Andries Smit
SUMMARY
Can you briefly explain open banking to us and explain what it means for businesses in terms of marketing?
Open banking is a movement that started in 2015 to promote innovation in the banking industry by giving account holders access to and ownership over their banking data. It is a component of a larger trend to allow users access to their data.
What does the idea of frictionless cashback entail, and what marketing ramifications does it have?
Frictionless cashback is a notion where incentives are delivered without any terms or limitations, and it is made feasible through open banking by keeping track of a person's spending habits with their consent and putting the rewards into their wallet. The removal of access to third-party data and cookies has repercussions for marketing because it will make it more difficult to accurately measure marketing campaigns.
What are some cookie substitutes that marketers can employ for data tracking?
Spend data is an accurate substitute for cookies that reveals users' actual actions rather than just their intentions. Due to the fact that it contains first-party data with past expenditure information, it is also more beneficial for marketing.
TRANSCRIPT
Marcus Cauchi: Hello. And welcome back once again to the Inquisitor Podcast with me, Marcus Cauchi. Today, I'm delighted to have, as my guest, Andries Smit, Andries is the CEO of Upside. Andries, welcome.
Andries Smit: Thanks Marcus. Nice to be here.
60 seconds on your background
Marcus Cauchi: Excellent. Could you give the audience 60 seconds on your background and how you got to where you are?
Andries Smit: Yeah, absolutely. Uh, I grew up in South Africa, so you'll pick up a bit of a twang, but, um, I then, uh, was very fortunate to be provided the opportunity to come to the UK, which we did about 15 years ago. I grew up in financial services, PWC, Morgan Stanley, other investment banks and insurance, ultimately, and through that, we, again, we're very privileged to spend some time in Canada, Singapore, Hong Kong, and made our way full circle back to the UK.
Marcus Cauchi: So, where did you find your soul?
Andries Smit: I think for those that are born in Africa, you, your soul is always left there. It's in your blood. They say the ground is in your blood. So, uh, yeah, we still, we still, even after 15 years referred to it as home.
Marcus Cauchi: Okay. You went into investment banking and insurance. Uh, it must have been lost somewhere along the way.
Andries Smit: I would like to point out that I made my way out of it, but, uh, yes. Yes. It was interesting times.
Marcus Cauchi: It was only on a lease to the devil, then? Excellent. Okay. So, tell me a little bit about open banking. First of all, uh, Upside is an instant cash back solution that uses open banking. I'm sure many people aren't aware of it and the implications.
Quick introduction to open banking and what it means to organizations, particularly in respect to their marketing
Marcus Cauchi: So can you give us a quick introduction to open banking and what it means to organizations, particularly in respect to their marketing?
Andries Smit: Yeah, absolutely.
Andries Smit: So two parts to that, the, the history of open banking post, the 2008 crash and the financial crisis, we had, the regulators and specifically in the UK and Europe felt very strongly that they need to encourage more innovation in the bank sectors.
Andries Smit: We can't be that dependent on one or two or three big banks. So, open banking was, uh, one of the initiatives that was pushed out sort of started in 2015. And it is this notion of that actually your banking data belongs to you, the account holder, the user. And I mean, clearly that is important and, and, and true something that we prescribed to, but that's a movement across the world actually, where it's not just open banking, now, it's also open data where there's a lot of thoughts being put into actually users should own their own.
It's not just open banking now, it's open data
Andries Smit: So that's where it came from. In a nutshell, what it is is any person you or me can give any other third party access to the last three years of our bank accounts. Initially, that might feel a little bit scary, but actually, if you think about the time it could save you the ease in, in which it allows you to do things like loan applications or mortgage applications.
Andries Smit: You can just short circuit so much in terms of those painful situations where you need to fill in endless amounts of forms. At least that's where it started.
Andries Smit: And then over the last two years or so with the maturity of the technology, the level of innovation on the use cases became more and more into what we have today, where you can do anything from a credit score, apply for a loan, a card you can apply for your rental applications through open banking, or like we do, you can even get some frictionless cashback as well.
What do you mean by frictionless cashback?
Marcus Cauchi: And what do you mean by frictionless cashback the by implication, there must be friction cashback.
