Latest / The Start, Scale & Succeed Podcast / Can We Finally Give Up on Growth Hacks? with Hugo van den Biggelaar (stage 4) - Ep. 437

Transcript

Can We Finally Give Up on Growth Hacks? with Hugo van den Biggelaar (stage 4) - Ep. 437 · The Start, Scale & Succeed Podcast

• 0:00
  Scott Ritzheimer: Hello, hello, and welcome, welcome once again
• 0:03
  to the Start, Scale, and Succeed podcast-the only podcast that
• 0:06
  grows with you through all seven levels of your journey as a
• 0:09
  founder. I'm your host Scott Ritzheimer, and today we're
• 0:13
  talking to all those founders out there who are approving
• 0:16
  budgets that their managers just can't tie to any real return,
• 0:21
  especially those of you who are in the disillusion leader stage,
• 0:25
  because we all do it. We all want it to be true. The usual
• 0:30
  fix is to go out, and we want to find that silver bullet, that
• 0:34
  one growth hack that we heard about from this incredible
• 0:37
  leader on this incredible podcast. That that one approach
• 0:40
  that's going to save the day, but you know and I know it
• 0:44
  doesn't. Growth hacks make for great content, but they
• 0:48
  inevitably make for a lousy strategy. That's why my guest
• 0:52
  today brings a growth method that's built to replace the
• 0:56
  guessing. Hugo van den Biggelaar is a Dutch entrepreneur and
• 1:01
  former director at Nike, now based in Brooklyn, New York.
• 1:05
  When his time at Nike ended, he made his biggest bet yet, moving
• 1:09
  to New York to bring BitSing to the U.S. BitSing is a proven
• 1:13
  growth methodology with a 30-year track record across more
• 1:16
  than 1000 organizations, from global giants like BMW, HP
• 1:21
  Enterprise, and DHL to fast-growing startups and
• 1:25
  scale-ups. Hugo works with founders and leadership teams to
• 1:28
  diagnose where growth is breaking down and rebuild it in
• 1:32
  a proven way. He's currently building Bitsing USA from
• 1:36
  Brooklyn, one client at a time, and he's here with us today.
• 1:39
  Hugo, I you know I don't know if you do. We'll find this out
• 1:43
  here, but I love a quick fix. Like I love that one thing that
• 1:46
  like it just everything else magically falls into line, and
• 1:49
  all the dominoes do what they're supposed to. But I've chased
• 1:53
  enough of them at this point in my career to know like they they
• 1:58
  just don't pan out. But but for a lot of founders, I know this
• 2:01
  was for me in my first organization. You you kind of
• 2:05
  don't know another way. Like the whole reason you're looking for
• 2:08
  the growth hack is because whatever you were doing before
• 2:11
  isn't working like it used to, and you've got to find another
• 2:15
  way. So how do you help founders that have had success? Right,
• 2:19
  this isn't brand new startups that have never figured anything
• 2:21
  out, but folks that have had some success-they've brought it
• 2:24
  to market and it worked until it didn't. How do you help them
• 2:28
  grow from that frustration to the next level?
• 2:31
  Hugo van den Biggelaar: Thank you so much, and thank you for
• 2:33
  the the fantastic intro. It's a pleasure to be here. And yes, to
• 2:37
  answer your question, how do I help founders to understand
• 2:41
  where their growth is stalling. Well, what we do is we use this
• 2:45
  methodology that's called bidsing, like you were
• 2:47
  explaining. And what is the really cool part about bidsing
• 2:50
  is that it's all encompassing. So when I sit down with a
• 2:54
  founder and with their teams, and we start to analyze, you
• 2:57
  know, what the company has been doing, we look at the insights.
• 3:00
  What we actually do is we build a a plan through that
• 3:04
  methodology that's all encompassing. Now, what does
• 3:07
  that mean? It means that it's not just a plan that's focused
• 3:10
  on, let's say, optimizing top funnel. It's not a plan that's
• 3:14
  focusing on and saying, hey, you should double down on this new
• 3:17
  product category. Now, what we do with Bitsing is we make an
• 3:20
  analysis of the entire organization. Then we deliver a
• 3:24
  plan that spans across seven principles, from strategy to
• 3:27
  finance to branding to marketing to sales. And then, not only do
• 3:32
  we deliver the plan, we also help you to execute on the plan,
• 3:36
  and we train your team to be able to do it themselves. So,
• 3:40
  what I feel like often, what happens when we are looking for
• 3:42
  that silver bullet or for that magic growth hack, is we tend to
• 3:46
  be hyper specific on fixing a part of our organization, or you
• 3:51
  know setting up a new team, or like I said, you know creating a
• 3:54
  new product category or doubling down on a particular market, and
• 3:58
  that might not be the wrong thing to do, but what we do say
• 4:02
  is that performance happens only when everything works together.
