INBOUND Bold Talks: Gerard Vroomen "Relentless Simplicity"

Key Takeaways

[Music] [Applause] [Music] thanks thanks very much two great talks so I hope I can follow in the footsteps uh thanks very much for being here 12 minutes let's uh start I think Beth has already introduced everything um 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 uh 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 uh my lifestyle so the next company is uh two people it's called open and we we work really hard to keep it to 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 2x 10x 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 uh 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 some dude who sold a couple books uh so we'll stick the rules and then I have something on uh real time uh marketing and PR which my good friend David mirman Scott he's written a book about it and I think it's a a very interesting book for if you have a company and you want to grow it and you maybe don't have that inade ability the way Johnny has it then you need to to learn how to do it well so um The Village Baker so when you look think about 50 years ago let's say you have a baker in a village you sell to the local community and you know 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 things 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 you know cheap was good convenience was important so that worked for a long time but I think a couple things are coming together now and um 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 you maybe you go back to your Village Baker and and you like that um 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 AA for the new Village Baker but it's a global village the second part that I learned I 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 design of 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 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 uh IBM for a while there's Apple there's Amazon the thing is we're no Jeff basos I'm know Jeff basos probably I haven't checked the whole room but probably none of you are Jeff basos I mean even that drawing I did is probably not any where close to Jeff basos but uh you know I I made an attempt somebody just asked me if I had the drawings professionally made which I thought was quite hilarious um 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 Goden I think um and coincidentally Seth Goen and sorry uh and Mr Amazon tell us some interesting things about being small and being big I thought the Jeff B one 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 Goen 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 cost go down and all that stuff but economies of 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 you're interested in are you really into cars you buy yourself a Porsche but you know your toilet paper two pie three pie you don't really care you just buy cheap no toilet paper you like bikes hopefully you buy a sella or an open or whatever uh 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 in expensive 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 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 2x 5x 10x if you were at the keynote yesterday from darashi 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 ferrar's kind of crappy brand doesn't know what it's doing um 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 uh I didn't make this up myself but I forgotten the lady who did um revenue is Vanity profit is sanity and cash is reality um so that's Sigman Freud there trying to indicate sanity although it's a bit of a mix with with the scream from Edward mon so um but anyways so sanity and Insanity are obviously uh 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 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 he just indic at for him one person is ideal uh 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 5 minutes you know 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 verified 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 you most big companies are faceless with few exceptions but it's 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 your nrow on 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 I think you get the picture this is the corniest playing 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 um 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 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 settle 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 head space you free up your head space 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 know is sort of my my Golden Rule and and one part of that is that I've decided I shouldn't be doing uh speaking engagements like this so this is the first and the last one but I'd already said yes so I thought it go through it but they take a lot of time you know to prepare for this that 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 the 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 uh and make a difference and the last thing that I wanted to talk about is this real time marketing and PR you know there's a lot of emphasis on on that on the time part the Timeless jump on things newsjacking all these things to 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 are am I 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 that you represent yourself and your company the way you really feel you know what is most important about it and I think that would be a good uh a good step towards success and it's the only way that you can last thank you very [Applause] [Music] [Applause] much