INBOUND Bold Talks: Gerard Vroomen "Relentless Simplicity"

Thanks. Thanks very much. Two great talks. So I hope I can follow in the footsteps. Thanks very much for being here. 12 minutes. Let's start. I think Beth has already introduced everything. The reason I sold the company is that I hated it. When we started it, it was fantastic. We grew it, we grew it, we grew it. Then we were 150 people. And one day I just decided, this is not me. This doesn't fit me. My personality. I don't like managing people. I'm not a people person. So I thought, I need to do something else. So I stepped out of that. Then we sold the company, and I thought, what do I really want to do? I want to build something, and I want to do it small, nimble, and something that fits my lifestyle. So the next company is two people. It's called Open, and we work really hard to keep it two people. Our motto is working hard to stay small. And whenever we decide to grow, we have to find a way to simplify our process so that we can stay with two. Because, you know, with the first company, I thought, well, you have a company, what do you do? You grow it. It's like a pumpkin. You don't really think about. You think the purpose of a company is growing, you know, 2x10x and we doubled our sales every year. And you do that for 10 years, you get really big. But in the end, it just wasn't me. So I'd like to talk to you this afternoon about four trends that I see in the world and see how that can affect business. So then I'll come up with seven rules of relentless simplicity. I called it seven habits. But I thought I might get in trouble with some dude who sold a couple books. So we'll stick to rules. And then I have something on Real Time marketing and primary, which my good friend David Meerman Scott, he's written a book about it, and I think it's a very interesting book for if you have a company and you want to grow it and you maybe don't have that innate ability the way Johnny has it, then you need to learn how to do it well. So the village baker. So when you think about 50 years ago, let's say you have a baker in a village, you sell to the local community and you make good bread and you take care of your customers. If you don't, all your customers talk to each other, and pretty soon you'll be out of business or worse, the customers talk to your mother. Your mother comes to meet you. Bad news. So you focus on quality and doing the right thing for customers. But then along the way, somebody comes and says, you know what? I can make bread in a factory much more efficient. The price goes down. I can sell it to villages all over the world. And that works because in that time frame, cheap was good, convenience was important. So that worked for a long time. But I think a couple things are coming together now. And, you know, through the Internet and just people's awareness, quality is becoming a little bit more important Again, people start talking in this bigger global village and say, you know what? That factory bread, it actually kind of sucks. So, you know, maybe you go back to your village baker and you like that. But there's something else that the Internet does, and that's that you. If you're a village baker, all of a sudden, you can start to talk to people all over this world, so you're not confined to your village anymore, and you can pick out the best customers that best match your kind of business. Talk to them, sell to them. So this is really the area for the new village baker, but it's a global village. The second part that I learned, and maybe just because I suck at it, but I think a lot of people do, is management is hard. You know, if you have a company of one, it's very easy to make decisions. Two, still doable. You get a bigger company, you want to make decisions, you want to tell people what to do, you have to go and verify if they're doing it right. You got to check up on people, you got different layers, you got to have meetings, all this kind of stuff. And so I went from designing the product, which I love, talking to customers, which I love, even though I'm not a people person. But as long as it's about bikes or something related, I'm okay with it. To managing people. And. And they always did things that I didn't think they should be doing, and I didn't know how to deal with that. So management is hard. And you might say, well, but, you know, there's some pretty big companies and they're quite successful. You know, there's IBM for a while, there's Apple, there's Amazon. The thing is, we're no Jeff Bezos. I'm no Jeff Bezos. Probably. I haven't checked the whole room, but probably none of you are Jeff Bezos. I mean, even that drawing I did is probably not anywhere close to Jeff Bezos. But I made an attempt. Somebody just asked me if I had the drawings professionally made, which I thought was quite hilarious. Or maybe this is a business I should enter. And there's money to be made in this one. Actually this looks a little bit more like Seth Godin, I think. And coincidentally, Seth Godin and sorry and Mr. Amazon tell us some interesting things about being small and being big. I thought the Jeff Bezos was really interesting. If you cannot feed your team with two pizzas, your team's too big. So for some people that means a team of one. Maybe a team of two depends on the size of the pizzas, but it's not 20 people. And Seth God has something he calls the economies of small. Of course we all know the economies of scale, how it's great to grow and your costs go down, all that stuff. But economies are small mean that you also lose a lot of efficiencies when you're growing, at least in a lot of cases. So the third trend that I see is what I call the massacre in the middle. So it used to be if you're pretty well off, you bought an expensive car, you had name brand pretty much on anything you did. But it's not really like that anymore. Nowadays people choose what they're interested in. Are you really into cars? You buy yourself a Porsche, but you know your toilet paper, two ply, three ply, you don't really care, just buy cheap, no name toilet paper. You like bikes, hopefully you buy a Cervelo or an Open or whatever floats your boat. But you don't really care about some other things. Maybe you don't care about bread and you buy the factory bread. So if you're inexpensive, high volume, there's a good business there for some companies, if you're a luxury brand, there's good business there. But in the middle, where you try to be pretty, pretty good and a reasonable price, you