• 4:06
  So instead of you know trying to double down on that one thing
• 4:09
  that might give you a short sprint or a short boost in
• 4:12
  growth, we help you to truly change your organization and be
• 4:17
  ready to be focused on on the future by looking at everything
• 4:21
  and making sure everything works together.
• 4:26
  Scott Ritzheimer: One of the things as I was getting ready
• 4:28
  for this episode that I saw you all really stress is leaning on
• 4:32
  things that that you can know work. And and one of the
• 4:35
  challenges for a lot of founders at this stage is the things that
• 4:38
  they knew worked feel like they're not working like they
• 4:41
  used to anymore. The and there's this kind of like game of
• 4:44
  whack-a-mole where it's like, oh, this thing's on fire over
• 4:47
  here. Let's run over here, and while you do three more fires
• 4:49
  start over there, and while you're fixing one of those,
• 4:52
  there's three more somewhere else, which I think is a big
• 4:55
  part of why this idea of a comprehensive model is so very
• 4:58
  effective is because it it. Short circuits the whole
• 5:01
  whack-a-mole approach, but one of the challenges is how do you
• 5:06
  know which one works? Because there's lots of people out there
• 5:09
  selling lots of different things. How how do you help
• 5:13
  folks have the confidence in your method to know that it
• 5:16
  really is going to help them?
• 5:18
  Hugo van den Biggelaar: Yeah. So what we see often when we think
• 5:21
  about okay, where you know what what what thing do I have to hit
• 5:24
  right through the Whackmo analogy, what you will tend to
• 5:28
  see is that people start to look at you know sometimes their
• 5:31
  intuition, their their their underbelly, their gut feeling,
• 5:35
  and and then start to double down on that. But what we do at
• 5:38
  Bitsing is we say let's look at the insights. What is the
• 5:41
  information we have available, and where has your money been
• 5:45
  coming from? Right, we call this your money sources, or what are
• 5:49
  your revenue drivers? And what you tend to see often is that
• 5:52
  when you actually look at where your revenue is coming from and
• 5:56
  where you're spending your marketing or sales budget, there
• 5:59
  could be and often is a misalignment, and I will give
• 6:02
  you an example that I love to use. So we were approached by
• 6:06
  the Storystar chain in the Netherlands, and they told us,
• 6:09
  "Hey, our market is declining. It's not working anymore. You
• 6:12
  know, how do we turn the ship around? And we did a financial
• 6:16
  analysis of where their money was coming from, their money
• 6:19
  sources, as well as that, we interviewed a lot of people. We
• 6:23
  asked them, "Hey, where do you think you should be spending
• 6:26
  your time, your budget, and your effort on? And what they said
• 6:30
  was, not surprisingly, and you know, intuitively making sense
• 6:33
  because they said we need to focus on kids because we're
• 6:36
  selling toys here, right? So we need to double down our
• 6:40
  marketing efforts on kids, and what do kids love? They love
• 6:43
  games. So we need to double down marketing kids to games. We need
• 6:47
  to be aggressively marketing that because that's how we're
• 6:50
  going to turn this thing around. Because that's what you know we
• 6:54
  think will work. But when we actually looked into the
• 6:57
  insights, what we found was that first of all, their biggest
• 7:00
  target audience or consumer group was fathers, was 82% of
• 7:04
  their revenue, and the biggest product category they were
• 7:07
  selling was Legos, was 64% of their revenue. So we told them,
• 7:10
  amongst other things, instead of doubling down on what your gut
• 7:14
  is telling you, and you're going after games, which was around 10
• 7:18
  to 15% of their revenue, and kids, which was in the end 0% of
• 7:21
  their revenue, you should be going after fathers and making
• 7:25
  sure you sell more Legos to them because clearly this has already
• 7:29
  been working without you investing a lot of time, energy,
• 7:32
  or effort into it. So sometimes it's about you know looking at
• 7:35
  the insights and what's available and understanding
• 7:38
  where you focus your efforts on. Now that doesn't mean that we
• 7:42
  always say where your revenue is coming from today is gonna be
• 7:46
  able to set you up for success tomorrow. But what it does mean
• 7:49
  is that you want to spend a significant amount of your time
• 7:53
  and investment and budget into where your money is coming from
• 7:56
  today, so that we can go after some of the high potential
• 7:59
  opportunities that we see for tomorrow's future. But people
• 8:03
  tend to be biased and think, okay, well, we see potential in
• 8:06
  certain areas, whether that is based on a gut feeling like
• 8:10
  kids, or whether they feel the potential is there for games,
• 8:13
  and double down on it. But you know, some potential might not
• 8:17
  be as much or as important as some of the revenue drivers that
• 8:20
  you have today in your business. So we help you to build a
• 8:24
  balanced growth strategy, where you don't start today's business
• 8:27
  by chasing tomorrow's.