Andries Smit: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I, I mean, I, I'm always, uh, perplexed by the paradox that we have in what's called rewards nowadays. So I'm gonna reward you and say, thank you, but then I'm gonna make it as hard as humanly possible for you to get your reward by forcing you to click things or, you know, by hiding quite a few things in the terms and conditions.
Andries Smit: In my mind, those conditional rewards are not real rewards. They, they, and, and it shows in the numbers, the adoption rates for those kinds of rewards are anywhere between eight and 14% on average, some do better, but that's where we see it established. Now, we had a big point of differentiation around that because we believe in unconditional rewards, there should be no catches, it should be cash, and you should be able to do with it, whatever you want.
Andries Smit: And also in terms of your question around frictionless, it means it needs to accrue to you without you having to do anything. Without you having to remember a card or a coupon code or a piece of paper. And what open banking allows us to do, with your permission, we monitor when you shop at the right shops and then the money just appears in your wallet.
Marcus Cauchi: Right. So, this must have some pretty serious implications for marketing. Uh, obviously recently there's been a huge shift away from third party, uh, data, and this is first party data. So, what are the implications? First of all, of the removal of access to third party, data and cookies?
Andries Smit: Yeah. We're seeing a lot of a scramble in the market over the last three, four months, both with Google stating that they are gonna remove third party cookies and introducing their own form of tracking, but also through Apple and their implementation of iOS 14.5, which meant that a lot of marketing initiatives is no longer accurate in its measurement.
You can still do your ads, but you don't know whether they work or not
Andries Smit: So you can still do your ads, but you know, you don't know whether they work or not. Uh, and there's a lot of movement in the industry right now, trying to figure out different ways to do that and track it. Now, what we are professing is actually first party consent is critical.
Andries Smit: Cookies got us into the trouble we, we are in over the last decade or so as a, as a society. Because it wasn't clear to use as what they were opting in. Or sometimes not even asked to opt in. So that's why you, we got to the stage where cookies are being removed. That alongside all the privacy movements, GDPR here in the, in, in European union, but also in the UK, great advocacies for users in saying that you are in control and you should have the decision as to who and what you share with who.
You should have the decision as to who and what you share
Andries Smit: Now with cookies going away, marketers are gonna look for alternatives. An industry, as you would expect us already working on that.
Andries Smit: There's quite a few alternatives in there, which, um, we are probably not gonna get into today, but one of the alternatives which we are professing for is spend data because spend data is accurate. It's valid. It doesn't just show, you know, intent. It actually shows what users have done. Lots and lots of people look at lots and lots of websites.
Andries Smit: But the percentages of those that actually conclude and buy is very, very little, I mean, we're talking of fractions of percentages, whereas your spend transactions is what you've actually done.
Marcus Cauchi: There's, uh, a very interesting book by Shoshana Zuboff called The Age Of Surveillance Capitalism. And if, if you haven't read it, it's definitely worth a read because it shows you just how deeply your data has been abused.
Marcus Cauchi: And so by opting in and by giving consent, you are clear about how that data will be used. And from a marketing standpoint, it must be immeasurably more valuable to have first party actual spending data. Because if you've got three years of historical data, it also must mean that you're getting current spend.
By opting in and by giving consent, you are clear about how that data will be used
Marcus Cauchi: And therefore you must be getting comparative spend as well. So as a marketer, this is kind of the holy grail, surely.
Andries Smit: Absolutely. That's how we think about it. In the past, there was way too many prey and spray approaches when it comes to marketing, we were all hunting for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people on our email lists, but it's actually quite pointless if you have very little engagement on them. You can have a million people on an email. If you, if nobody opens your email or response to it, then what's the point. And, therefore, having more and more specific, detailed situation of exactly who your customers are and exactly what they do that is super, super powerful.
Andries Smit: Because now I can have a real relevant conversation with uh you know, anybody, uh, it's not so much now, but two years ago, big data was the, you know, what everybody was ranting and raving about. Actually small data, detailed data, first party consented data really, really understand who Marcus is and where he shops and, and what he likes or do not like. That is really powerful because now you can have a relevant conversation with each one of your customers.
