This is a guest post by Christopher Beselin, who is a multi-exit company builder that resides in Vietnam. Christopher was part of the founding team of Lazada (acquired by Alibaba), Intrepid (acquired), Fram (IPO’d) and Endurance Capital Group.
Guest Post Series: “Building, investing & exiting in Southeast Asia”
I’m running this “bonus series” as a mid-week digest of some basic rules/principles I’ve collected over the last 10-15 years of company building in Southeast Asia.
I would consider them generally applicable, no matter what business you are building and no matter where in the world you are building it.
Think BIG, start SMALL
Everything starts small. Ali Baba, Amazon, Lazada, etc. – they all started small. First day of Lazada Vietnam, we had only ca. 80 orders (almost 100% was from staff).
Today, Lazada Vietnam is doing many 1,000x of that.
When you go on the journey of building your own company from scratch, your company will inevitably start to work with small numbers.
Your ability and attitude to truly dare to think big is one of the main drivers behind changing that.
Some people have the ability to clearly envision how something can be 1,000x bigger than what it is today, but most people don’t.
To dare to think big might even be a very painful pursuit socially – people around you (friends, family, colleagues, etc.) are likely to question your vision, urge you to “be realistic”, or even laugh you out of the room.
To grow your company truly big, you have to be one of the few – one of the few that can envision how something small becomes huge and one of the few that can resist the social pressures on you to “be realistic”.
When we arrived in Vietnam in early 2012 to start Lazada, we were told more than 100 times “…e-commerce will never work in Vietnam, here the consumer is a bit different and they like to touch and feel the product…”.
That was “realistic“ thinking at the time, but reality turned out quite different – the ecommerce industry of Vietnam is turning over well over 10 bnUSD per year (source: Google/Bain/Temasek’s e-conomy report, metric.vn).
Don’t take ‘no’ for an answer
As an early stage company builder you must not only say this, you must practice this systematically in every little decision and task associated with your business.
The most scarce resource for any company builder is calendar time (keep in mind that it is not money in the account) – most of your costs accumulate per time unit (rent, payroll, etc.), competition grows per time unit, and time is also the only resource you can never retrieve or raise more of.
In this context, the key question becomes: how can you build your company to meaningful and sustainable size in a 1/10th of the time that people normally expect it to take?
The only way to do this is to refuse to accept the “generally accepted time it takes to do things” – in a way, you have to get into a mindset where you refuse to accept the world as it is being presented to you.
The good news is that the world around you can be shaped and changed to fit your 10x faster time plan – but you need to be relentless and you need to apply it in every tiny detail of your work.
If someone says it takes 20 days to recruit a sales manager, you should tell them that in your world it takes 2.
If someone tells you it takes years to reach 100k revenues per month, you tell them that where you come from it takes a quarter.
If you squeeze every single timeline you are given down to 1/10th, then naturally your company will grow 10x faster than everyone else’s.
Start with the assumption that everything you try will fail, and plan for that recurring failure
Every early stage company is an endless chain of chaos, problems and challenges.
This is why most of your initiatives will inevitably not work out the way you planned them.
It’s fair to assume that at least nine out of ten things you try will not work out the way you wanted them to. Success or “according to plan” is far, very far, from the base case in early stage company building – it is the exception.
This does not mean we should accept to consistently fail. Instead, we must learn to live with, and plan for, that 90% of our initiatives will fail, even if we think they “should work”.
In practice this means planning not only Plan B, but also Plan C, D, E, F, G, etc. – not once, but every week or month to make sure we hit the targets needed to drive the company forward through its growth journey.
An early stage company builder can never afford to be caught by surprise by failure – we know it will come, every day, every week, every month – by planning for its inevitability, we can work around it and overcome it!
The two most dangerous words in company building are HOPE and TRUST.
In our context, “HOPE” in 99 cases out of 100 means “I don’t think it will happen”.
Train yourself to spot when you yourself or others around you are using the word “HOPE” or “HOPEFULLY” and switch it mentally to “I don’t think it will happen”.
This will allow you to a) spot issues and uncertainties much much faster and b) push your team to prepare plans or drive initiatives to the point where they instead of saying “I HOPE” say “I will MAKE SURE”.
Trust unfortunately typically translates into “I have relinquished control” – same rule here, translate it mentally, to spot risks and uncertainties in your plans and initiatives associated with this.
