MBS973- The power of speed (Million Dollar Principles)

In this episode, Matt talks about the power of speed and how Digital Kungfu became Africa's Best Tech Start-Up by simply competing on speed. 
 
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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Hi there guys, my name is Matt Brown. I'm a serial entrepreneur. I've built and sold multiple million-dollar businesses. And this is the million-dollar principle series where I'm going to be sharing with you some of the principles that I've used in my entrepreneurial journey to build a million-dollar business at a minimum. Now, if you apply these principles in your business, I can guarantee you you have a far greater chance of success. Now, this principle is called the power of speed. There's a lot to be said about speed in business. It's a very easy thing to aspire to, a very different thing altogether to actually achieve. So I've got a quick story to share with you here. So Digital Kung Fu was the last business that I built to a million dollars and then exited from or sold. And it was positioned as the world's fastest storytelling production company. We won Africa's best tech startup in our first year, and it went on to great success. But uh as a business, we were doing essentially lead generation for tech companies in the B2B space. And at the time, there were a lot of reasons not to do this. There was a lot of reasons not to do lead generation for technology customers like Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, and these kind of guys. And the reasons for that were number one, there was a lot of competition. There were a lot of entrenched incumbents in the market. And these competitors had customers, they had relationships. We were coming in completely cold. We had absolutely nothing. Other things we didn't have were no customers. We didn't have, you know, in the context of lead generation, a single customer buying leads from us. We didn't have any products or services that were designed. We had no brand story that spoke to what we specialized in in the technology sector. There were no systems or processes designed to deliver qualified leads for tech companies. So it was a really, really bad idea. Very bad idea. And nonetheless, we did it anyway. And the reason, um, despite all these aforementioned challenges, the reason why we won in the end wasn't because of the fact that we were doing uh lead generation for tech companies, it was because we were competing not on price, not on uh product, not on service, but we were competing on one thing and one thing only, and that was speed. Now, in the technology space specifically, it moves really, really quickly. So, you, as a partner to a technology brand like Microsoft, for instance, you have to move faster than the market. So, when an immediate requirement comes up, a vendor or a Microsoft as an example, they don't want to wait three months while their agency gets their campaign sorted out and then go to market. They need to go to market as soon as possible to secure the opportunity. As an example, when COVID happened and it first uh you know hit the market, tech companies came to us and they were like, we need to sell Microsoft Teams as an example or um software that would allow employees to work from home. Um and uh we need to sell this fast. And they didn't have three months to wait because people were literally at the office one day and the next day they were at home. And so they needed to sell their software and their cloud services and their licenses and things like that to businesses so that their employees could work efficiently from home. So they didn't have three days to wait. And so what we had the ability to do and what we built our entire operating model to do was to produce and launch a campaign, a lead gen campaign, in seven days. The fastest that we've ever done it was 48 hours from the moment that, hey, we need to go to market with this uh product was 48 hours. Now, this is the value of speed because in our case, the competition would literally take three months. And on top of the speed, we would deliver a large scope of work. Like when I say a large scope of work, a much larger scope of work than the competition. So the perception that was being created was that we would we were creating far more value in the market because we were faster and we delivered more work uh that was effective. And this is what um technology customers really resonated with and how we really started to scale our business up to a million dollars. Now, what maximized our value exchange, right? So value exchange is what really drives market dynamics. It's uh it's the difference between whether you sell something and whether you don't. And what uh was really driving our value exchange was essentially four things. Our ability to deliver on the outcome, which was sales qualified leads, our perceived perspective or the perception that we created that we were the best partner for a technology business. In other words, we were faster. Then the time to value delay, in other words, the time it took for our uh technology customers like a Microsoft, for instance, to get value was 10 times less than the next competitor. Ten times. 10 times less than the next competitor. Okay, and so this means that as a customer of digital kung fu of our business, uh, I was able, they were able to get more value faster in less time. And then the final thing was the effort and sacrifice that our clients had to go through to get that result. It was very, very minimal. There was almost no effort and sacrifice for them. It was speed, effectiveness, massive scope of work, pipeline delivered fast. This is what made our proposition so appealing to the technology market. So, what's the bottom line here? Well, the bottom line is that when there is a lot of competition in your market, please do not compete on price. Do not compete on price. You compete on speed, and that is what makes the difference between building a million-dollar business in a competitive market or not. If you like what I have to say, guys, why don't you join the conversation, like, comment, and subscribe to get more million dollar principles just like this. I'll see you in the next video.