They're effectively just spending money to acquire emails of their existing customers multiple times over
Marcus Cauchi: Certainly big data is being poorly used according to Forester by 93% of organizations that collect it. So they're collecting these lates of data and they have no idea what they're to do with it. I also see this with email opt-in list and yeah, I'm speaking from personal experience, but also having asked this question of literally hundreds of people, the number of people who've opted into lists.
Marcus Cauchi: And often, certainly from a consumer standpoint or even a B2B side, you'll often give your crappy email the one that you have no intention of ever looking at. And it's kind of the one that they've just spent 10 or 20 quid, uh, to acquire that, uh, email address. And in the consumer world, I know that people will often give four or five, uh, emails in order to get those offer codes on multiple occasions.
Marcus Cauchi: So they're effectively just spending money to acquire emails of their existing customers multiple times over. So it, it strikes me that marketing must have a very difficult time in retail, justifying its existence to finance.
Andries Smit: I'll come back to that point, but just as a, a, an aside, uh, interesting most email clients like Gmail allow you to create infinite amounts of email addresses just by adding a number plus one plus two plus three plus four. So as an easy exercise marketing department can just find out how many plus email addresses do they have in their database. And you can immediately see the truth of the problem that you just highlighted.
Marcus Cauchi: Hmm.
The problem you have with big data is to stitch the stuff together
Andries Smit: Going, going back though, the reason why I am personally so enthusiastic about open banking is we think of what you spend, what you do, we think of that as the spine of data. It's the one true ledger of life, right? We all have multiple interests. We all go everywhere. We're all curious. We all sniff around, but actually what you do is captured in your bank statement.
Andries Smit: Now the problem you have with big data is to stitch the stuff together. People have data, large organizations have data everywhere. They have it in their points of sales systems and their marketing systems. The email systems, Facebook, you name it, actually bringing that together is the hard part. And that's why they have countless numbers of data science teams, and they buy data and they use consultancies and agencies.
Andries Smit: Well, actually, that entire inefficiency can be removed. If you have first party consent from a user and you have the ledger of their life, their bank account, then that becomes the central truth on which it becomes so much easier to, to stitch the rest of your data together and understand your customer.
Marcus Cauchi: So, from a, a marketer's perspective, what you're getting is how much people spend in which categories, in which locations, and a comparative spend between you and your competition. Is that right?
Andries Smit: Absolutely. It's always best to use this with an example with Andries' permission and apologies for talking about myself in the third person, but it's the easiest, the easiest to explain an example.
Andries Smit: If I give consent, you can see that I drink coffee. You can see, I drink a lot of coffee. You can see, I drink every coffee every single month. More importantly, you can see how much coffee do I drink each month. It's 80 pounds, by the way, it's scary. I know my wife keeps telling me off, but more importantly, you can see that I can - I drink X a brand retailer, a and a brand retailer B. And therefore it becomes very specific for marketing teams and for their finance colleagues to work out how much is Andries worth to us? How much should I spend to acquire him? How much should I spend to keep him.
Andries Smit: That part of the puzzle has been neglected. If you work in large new organization. Well, not even new, all organizations, marketing teams are usually very keen on acquiring customers and they work with blended rates. What is our total customer acquisition cost? What is the total customer lifetime value? And what actually, what open banking and later open data will do is it will be if you'll be able to calculate customer lifetime value for specific individual segments, not just overall for your entire customer base.
You will be able to calculate customer lifetime value for specific individual segments, not just overall
Marcus Cauchi: Okay. So from a consumer's perspective, my alarm bell goes off because I'm giving away all this insight. Now I, I can see the benefit of it, but wh why should I trust, uh, an organization that is asking me for my open banking data and what safeguards are there to protect my data? And how it's used.
Andries Smit: Absolutely. I mean, that is down to each consumer to judge the entity in which they are dealing with. And of course, whether they are comfortable with the proposition that is on offer for them. In addition to that, in addition to you judging whether you can trust this company, what is good about open banking, especially in the UK and in the European countries, is that it's heavily regulated. The FCA in the UK oversees everybody that deals with open banking data and has very strict controls and oversight in terms of how that data is being dealt with, treated, and there are various elements of control in there. Including things like when somebody removes a link. So you link your open banking account and you then decide no long- i, I don't wanna do this anymore.
