← Success Story with Scott D. Clary
Success Story with Scott D. Clary
Lessons - Why Thinking Like a Founder Changes Everything | Sandeep Chennakeshu - Former BlackBerry President
00:12:01
Loading summary
Transcript7 lines
- [00:00]
A
In this lessons episode, explore why building a company like a castle creates resilience, longevity and sustainable growth. Discover how strategic structure replaces reckless speed. Understand how culture, cash flow and execution determine long term success. And uncover the core elements that transform fragile startups into enduring market leaders. Let's talk about the, the thesis of, of what you've written. So the thesis of, of what you've written is that your company is your castle, which is also the name of the book. And obviously that's all going to go in the show notes and people can go check it out. But what, what does this thesis mean? Your company is your castle. I've heard the term moat before when it comes to business in terms of business analogies, but I've never heard the, the analogy of the company, the entire company is, is a castle. So walk me through what this means.
- [00:52]
B
Yeah, so I asked the question, I actually read this in a, in an article in Forbes that why do two thirds of all companies fail within 10 years? You know, 20% fail within two years, 45 and five years, and 65% in 10 years. There are a whole bunch of reasons. Okay. It's well chronicled. And so I said, you know, I, I thought about my own career and why companies that I worked in went to the highest of highs and fell down to the earth. Why? And I, the common answer to what I've read, researched and experienced in my own companies is that sometimes speed is not as important as systematically building structure. Okay. And when you, when you go for speed, you miss a lot of things. And so I basically said, okay, if I want to basically build the way I've been successful in building companies. I began with this company called Ericsson Mobile Platforms, where I was sent to Sweden to help realize its potential. The company had invested a very large amount of money. We had nothing to show. We were bleeding. For every dollar we made, we lost a dollar. Our customers were getting anxious and everybody was contemplating our failure. And I put this framework to work. And in the year we became profitable and within a short time thereafter, we took 30% market share in the world. And I said, what was the structure? And of course, I repeated this formula multiple times and it always worked. It's even working in my startup now. So what was this? And I said, the analogy I used is, I said, take a medieval castle. I was looking for an analogy and an extended metaphor. And I said, look at the castle. Medieval castles have lasted. Some of those that have lasted, have lasted 500 years plus all around the world, whether it's in Japan, In India, in England, Wales, the Czech Republic, etc. So these castles had a number of structural elements that have made them withstand nature's elements over the centuries, as well as invaders. And a company likewise needs to withstand macroeconomic factors like recessions, depressions, pandemics, etc and a hordes of competitors. So it is a nice analogy. And I said, what are these elements? I said, if you, if you look at a castle, you have to find the right location, which is unassailable, hopefully. You need a solid foundation to take the weight of the castle and build a tall castle. You need a perimeter wall that protected it from invaders. And right in the center was the keep where people lived, they stored granaries, they stored their ammunitions, etc. And that turns, you know, that has a certain meaning. And then you have to protect the strategy, which is the perimeter wall with towers, because you don't want people scaling these long walls that are unprotected or you don't want them tunneling underneath. And then you also talk about, so there are a number of towers. And then you talk about, you know, the, the, the central portion of the castle, the keep needs a roof to prevent it from enemy arrows and from hail and Snow and rain, etc. And so, you know, I took these elements and said, I liken them to a business. And in my analogy, I said, you know, the picking of the location is the business model. You want your business model to be as unassailable as possible. The foundation is cash flow. Without cash, you can't do anything. Without cash, you can't build a big, big business. And then I said, the parameter wall of this was a strategy. The strategy surrounds the entire business. And that wall has to be protected by a number of towers. And those towers are product creation, products or services. It could be either products creation, product delivery, you know, sales channels and execution. Because if each of these, any of these fail, the, the wall is not going to stand for long. In the central portion of this castle. The keep is the culture. You know, strategy is what you want to get done, but culture determines what you actually get done. And when culture falls, the entire castle falls, because it doesn't matter if the walls are standing. And so I talk about culture as the keep. And then the roof on the keep is stakeholder confidence. And there are three stakeholders. You have your investors, you have your customers, and you have your employees. And they are the triangle of trust. If you break the trust with or any of them, you're toast. So I go on to explain how these elements actually build a very, very strong castle or a strong company and how they're interrelated. And then the last part of my book is I, I talk about now that you learn to build a strong castle and I give you a lot of recipes and checklists, but at the end of it I say now how do you basically build yourself to run such a castle?
