One idea to Build your Business, one idea to Scale your life. Every Wednesday.

Welcome to Winformation Weekly. My 13 years’ experience of growing a business from £0-£100m, and the life that goes with it. All wrapped up, in one winning weekly email.

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Business

Bootstrap Like a Pro: 5 of the Most Famous Bootstrapped Businesses

Bootstrapping is the (often painful) process of launching and growing a business without external investment. Launching a business with investment from others can speed up the timeline, but I’m here to tell you, that bootstrapping can be done, and with huge results too! Here are five such businesses and what you can learn from them…

1. Mailchimp – from start-up to $12bn buy out – For Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius, Mailchimp remained a side hustle for five years while they ran a design agency. Their attention to their customers’ needs enabled them to identify an opportunity. They were often asked if there was a better way to use email to interact with and capture customers. And so Mailchimp was born. Their motivation to support small businesses catapulted their growth, when in 2009, they took a calculated risk, offering a free product. It helped grow its user base from 85,000 to 450,000 users in a year, gaining 4,000 new paying customers per month.

2. Spanx – from door-to-door sales to billionaire – Sara Blakely was selling fax machines when an idea struck about the pricey pair of cream trousers she’d never worn, because she didn’t have any underwear that wouldn’t show through the light fabric. Cutting off the feet of a pair of tights, she put them beneath the trousers, creating a lineless look she believed women would pay for. With $5k in savings and knowledge of how to start a business, she went to fabric stores, tested prototypes, and wrote much of her own patent. That work ethic helped her bootstrap the growth of the company on sales of her product, quickly locking up large purchase orders.

3. Tough Mudder – how an assault course became a $100m a year business – Co-founder Will Dean was told by Harvard Business School that nobody will pay to run through mud. Dean and his co-founder Guy Livingstone put $10k of savings into Tough Mudder, using proceeds from pre-selling of race registrations as working capital to build the obstacle courses that earned Tough Mudder its fame. Creating an event that was impossible to complete without the help of others, they felt it could inspire a community, setting it apart from other running events.

4. Patagonia – a brand to last a century – In creating clothing retailer Patagonia, founder Yvon Chouinard became a billionaire. Driven to build a company that lasts more than 100 years, he believes you need a sense of urgency to continually adapt and evolve. He uses a falconry term—yarak—that means super-alert, hungry, and ready to hunt, which he maintains. After being hit by a financial crash in 1990, Patagonia discussed their values, which became the bedrock from which to make quick decision-making every day. While their core stance, of aiming to move people, not just goods, has helped take Patagonia to where it is today.

5. Basecamp - bootstrapping a $100 billion business – Co-founder Jason Fried was struggling to manage multiple design projects, and so Basecamp was born. He believes you need less than you think to start a business. His advice is to stay lean and frugal and learn to act fast. Fried is passionate about bootstrapping and urges new businesses to consider the alternative to taking funding. “Don’t raise money, raise prices,” he says. “Force yourself to learn how to make money as early as you can. You may hate it in the short-term, but it’ll make you a great businessperson in the long term.”

Life

My Personal Tactic for Ensuring Success: The “NFC”

When we wanted to scale our business, the bank required £70k from each of us to personally guarantee a loan. By putting my house down against the loan, I had created what I call an NFC, an acronym where the N and the C stand for No Choice. I will leave you to work out what the F means. I quickly learned that you can achieve anything when you have no choice!

How can you create your own personal “No F Choice” situation?

I am certainly not advocating gambling your house for your business venture. Some people can’t stand social embarrassment, for others losing out financially is a real motivator.

Here are 3 ideas for creating your own personal NFCs.

1. Tell them – Tell a trusted fried about your big goal and ask them to check in your progress periodically. A University report found those who shared goals with friends were twice as likely to achieve them.

2. Post it – Post your idea or intended outcome on social media. Once it’s out there, you have online eyes ready to see you win or lose.

3. Book it – I have heard of someone booking a non-refundable weekend away that they wouldn’t go on should they have not completed what was needed to have been done prior to going. Great one here for the financially adverse crowd!

4. Buy the stuff – You want to run a marathon. Buy all the kit, book your place and reserve the hotel. Once those confirmation emails land, you now have much less choice than before.

…Plus More!

A Book EVERY Entrepreneur Should Read

Beyond Entrepreneurship by Jim Collins.

Reed Hasting, CEO of Netflix famously said that every young entrepreneur or future CEO should memorise this book’s first 86 pages. Honestly, this book is a blueprint for how to launch a business that will really change the way things are done.

Until next week! 

Let’s win, together!