Once you ask to be removed from the app, they have seven days to remove your data
Andries Smit: Once you ask the entity to remove it, which by regulation has to be a very simple button in the app, then the entity has only seven days to remove your data. That is kind of brilliant safeguards, which I only wish we had the same level of control over our web data and our search data and everywhere else where we're being followed and, you know, surveilled as you, as you mentioned. So actually I would profess that open banking and, and because of the regulatory frameworks are, are much safer than the other data that's being collected on you.
Marcus Cauchi: That is interesting. Okay. So if we look at how this is likely to shift marketing behavior, I'd be curious to get your insight and predictions on that.
Andries Smit: The key thing is, again, what I mentioned earlier, spend data is highly predictive. Whether we like it or not, and, and in the data we've looked at. People have certain brands or retailers, which they frequent.
Andries Smit: Those are the 10 shops they always go to. And the brands that they always support. And then they have a very, very long tail of impulse buys, single ad hoc buys. Now understanding that behavior at a segment level means that you can incentivize a customer in your specific industry. Marcus never drinks, coffee, Andries drinks, a lot of coffee, only speak to Andries and only speak to Andries for how much he is worth to us being a coffee shop.
Andries Smit: And I think that level of sophistication is where marketing and finance can once and for all be reconciled. For so long, the marketing department has been saying about - talking about the good work that they've been doing, but the finance colleagues will keep complaining and saying that I can't see it fall to my bottom line.
It's where marketing and finance can once and for all be reconciled
Andries Smit: How do I know that you're acquiring the right customers? How do I know you're acquiring profitable customers? Now what this new movement will do is it will give both departments clear understanding of who the customers are, whether they're profitable, whether they're staying, whether they're lapsing and how much they are spending in their specific segment.
Marcus Cauchi: So this is bringing marketing certainty, and it's allowing you to be relevant at scale in a hyper targeted way. Because I think one of the biggest methods that's been going on for the last few years is this whole idea of personalization at scale. And you know, it doesn't work cuz you get Dear first name, uh, emails and stuff like that.
Marcus Cauchi: The thing I I'm really excited about, uh, as a business person is the whole idea that you can segment in such a way that you can be really relevant and timely. And the offers that you can bring are going to be extremely valuable to the individual, which makes them compelling. And surely that's the holy grail of marketing, isn't it?
Andries Smit: Absolutely. And it's, it's again, not just when you acquire them. Absolutely. Everything you've just said, Marcus. But what you can also see is you can see the journey a customer goes on. The moment Andries starts drinking more than his 20 quid of coffee at a specific retailer, that's a clear signal that the relationship is changing and vice versa.
If you have the ability to see spend data, you can have lead indicators as to when a person's behavior is changing
Andries Smit: Andries hasn't drink coffee for the last three months from, from us, from our, our brand. That's a very clear signal that you need to intervene very quickly and very specifically. For too long people who have been thinking about marketing as new customer acquisition, existing customer service or loyalty and re and you know, uh, reacquiring lapse customers. Actually, if you have the ability to see spend data, you can have lead indicators as to when a person's behavior is changing.
Andries Smit: And therefore you can reach out back again with relevant rewards to make sure that you maintain the business.
Marcus Cauchi: So how long has it been since a ustomer last transacted with you? So you've got recency and be able to target those people, cuz they're, presumably they're most likely to be responsive to promotions.
With enough data, you can start running experiments, if you split test you can see the direct impact on sales, retention, basket value, profit, and so on
Marcus Cauchi: How frequently, they interact with your brand or with your products and how much they're spending within a clearly defined timeframe. So again, in terms of pinpointing where you invest your marketing pounds, presumably this enables you to eliminate the guesswork. I, I, I remember years ago, I was recruiting a VP of marketing for one of my clients and the CFO rather glibly said, well, I don't mind you running the experiments, but I only want you to run the experiments that work.
Marcus Cauchi: Presumably that's now something that with enough data, you can start running experiments with a, a high degree of accuracy. And if you split test, then you can see the direct impact on sales, retention, basket value, profit, and so on.
Andries Smit: Absolutely. And, and there's another level of sophistication here, because to some extent you can do your AB tests and experimentation with existing solutions, but you only get feedback on your experiment of what's happening in your store.