• 8:29
  Scott Ritzheimer: One of the the kind of common growth hacks. I
• 8:31
  don't know that we'd really call it this, but it is what what's
• 8:35
  happening is for a visionary founder be like, "Hey, we just
• 8:39
  need blank like this new thing, a new product line, a new
• 8:42
  revenue channel, a new something, and and so I love
• 8:45
  what you're saying because more often than not, making sure that
• 8:49
  we're at least executing what's already working or or you know
• 8:53
  close to working well is a really big part of that, and so
• 8:56
  you kind of brought this nuance that hey, just because your
• 8:59
  revenue is coming from there doesn't mean that it should keep
• 9:03
  coming there, or that that's going to be the revenue of the
• 9:07
  future. How do you help folks figure decipher that? Because
• 9:10
  sometimes it can feel like hey, we've maxed a market. How do you
• 9:14
  know if that's actually true?
• 9:16
  Hugo van den Biggelaar: So what we do when I work together with
• 9:19
  my my clients is we sit down together, and like I said, we
• 9:24
  stop thinking and we look at the insights that's available to us,
• 9:28
  and then together we look at you know we have a special
• 9:31
  methodology called the pencil method. So we call this the way
• 9:35
  we call this the pencil method because we say you have your
• 9:38
  sharpest pencils in your toolkit, and that's what's
• 9:40
  drawing or that's what you use to draw your revenue today, and
• 9:43
  then we have your blunt pencils, and we want to sharpen some of
• 9:45
  those because they might be your most important pencils in the
• 9:48
  future. And having that analogy makes it very easy for people to
• 9:51
  understand around. Okay, you know what does my toolkit look
• 9:54
  like today, and how do I want my toolkit to look like tomorrow?
• 9:58
  And then we basically sit down and we just have. Deep
• 10:00
  conversation around you know growth ease is the potential
• 10:04
  that we see in a certain blunt pencil making up for you know
• 10:08
  potentially under indexing our effort and and time and budget
• 10:11
  into your sharpest pencil. We talk about margin, right?
• 10:15
  Because margin is also very important if we think about
• 10:17
  product categories, for example. Is it what what is coming top
• 10:22
  top line and what's coming bottom on on the bottom of our
• 10:24
  P&L, so we sit down together, we look at the insights available,
• 10:28
  and then together we create a balance growth strategy. And I
• 10:31
  think balance is the the key word here, because what you see
• 10:34
  often is like you explained, people see potential, they see
• 10:39
  something new, and they double down on it, and if you do that,
• 10:42
  you know you might be able actually to live up to the
• 10:44
  potential. But if you're losing on the markets or the product
• 10:48
  categories or the consumer groups that are working right
• 10:51
  now, that that you know that 100% growth you you manage to
• 10:55
  create in in this new product category might not be able to
• 10:58
  make up for the 5% market share you lost in your biggest product
• 11:02
  category.
• 11:05
  Scott Ritzheimer: Yeah, yeah, it's so true, so true. Hugo,
• 11:08
  there's a question that I ask all my guests. I'm very
• 11:10
  interested to see what you'd have to say. But the question is
• 11:12
  this: What is the biggest secret you wish wasn't a secret at all?
• 11:15
  What's that one thing you wish every founder or leader watching
• 11:18
  or listening today knew?