see for products throughout the world, those companies are often in trouble. So the fourth trend that I see, and I don't think it's hit really yet, but it's sort of this pumpkin phenomena. If you have a company, you try to grow it. Whereas I would like to argue that for a company there's a certain size that's pretty Good. So yes, 2x5x10x. If you were at the keynote yesterday from Dharmesh, he also talks about that. And certainly for a lot of companies those are good goals. But you have to grow towards something. You know, Ferrari has been growing 10% per year for the last 50 years. That's not 2x or 5x but that's pretty darn good. I don't think we would say that, you know, Ferrari's kind of a crappy brand, doesn't know what it's doing. And what we found is that at our height, we had roughly eight bike models and seven of them. We needed the profits from those just to support the office. We had the factories, the people we employed, the marketing, this whole machinery. And then there was one model left. And that sort of created the bottom line for us as a company and for the two founders. Now, there's great things about that. First and foremost, that you're employing 50 or 100 or 150 people, and those people have their livelihoods. But if you're killing yourself in order to give other people a life, maybe that's not really the work life balance you're looking for. And so I would like to argue that I didn't make this up myself, but I've forgotten the lady who did. Revenue is vanity, profit is sanity, and cash is reality. So that's Sigmund Freud there trying to indicate sanity, although it's a bit of a mix with the scream from Edward Munk. So. But anyways, so sanity and insanity are obviously pretty closely related. So those are the four trends that I see. And I think that keeping your company simple can solve those. So the seven rules of relentless simplicity, or if that's too complicated, seven times simple. So what are these seven things you can do? The first of all, keep it small. I mean, Johnny just indicated for him, one person is ideal. I find I need somebody to bounce ideas off of. So two for me is a really nice number. And it means that you can huddle every morning for five minutes, talk about what's new. If you have some questions, you get them answered and decisions are made and you can move on. And also, any of the work that the other person does, you don't really have to check up on that. I mean, you both know everything that's going on in the company. So whether you answer the customer or your colleague does, it doesn't really matter. Once you have people for that, you need to start to verify they're doing the right thing. So the second one is be visible, don't be invisible. This is the one thing that a small company has on almost all big companies. Most big companies are faceless, with few exceptions. But as a small company, you can really be human. And I think when the customer has a choice, they'd rather buy from a person than from a faceless company. The third one is focus on as few products as possible. You narrow down the products or the services that you focus on, everything gets Easier. Your website updates get easier because it's just a couple pages. You know, your supply chain gets easier, your customer service gets. Everything gets easier if you just narrow down. You know, I always used to say the ideal company is one with no employees, no products, and no customers. You may need to add a little bit of complexity to that model to make it feasible in the long run. But. But I think you get the picture. This is the corniest plain words I've ever done in my life. I'm ashamed it's in here. But we had to lock in these presentations a week ago, so I couldn't take the slide out anymore. Obviously, if you have very few products and you're a small company, you better stand out from the rest. So in a world of boxes, make a ball and forget about the unique thing and just. Just let's make sure it doesn't leave this room. Next, be global. Nowadays, the Internet, shipping, everything is cheap. And it's much easier to have one product or one service and sell it all over the world than have a thousand products and sell it in one location. Have to keep track of all that stuff. Of course, we're now in a world where we're always on. We have to respond quickly to people when they have questions and all these things. And I actually think that we're overdoing that. And I would actually like to turn it around and say, I'd like to promote the power of no. The quicker you can say no to an opportunity, the quicker you save up your headspace, you free up your headspace, and you save the time to do what's really important. So if an opportunity comes around, and they always do, immediately figure out, is this really the perfect opportunity for me and my business? If not, say no immediately and move on. Don't try to do it. Spend your time on it, and then figure out that it's not the right thing for you. So the power of no is sort of my golden rule. And one part of that is that I've decided I shouldn't be doing speaking engagements like this. So this is the first and the last one, but I'd already said yes, so I thought I'd go through it. But they take a lot of time, you know, to prepare for this. To do all these doodles takes a lot of time. So. And the last one, great customer service. That's another one where a small company can really outwit the big companies. How often have you called a company for information? You get lost at a phone tree or you send them an email. They don't even respond, hey, I'd like to buy your product. You don't hear back. That's crazy. And that's really where as a small company you can jump in there and make a difference. And the last thing that I wanted to talk about is this real time marketing and primary, you know, there's a lot of emphasis on the time part, the timeless jump on things, newsjacking, all these things. Just be quick and be the first one in there and respond to your customers. There's also a lot of focus on the marketing and PR side itself. You know, what's the content? How do I optimize the content? Am I on all the platforms? But I'd like to venture that the most important part of real time marketing is the real part. Make sure you're real. Make sure, make sure that you represent yourself and your company the way you really feel. You know what is most important about it and I think that will be a good, a good step towards success and it's the only way that you can last. Thank you very much.