Andries Smit: So great. You moved Andries from drinking 20 pounds off coffee a month to 25 pounds of coffee a month. And you'll rate that experiment as amazing and brilliant. But if you knew the spending behavior, if you could see the whole wallet, he might have increased his spend from 80 to 150 in total. So therefore you've lost share of wallet, but you think your, your experiment has been fantastic. Successful.
Andries Smit: So again, by seeing the trends and by seeing the whole wallet the level of sophistication around your experimentation and it doesn't give, you don't have to stop post experimentation. You just ramp it up. You just scale up and dial up the level of input you want to do.
Marcus Cauchi: There's a great affinity all there on blood pressure meds.
Andries Smit: No comment.
Marcus Cauchi: Okay. Tell me this. I mean, let's move on to running an early stage Fintech startup because I I'm really curious to find out the good, the bad and the ugly of that. Um, if we look back over the time that since you've been running the business, what's been your best mistake?
What's been your best mistake?
Andries Smit: Wow. That is an interesting question.
Andries Smit: I think one of the things that happened was we raised a, a crowd funding round in September last year. And, although the crowd round itself was decently successful and we were very happy with the outcome, we made a video as part of the pitch. And in the video, we actually made a mistake in the way we positioned some of the solutions at that stage, we were thinking like, uh, uh, an individual direct to consumer app.
Andries Smit: And I mentioned in the video that actually we are gonna make this available to other apps to also plug in to them. We were thinking about it at the time, but that was not the hardcore business strategy. Actually that silly little three minute video ended up in nearly a dozen organic inbound outreaches to us where people say, I just saw that I, I invested 50 pounds in you, that is brilliant, but actually more importantly, can I plug you into my app?
Andries Smit: And, um, it sort of made us sit up and think, wait a second. You know, the hardest part of having your own app is customer acquisition, of course. And if we have other partners, we already have a hundred thousand, 200,000 few million customers and users and we plug into them, then we can just provide them with the same service, um, and scale much, much quicker.
Andries Smit: So it was probably the best mistake we've made so far. And hopefully we make even better mistakes in the future, but, uh, yeah, that definitely ranks up there.
What are the blind spots you have to be aware of?
Marcus Cauchi: So in terms of blind spots, as a CEO of a FinTech scale up, what are the blind spots that you have to be aware of?
Andries Smit: Oh, there are so many and, and it feels like each week you get different elements and Marcus, I would go as far as to say, I mean, if you're a first time founder, there's way more blind spots than, than you can ever try and teach yourself or learn out before you just gotta just jump in and go for it. But even as a, as a scale up or, or a serial entrepreneur, who've done this a couple times every week brings new challenges. And it's more that you just physically cannot think about every single thing. So you've running blind because you've got so much focus and so much to do each week.
Andries Smit: There's challenges, anything from investors and regulators and partners and clients and team. And it is just one of those things where I always joke, uh, in trying to do planning for the week on a, on a quick Sunday evening. By Monday morning at 8:00 AM, my old plan has, has gone, gone apeshit anyway. So you take it day by day and you do your best.
Marcus Cauchi: The rule is the plan never survives contact with the enemy and the minute it's published, it's out of date. So it sounds to me like adaptability and agility are really key in terms of building the team. As a CEO, what are the most important elements of that team?
As a CEO, what are the most important elements of that team?
Andries Smit: Culture. And when I say culture, I mean how the team comes together, especially if you're so small.
Andries Smit: I've worked in large teams. I've I've, you know, and some of my last roles team was nearly 2000 people. If you then have one or two outliers, the team is big enough to carry you through that. When you're only 10 people. Then having one or two outliers causes real structural challenges in, in team dynamics and cultures. If two people don't talk to each other, then you've got a real problem, a 20% problem in your business.
Andries Smit: It's just basic math. So in the early days, it is super important that the people get along, get along, not just being nice to each other or like each other. That's not what I mean, but being, getting along as a high productive team and a high performing team. The analogy of sports teams are used a lot, but it's true because they similarly have anywhere between 10 and 15, you know, members on a field that have to play, uh, together.
