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It was OK but I took slight exception to the inference that nudie (and ?What If!) had been failure.
Here was my response to Amanda:
Hi Amanda
By using the term “fallen entrepreneur” in a pejorative sense you potentially obscure both the facts and the lessons for other entrepreneurs.
It is true I was “kicked out” of nudie. I certainly wasn’t without fault in the proceedings but, at the heart of this was the fact that I had a very different vision and strategy for nudie than the board did. It provides a hard-won lesson for all entrepreneurs. When it comes to a contest between an entrepreneur’s vision and an investor’s money it is always the dumb money that wins!
I believed (and still do) that nudie is a powerful brand, and that as such we should have concentrated on brand development and marketing and outsourced manufacturing and distribution, via license, to another organisation that had a comparative advantage in those areas. nudie could then focus on what we did best and leave others to do what they did best. This seemed to me to be both a scalable model and an economically desirable one. The board believed nudie was a juice company and needed manufacturing and distribution to give truth to that.
I believe history will prove me correct (perhaps has done so already) and in part this is evidenced by the fact that the VC’s in nudie exited at a significant loss some two years after I had been “kicked out”.
But in any event nudie was a staggering success. It proved it was possible for a bootstrap start-up to tackle huge and profitable incumbent players in a mature industry, and create a brand (voted in 2005, two years after commencement, by readers of brandchannel.com as one of the top 10 “most influential brands” in the Asia Pacific region) and a business (turning over $18m a year after two years in business) that shook up that industry (have a look at the chilled juice cabinet in any supermarket now) in favour of consumers. It is a story which has and should continue to encourage and inspire budding Australian entrepreneurs and innovators.
The ?What If! experience is also one I am content with because, apart from the lessons I learned about the apathy big Australian businesses have towards innovation (and therefore their customers), it was a tangible demonstration of my increasing commercial maturity.
With ?What If! I stepped in as CEO to a 6 year old business which had been losing money for the previous 18 months. My initial objective was to turn that business around (as I had done successfully in the past, for example when I inherited a very dysfunctional, loss-making Encyclopaedia Britannica as CEO in the mid nineties). In the space of 6 months I determined that it would be possible to turn it around but that the size of the prize for doing so simply didn’t warrant the investment or the energy. ?What If! is a global organisation and they were better off investing in more lucrative and receptive markets. In the old days I would have seen it as a virtue to ‘soldier on’ and swing the business around. The more commercially mature me is more prepared to focus on the size of the prize.
I have three university degrees but have long held that formal education is not a patch on the benefits conferred by ‘lifelong learning’. Everything we do or experience in life gives us something – often it’s a lesson which we can build from. Particularly in the case of nudie, which I was extraordinarily attached to emotionally, the experience came with significant pain, but it still ‘gave’ me something personally and something to share with others.
I am applying all those lessons to Sultry Sally currently, and making those lessons available to other through my new business. I believe Sultry Sally will be a great success (both emotionally and commercially) and I am focussed on achieving that success by relying on the lessons of the past.
By using the term “fallen entrepreneur” in a pejorative sense you potentially obscure both the facts and the lessons for other entrepreneurs.
It is true I was “kicked out” of nudie. I certainly wasn’t without fault in the proceedings but, at the heart of this was the fact that I had a very different vision and strategy for nudie than the board did. It provides a hard-won lesson for all entrepreneurs. When it comes to a contest between an entrepreneur’s vision and an investor’s money it is always the dumb money that wins!
I believed (and still do) that nudie is a powerful brand, and that as such we should have concentrated on brand development and marketing and outsourced manufacturing and distribution, via license, to another organisation that had a comparative advantage in those areas. nudie could then focus on what we did best and leave others to do what they did best. This seemed to me to be both a scalable model and an economically desirable one. The board believed nudie was a juice company and needed manufacturing and distribution to give truth to that.
I believe history will prove me correct (perhaps has done so already) and in part this is evidenced by the fact that the VC’s in nudie exited at a significant loss some two years after I had been “kicked out”.
But in any event nudie was a staggering success. It proved it was possible for a bootstrap start-up to tackle huge and profitable incumbent players in a mature industry, and create a brand (voted in 2005, two years after commencement, by readers of brandchannel.com as one of the top 10 “most influential brands” in the Asia Pacific region) and a business (turning over $18m a year after two years in business) that shook up that industry (have a look at the chilled juice cabinet in any supermarket now) in favour of consumers. It is a story which has and should continue to encourage and inspire budding Australian entrepreneurs and innovators.
The ?What If! experience is also one I am content with because, apart from the lessons I learned about the apathy big Australian businesses have towards innovation (and therefore their customers), it was a tangible demonstration of my increasing commercial maturity.
With ?What If! I stepped in as CEO to a 6 year old business which had been losing money for the previous 18 months. My initial objective was to turn that business around (as I had done successfully in the past, for example when I inherited a very dysfunctional, loss-making Encyclopaedia Britannica as CEO in the mid nineties). In the space of 6 months I determined that it would be possible to turn it around but that the size of the prize for doing so simply didn’t warrant the investment or the energy. ?What If! is a global organisation and they were better off investing in more lucrative and receptive markets. In the old days I would have seen it as a virtue to ‘soldier on’ and swing the business around. The more commercially mature me is more prepared to focus on the size of the prize.
I have three university degrees but have long held that formal education is not a patch on the benefits conferred by ‘lifelong learning’. Everything we do or experience in life gives us something – often it’s a lesson which we can build from. Particularly in the case of nudie, which I was extraordinarily attached to emotionally, the experience came with significant pain, but it still ‘gave’ me something personally and something to share with others.
I am applying all those lessons to Sultry Sally currently, and making those lessons available to other through my new business. I believe Sultry Sally will be a great success (both emotionally and commercially) and I am focussed on achieving that success by relying on the lessons of the past.
Two of the things I am very passionate about are the necessity of innovation in favour of consumers and the power of lifelong learning. One of the reasons the most valuable entrepreneurs in the US are those that ave at some time 'failed' is that they are presumed to have learned lessons from those failures. They'll take those lessons into their next venture. In Australia we have more significant cringe around the "f" word and therefore are often not as focussed on the benefits (and value) of learning from experience.
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