huge strength. Any start-up can do this with speed, agility, and flexibility, but you can also do it with perception and brand.
Grow Some Balls
In 2011, in London, having overcome all the previous issues we’ve mentioned, we now had another issue. The head of our UK team had a large ego. As I said, this is the kiss of death for a bootstrapped start-up. He insisted on being called the Managing Partner, UK, and also refused to mention the Australian brand, as he believed it diminished the UK team and its offerings.
Our UK team consisted of just two people, two products, and about ten clients. The Australian team was twenty-five strong, had ten research products, several million dollars in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), various media products, and a fast-growing conference and event division. It also ran all our programmes across six Asian markets and the UAE. I’ve never understood how this diminished the UK brand but never mind. We had sent Chris, a top Australian salesperson, to the UK office to help. Pete, the UK head, wanted Chris, the Australian salesperson, not to sound too Australian or be too Australian (whatever that meant).
This beggared belief. Chris was six feet five, with spiked-up flaming red hair and a broad Australian accent. He couldn’t blend in or pretend not to be an Aussie if he tried. This strategy was not working—it wasn’t just weak; it pretended to be something that we clearly weren’t. This can be fatal. To be clear- Chris was and is a fantastic salesperson but he was in effect being muzzled. Chris complained to me in frustration, ‘Boss, when can we grow some balls?’
Having belatedly removed Pete, Chris and I came up with our ‘Grow Some Balls’ plan. We knew that our UK clients understood that the head office was in Australia, and this was the small but growing UK satellite arm. What I had initially claimed in the UK in 2009 had finally become true; perception had become reality. There was no point pretending that we weren’t Australian, so we decided to do the opposite, go full Aussie, and get a bit of mongrel on—a term I’ll return to later.
This was the tail end of the GFC. UK banks were still hurting and desperately trying to resuscitate their balance sheets. By comparison, the Aussie banks were back to record profits. On top of that, with the exchange rate between sterling and the Aussie dollar at its lowest ever, we could produce the insight programmes for significantly less than our UK competitors. We could afford to be cheap.
I told Chris to double down on his Australianness and the English stereotypical view of Aussies by being bold, brash, and loud. I encouraged him to get in their faces, to tell them that the Australian banks, our main clients, were doing so well and making so much money that our head office had become a cash cow and we could afford to offer our UK products at incredibly low prices.
We figured it would probably annoy them and get right up their noses, confirming their worst prejudices, but frankly, who cared? More importantly, it would justify the substantial discount we offered, allowing us to grab market share from our UK competitors, who were all in survival mode.
We knew, by then, that if we could steal market share, once we started working with the clients, our experience in other markets had shown that they would see our value, and we could increase the prices later.
Chris did exactly that and, undoubtedly, he annoyed and wound up quite a few potential clients. He was to English ears loud, brash, aggressive, Australian, in their faces and amazingly, it worked.
The product was good, the gap and the need for it were obvious, and our price was insanely attractive for a justifiable reason, unpalatable as some might have found our attitude.
One bank did hold out, stating that if it sounded too good to be true, then it probably was, but they were thankfully the exception. In the next twelve months, we enjoyed a booming UK business, onboarding lots of clients, which we bootstrapped to grow the team substantially and also used the revenue to finance growth not just in the UAE but in Canada when we launched there.
This was all down to a change in perception. We had taken what was perceived as our principal weakness—being Australian—and turned it into our principal strength.
As a bootstrapper, you will always face perception challenges that established corporate brands don’t and won’t, but at the same time, you will enjoy the freedom to come up with innovative and fun solutions that would absolutely not fly elsewhere in larger, staider and more structured organisations.pt
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