Andries Smit: They might not like each other, but if they're a high performing team, there is shared goals. There is shared ambition. There is shared drive.
Marcus Cauchi: So it strikes me that the whole process of recruitment is really critical, but also ensuring that the ground rules and terms of engagement are really key. So let let's deal with the rules of engagement.
Marcus Cauchi: First of all, in order to ensure that you can enter into constructive conflict. Cuz I, I suspect it's very unlikely that everyone agrees all the time and even if they did, that would be wildly unhealthy.
Andries Smit: Absolutely. Again, one of the things that we talk about a lot is diversity. When you are different to each other, you're gonna have different points of view, which by definition is conflict.
Andries Smit: We are sitting at different ends of a discussion or a debate. The challenge is, how do you have a safe space where people speak up and can deal and work through it and have a point of conclusion? You need all three, you need to be able to start the conflict. You need to be able to chew through it, and you need to get to a point where you just go, okay guys, whether we've come to an agreement or not is now irrelevant, we are now drawing the line and we are moving on on delivering it. And what I've, what I've seen in the past is certain teams are better and, and less good with certain parts of that. It's very seldom that you get to be perfect at all three stages of that. And, and usually you need to pick up one or the other.
Andries Smit: We are very privileged to work with a, a performance coach who specifically deals with teams that sometimes as a team, you get out of sync and you actually need the coach to just walk on the field, give everybody a bit of a telling off and didn't, you know, get back on the field and play the game properly.
Andries Smit: So having that is is really important, even for very small startups, I would always recommend that. You do need that level of independence that can just shake the guys by the shoulders and say, okay, right. That was great. Fine. Now where's the line. What's the issue? What are you moving forward on?
Marcus Cauchi: I'm always reminded when I hear something like that of, uh, the Robin Williams sketch, where he talks about having someone with the, as the middle name.
Marcus Cauchi: So Jimmy the ax, so on to knock heads. Cause I, I, I think far too often, people fall into confirmation bias, but also disconfirmation bias where they get emotionally attached to a particular perspective and they put a higher standard of performance against the opposing view and you'd sometimes need an independent third party to ensure that your crew maintaining objectivity and you're staying true to the, uh, the values and the measures.
How you recruited your leadership team?
Marcus Cauchi: So in, in terms of how you recruited your leadership team, talk to me about that journey.
Andries Smit: So two of the guys and I go back, uh, a very long time. So Paul, our CTO and I have worked together for the last six years.
Andries Smit: And I think that's also important that, you know, each other, especially again, I'm talking very, very deliberately from a new startup founders and leadership team perspective. It's really important that Paul and I have worked together previously. It is hard. You have many moments of near death experiences in a startup, and therefore if you are not glued together and you know how people are gonna react, it's tough.
Andries Smit: The same for Ramsey, who's our Product Lead. So Ramsey, uh, and I have worked together for the last three odd years. Know him, have been through very tough times, uh, together as well. So we know what does it look and feel like when person, you know, if something happens, we, the, there is no surprise. Steve and I met through a very good common friend who we all, we both know for many years and therefore it was a very specific and personal recommendation.
Andries Smit: And Steve and I ended up working together for three months at the beginning to say, we're just gonna test the relationship. Let's just see how this works. And Sam, our Chief Data Scientist, same thing. So Sam and I started talking about doing something together very early 12 months ago. And we only pulled the trigger after, you know, those 12 months of getting to know each other and, and various different things, observing how she was. Uh, she at the time also had her own startup working together and, and going through it.
Andries Smit: So the relationship by the time we got to the point of saying, let's do this together, It was, we knew each other. We, we saw the good and the bad and the ugly from, you know, in various different situations.
Marcus Cauchi: Okay. So then as you start to go out and, uh, recruit customers, um, in your case, um, members and retail partners, what advice would you give to founders in those early stages?
What advice would you give to founders in those early stages?
Andries Smit: Write it down. one of the things we did wrong last year. And again, this is not my first rodeo, and yet still after having done this before, I made the same silly mistake again. Over the course of last year, we, we went to market hard in about August, September last year. And we had well over a hundred conversations with potential clients.