- [06:21]
A
And that's the Granola is a success story, partner. Now here's something I used to do after every single meeting. Sit down for about 15 minutes trying to reconstruct what just happened, who said what, what, we actually decided what I'm supposed to follow up on before next week. And, and when you're running calls all day and you have podcast guests and you have client check ins and you have team syncs, that adds up fast. You either spend half the meeting furiously typing and you miss the actual conversation, or you're present in the meeting, but then you're scrambling after. Neither is a good option. Granola completely changed that for me. It's an AI powered notepad that works through your device's audio, so there's no bots joining your call, no awkward setup, nothing weird. It just runs quietly in the background while you take your rough notes like normal. And when the meeting is over, you get clean, structured notes. What was decided? Who owns what, what's next? Now the first time I saw the output, I genuinely thought, this is what my notes should look like. You get to actually be present in your meetings and you still walk away with everything documented. Try Granola for free for three months at Granola AI Success. That's Granola AI slash success. Get your time back. LinkedIn Marketing Solutions is a success story, partner. Now you know what's brutal? Spending real money on ads that reach completely the wrong people. Wrong industry, wrong seniority, wrong everything. And I've been there. You run a campaign, you spend the budget, and the results don't match because the audience was never right to begin with. LinkedIn ads fixes that their network has grown to over a billion professionals, including over 130 million decision makers. And the targeting is on a different level than anything else out there. We're talking job title, industry, company size, seniority skills, company revenue. You can get super surgical with it. And that's exactly why LinkedIn generates the highest B2B return on ad spend of any major ad network. Not one of the highest, the highest. So if you're serious about reaching the right people who can actually say yes, this is where your budget belongs, right? Right. Now drop $250 on your first campaign and LinkedIn will give you $250 in credit for your next one. Go to LinkedIn.com ScottClary that's LinkedIn.com ScottClary Terms and conditions do apply. Framer is a success story partner. Now you could be a solopreneur, you could be an entrepreneur. You could be somebody just sitting at home who's trying to start a business out of their house. But you know the drill. You need good design to create a website to get your business off the ground. But good design is expensive and you can't afford to hire a designer for every single landing page. Social posts. But you also can't afford to look amateur. And I've been there. You need to move fast, you need to look professional. But you also need to not blow your budget on five different tools. Framer already built the fastest way to publish beautiful production ready websites. And it's now redefining how we design for the web. With the recent launch of design pages. A free canvas based design tool. Framer is more than a site builder. It's a true all in one design platform. From social assets to campaign visuals to vectors and icons, all the way to a live site. Framer is where ideas go live, start to finish. And the best part is it's actually free. Not a trial free. I'm talking unlimited projects, real vector tools, 3D transformations, everything you need without the nickel and diming. So if you're ready to design, iterate and publish all in one tool, start creating for free@framer.com design and make sure you use code Success story for a free month of framer pro. That's framer.com design and use promo code success story framer.com design promo code success Story Rules and restrictions may apply. I love it. Let's go into, let's go into some of it. Makes a ton of sense. I love, I love the analogy. Um, let's go into some of the, let's go into some of these strategies so that people can at least take some really tangible things away. So there's so many different elements and, and I always hate asking like what's, what's the most important because they're all obviously very important. That's the concept of the castle. It's, it's. None of them can exist without the other entities. And they're holistically, they create this ecosystem that leads to a strong business. And I'll ask, actually, I'll ask in a second. Maybe some of the more tactical strategies for pick an element or two. But before we do that, what are really glaring examples of companies that haven't done this properly and pick a company that has failed. What is the thing that they missed the mark on to sort of highlight the importance of. I'm sure you have some thoughts on different companies that have grown too fast. But like, I'm not going to make you. I'm not going to make you talk about the ones you don't want to talk about. But other companies, for example.
- [11:08]
B
Yeah.
- [11:08]
A
What are some of them?
- [11:09]
B
I'm going to be a little political and no problem. Because you know the two most important things because you brought up what are the two most important concepts? I talked about eight elements. But what are the two most important? I think that you must have. Actually there are three very important things. I'll mention the three most important. The three most important is when you build a strategy, you have to think it through very carefully. Okay. There are three elements of a strategy that if you get wrong, you're invariably going to fail. So the three elements of the strategy are how big is your opportunity you're addressing? Don't go after little opportunities, go after big opportunities. You want to go and fish in lakes full of fish so that you can basically catch something reasonable. Okay. And especially I call it open spaces. Go to somewhere where no one else is fishing so you can catch something. Okay. The second is, is your product relevant to the market? How do you make sure it's relevant? Right. A lot of products have been launched which either customers did not like there was no need and I make a lot of. I talk a lot about these are given examples in the book or they've come too late when others have already been entrenched. Okay. Now your biggest opportunity there is the example I give is the iPhone. You know, they entered when they were the leader had for over 400 million phones. They were selling 400 million phones in the market. But the leader basically didn't missed out a major issue. They did not realize the value of an application store and the user interface which the iPhone solved. That was a fundamental customer need and they toppled an entire industry and rose to the top. So product relevance. Knowing what your customers want and need is most important. Find out what your competitors are not doing or will not do and see if you can address it. All of that relates to relevance. Make sure you have sustainable differentiation. So that's the second element of the three in strategy. The third element is do you have the capability to execute on your differentiation and your relevance and capture the opportunity if you don't, you're not going to succeed, however brilliant your idea is. So that's about strategy. The second aspect is culture. You know, as I said earlier, strategy is what you want to get done. Culture determines what you actually get done. How do you build the culture to execute and build and in my book, I talk about two things. I call it raising the right army and leading the right army. It's both a combination of leadership and instilling the set of beliefs that you need in your team in order to execute to the strategy. Okay, I won't go too much into this. It's in the book. And the third part is you have to be able to generate cash. Nobody trusts a company that bleeds constantly and does not meet its promises. So I've devoted an entire chapter to basically managing cash and managing risk and figuring out how you generate more cash. Okay. And fiscal prudence is extremely important in doing this. So those are three elements that stick out as it's it's very fundamental to how I run my businesses. If I can't get these three things right, everything else doesn't matter.
- [15:16]
A
Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the Description Description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.