• 11:20
  Hugo van den Biggelaar: Okay, so I would say that that secret
• 11:23
  that we want everyone to you know know, so it's not a secret
• 11:26
  anymore, is that growth actually is predictable. So we we've been
• 11:31
  talking about hacks, we've been talking about you know for
• 11:34
  example luck, and we feel like oh we're doing such a great
• 11:37
  thing by just doing this one thing, or it suddenly just
• 11:41
  happen to us, but I think growth is predictable as long as you
• 11:46
  you know think about the sequencing of setting yourself
• 11:48
  up for success. Like I was explaining, if you focus just on
• 11:53
  one part, let's say optimizing your top funnel, you might be
• 11:56
  doing it very successfully and you might grow, but it might
• 12:01
  also be the right thing to do still. But still, it might not
• 12:05
  be successful because other areas in your business are
• 12:07
  lacking and are dragging it down. So, if you want to make
• 12:10
  growth predictable, think about your entire organization and
• 12:14
  sequence and plan for growth. Use the methodology. You know,
• 12:18
  think about okay, what are my financial goals? What is my
• 12:21
  strategy that I have to get there? What are what is my brand
• 12:24
  positioning? What is my funnel looking like? And make sure that
• 12:27
  all those those questions are answered in the right order and
• 12:31
  at the right time, so that your entire organizations is is you
• 12:34
  know is is set up for success and is making sure that that
• 12:38
  growth is going to happen, versus you you know making sure
• 12:41
  that one part is working, but then the others are not. It is
• 12:44
  predictable. We can work on it together. It's not something
• 12:48
  that you should be guessing for or hoping for.
• 12:52
  Scott Ritzheimer: Yeah, it's so good. It's so good, and and
• 12:54
  that's such good news for folks because it it feels like the
• 12:58
  opposite of that when you're playing that whack-a-mole game,
• 13:01
  and you fix this, but this breaks, and this, and then this
• 13:03
  breaks. It feels like that, like that's just it. Like that's the
• 13:07
  game we have to play forever. But I couldn't agree more that
• 13:11
  when you get the right things in the right place and at the right
• 13:15
  time, those it does it creates a predictable pathway to growth
• 13:20
  that is-it's not just great because you're growing, but it's
• 13:24
  great because you're not playing whack-a-mole anymore. Like,
• 13:27
  let's be real, like that-that only is fun for so long. So I-I
• 13:31
  love that point, Hugo. There are some folks that are are you know
• 13:36
  are hopefully really encouraged by this, and and they they want
• 13:39
  to believe that there's a predictable path to growth for
• 13:41
  their organization. Where can they reach out to you to find
• 13:44
  more out about the work that you all do there?
• 13:46
  Hugo van den Biggelaar: Yeah, so we have our website, which is
• 13:49
  bitsing.com. The methodology is called Bitsing, so that is
• 13:53
  b-i-t-s-i-n-g.com, which they can visit. There's obviously
• 13:57
  some contact details on the website, they can hit me on
• 14:01
  LinkedIn. So Hugo van den Biggelaar, I will leave the
• 14:05
  spelling for this beautiful long Dutch name, but you can see it
• 14:09
  probably in your post. And then also they can hit me up via
• 14:13
  email, which is hugo@bitsing.com. And I gladly,
• 14:17
  you know, discuss any questions they have, any thoughts they
• 14:21
  have. I'm here as a resource.
• 14:23
  Scott Ritzheimer: Fantastic! We'll get all that, including
• 14:25
  Hugo's brilliant Dutch name, in the in the show notes. It it the
• 14:31
  name itself is worth it, so check that out. But also reach
• 14:34
  out to Hugo and his team. It'll be fantastic. You will not
• 14:38
  regret it. Well, Hugo, thanks so much for being on the show. It
• 14:42
  really was a pleasure having you. Welcome to the U.S. of A.
• 14:46
  or here at least on the East Coast, and so thankful for the
• 14:49
  work that you do. And for those of you watching and listening,
• 14:52
  you know your time at Attention mean the world to us. I hope you
• 14:55
  got as much out of this conversation as I know I did,
• 14:58
  and I cannot wait to see you. Next time, take care. Hey
• 15:05
  everyone, Scott Retzimer here. Thank you so much for listening
• 15:08
  to the Start Scale and Succeed podcast. I hope this episode
• 15:11
  gave you exactly what you need for the level you're in right
• 15:15
  now. If you want to discover what level you're in, take our
• 15:18
  10 question Founders Evolution quiz for free at
• 15:22
  foundersquiz.com. That's foundersquiz.com. It'll pinpoint
• 15:26
  exactly where you are and give you tailored tips to move
• 15:30
  forward and reach that next level in your journey as a
• 15:33
  founder. If you got something out of today's episode, don't
• 15:36
  forget to subscribe, rate, or review. It helps us reach more
• 15:40
  founders like you, and let's be honest, it means a ton to me, my
• 15:44
  team, and all our incredible guests. So keep starting,
• 15:47
  scaling, and succeeding, and I'll see you in the next
• 15:51
  episode.