Andries Smit: And at the end of it, we all sat down. And we had a very silly little retro meeting. So guys let's just work out what went well, what didn't work well? You know, how can we improve? What language, which role did we speak to? Which category of industry worked? And we realized that none of that was easily accessible.
Andries Smit: We, we have to reverse engineer and go back and go through hundreds of dates and notes and meetings and try and figure this out, which is a bit silly. We should have just from the start be, have been very diligent. And I don't mean you need to document everything to within an inch of its life, but as simple five or six questions that you just fill in for every engagement go so far in really, really nailing it down and, and your learnings. Because again, the product as it is today, is the culmination of now 15 months of learning and improving and tweaking and bettering every single time.
Andries Smit: Now, if you do that very diligently every day, you can be, you can accelerate that a little lot.
"The weakest ink is stronger than the strongest memory"
Marcus Cauchi: Well, there is an old maxim, which is that "The weakest ink is stronger than the strongest memory." And so much is lost because people don't write stuff down. And you've touched on another really important point, which is that everybody in a startup needs to spend time in reflection. But very, very few do because their nose is to the grindstone, they're so focused on the next bit of busyness and they don't spend time capturing and sharing those lessons, systematizing them, putting them into processes and making them part of their playbook.
Marcus Cauchi: And I, if you are scaling up. And particularly in the early stages, but even later, it's really important that you start building systems and processes and you document them and you document them in writing you doc them document the processes on video. So someone else can very quickly move into that role and cover for somebody else.
Marcus Cauchi: And the mistake I see so many organizations make is they don't design their business and you generate precisely the results that you've designed into your business. And if you haven't designed it, then is there any wonder that the results are often disappointing? And if you're not spending that time in reflection and sharing, then you're failing to capitalize on the compound interest of multiple intellects capturing lessons and, and synthesizing them so that you improve your processes.
Marcus Cauchi: So what advice would you give to people thinking about founding a business or in those early stages where they're finding themselves going from, um, fits and starts?
What advice would you give to people thinking about founding a business?
Andries Smit: I think it is that, and, and I, I do recognize personalities are different, but I would argue that the biggest mistake that I've seen and made is not being diligently disciplined each day. In business what comes quite natural is the conversations around who are we; what's our mission; how do we position; what's the product; who's the customer; and so forth. But actually that ability to iterate consistently is usually where a lot of the value is missed. Now that's the concept, but making it very practical.
Andries Smit: If you're trying to hunt customers, get an Excel sheet, put all your targets in there. Keep diligent notes, add every single time you speak to somebody new, you add them in. Every single time somebody says, no, you document and you take out. If you are designing a sales deck or a piece of collateral, every meeting that you've had, where you've had feedback, or you saw that somebody's facial expression didn't work on a certain slide, or you got stuck on a certain slide, change it immediately. Iterate, right?
Andries Smit: We have decks. We've gone through, I kid you not hundreds of iterations where small little improvements. The challenge is most of the time it gets put to a side and once a month you think you're gonna do the back dated updates, it doesn't work. It never gets done. There's never time. You have to make those improvements right there, right now.
Andries Smit: You know, if you are, um, I, well, I once read a, a book about Toyota and the Kaizen process and how they improved it and, and that philosophy, although there's a lot of things I don't agree with. What I do agree with is the fact that they fix it immediately and improve it. It has stood me in good stead in business for a very, very long time, because that is when you have the moment.
Andries Smit: That's the moment of pain. That's the moment where you, when you have the energy to fix it, do it. And then you'll just add one little bit better the next time and the next time. And the next time.
Marcus Cauchi: I think another thing that makes a good deal of sense is go and speak to your customers and your prospects, whether they bought or not.
Marcus Cauchi: And this is really where the senior executive team should be spending time on a regular basis. It's going out and finding out what worked and what didn't work. And my favorite question in customer success surveys is have you seen better? And interestingly enough, when you ask that you jump in credibility because it takes real courage to ask that question and be vulnerable. But more importantly, they will tell you how to improve.
Go and speak to people who are not happy, don't live in a bubble
Marcus Cauchi: And Salesforce's research that came out at the tail end of 2020, said that companies that speak to unhappy customers have a 600% faster product development cycle. And so go and speak to people who are not happy. Don't live in a bubble. Your thoughts?
