iplicit is the seventh business I’ve been involved with building over the past 35 years.
In every one of them – whether it was in telecoms software, renewable energy pipeline maintenance, even a cemetery and now financial software – the challenges have been largely the same.
They are:
• What problem are you solving?
• How do you find the people that have that problem?
• How do you bring the solution to them in a cost-effective manner – and if it’s through a channel, how do you make sure you have a motivated and incentivised channel to do that?
Those challenges applied whether I was building an Apple reseller channel in the 1990s or a funeral director channel in the 2010s.
Ideas are cheap. People think they have the greatest idea ever and that there’s lots of value in it. But, in my experience, it’s all about execution.
Too much optimism
I recently heard Marc Randolph, the co-founder and first CEO of Netflix, saying something similar. He says you have to treat every idea as if it’s bad until you can prove that it could be good. I agree with that because, particularly in the social media generation, there’s way too much optimism and overconfidence right now.
The attitude from friends and family is often: “Yeah, just do it! Give it a go! It sounds like a great idea…” and the reality is often a far cry from the dream.
There’s nothing worse than a solution searching for a problem. You need to know whether you’re adding real value and whether it’s a problem that people will pay to be solved – and if so, is the market large enough for this problem to be repeatedly solved for many customers?
It takes time… & money
Even when you have the right product or service, everything takes two to three times longer than you first imagine – and it takes two to three times more money than you could conceive.
With this in mind, I always encourage people to pilot their ideas.
Show me a fantastic-tasting cookie that people want to pay, say, £5 for and why it’s so great that they want to pay the extra. Test that and prove it across a decent-sized sample, then I’ll focus on how the model could be scaled to find 5,000 people that will buy it.
Even with a fantastic product/service and proven traction, it still requires a cost-effective route to market in order for a business case to be made.
That’s the key for me: to prove a level of traction for the core problem that you’re solving – and then do your research to establish that there are enough people in that market that have similar problems. After that, you need to look at how you then take your solution to the market that has the problem.
The team is key
When it comes to execution, I’d take an average idea executed by a great team over a great idea with an average team any day of the week. People are everything.
If you gave me 50 of the right people with the right plan, the right vision and the right funding, I’d be ready to take on most other companies that have 500 staff, because mediocrity is rife – mediocrity, confusion, chaos and ambivalence.
Having a clear vision of what you’re looking to achieve based on solid market research, with adequate funding and a passionate team that’s aligned to that vision, those are the fundamentals to deliver success.
One lesson that I’ve only learned after building six businesses is the value of a recruitment partner – one that really understands your business model and your culture. Wanting to scale at pace requires talent on tap, and that’s rarely available if you try and do the recruitment process yourself.
Good timing
This point also ties back to luck, because iplicit couldn’t really have scaled at this pace and benefited from such a close recruitment partner relationship without lockdown having changed the rules of the game, enabling us to recruit from anywhere.
You’d never find the amount of talent that we have, in such a compressed timescale, if you were geographically tied to an office and could only resource locally.
Timing is everything in the marketplace. If you’re trying to build a market when the timing is against you, the chances are you won’t succeed.
You need to ride a wave of opportunity, luck and timing to ensure the momentum is with you. Recognising you can’t control everything is an important element to staying grounded.