Andries Smit: Absolutely can't agree any more. The one additional thing is the feedback loop that sits on the back of that.
Andries Smit: The other issue you have is even organizations that are really good in asking those customer feedback or client feedbacks, it ends up sitting just hidden in a silo, in a sales team or a marketing team or a customer service team. Actually bringing that to consciousness for everybody is super, super useful.
Andries Smit: One of the silly little things we do is every time a customer talks to us, it's unfiltered. It flows through our, um, slack channel. And therefore, if there is any complaint or comment or so forth, it gets flagged and the entire organization can see. Of course it's anonymized. So there's no data around the, a specific user, but it's constantly in our consciousness as to what's working, what's not working.
Andries Smit: We also have once a week, uh, what we call a, a discovery session, where we bring the voice of the customer, the voice of the client, the voice of even the operations teams, we bring it to the front where the whole team is together because Marcus, to your point, that is when we pick up.
Andries Smit: Actually I'm in department X, I overhear what they say over there. And suddenly a bell just goes off for me and, and you know, I can make the connection, but don't just sit on it. You need to raise that to the organizational awareness.
Marcus Cauchi: A friend of mine recently talked about prototyping, a new app called ASKUM. And it's an app that salespeople will send before to the customer for the customer to assess the experience of dealing with that salesperson. And I have to say I'm very excited by that because it will be something that the salesperson carries with them from job to job. But it's only the good ones I suspect that will carry the ASKUM score. Because if you're not very good, you're definitely not gonna want that score carried around with you.
Marcus Cauchi: But I think it's really important to get that feedback from customers and from frontline staff. The people whose nose is, you know, is stuck in the call phrase, are where you're gonna get the best raw, unfiltered information about the, uh, engagement that they're having with customers and far too few organizations invite that kind of information.
Marcus Cauchi: And often it's down to brittle leadership that doesn't want to hear it. So again, what advice would you give to leaders who think that by doing that they're ceding control?
What advice would you give to leaders who think that by doing that they're ceding control?
Andries Smit: It's tough. It really, really is tough because it's personal. Especially if you are, if you are part of the founding team, then the idea, the product, how customers think and feel is attached to your identity.
Andries Smit: It, it really, really hurts to get a bad review on the app store or trust pilot or whatever the case may be. So, first of all, you've gotta acknowledge that. You've got to understand it's gonna feel that way. I see too many founders. The first time they get a bad review somewhere, then the world ends for them.
Andries Smit: You know, it, it, it will happen. It's inevitable. You cannot please everybody. So just deal with it, right. Just accept it right up front. Number two is that you've really gotta make sure that it's a safe place in the organization. The danger with feedback or transparency like this is that you end up in a blame culture.
Andries Smit: And as the leader, you have to nip that in the bud. In the first instance, you've gotta prepare for it. The first time that happens is where you will set the tone forever, for how feedback is dealt with in your organization. If that first meeting is a slaughter where you just go after the person and you try and find out who's to blame, or who did something wrong, then then as long as that organizational team exists in that format, you're gonna have a real problem because people will hide the bad stuff. They will greenwash everything and so forth.
Andries Smit: So my only word of, um, well experience would just be, is you've gotta prepare for it, right? You've gotta be ready and capture it and deal with it and set it up in the right way. Once you're over that hurdle, I promise you you'll get many, many more criticisms and feedback and complaints and so forth, but you'll be prepared for it.
Andries Smit: And actually when you, as a team deal with it together, it's hugely unifying. The team really comes together, actually. And, um, it has a double positive effect, but you've gotta set it up in the right way.
If you are in sales, if you are in leadership, you have no room to allow your ego to get hooked
Marcus Cauchi: Well, it's again, really important to understand the difference between role, what you do and identity, who you are.
Marcus Cauchi: And if you are in sales, if you are in leadership, you have no room to allow your ego to get hooked. Otherwise you end up in this, uh, drama, um, gameplay, and one of the most impressive bits of management vulnerability that I've ever come across is Ray Dalio's policy. Ray Dalio wrote a fabulous book called Principles, and, uh, he runs the world's largest privately held hedge fund.
Marcus Cauchi: And their philosophy is that failure is universal. It's unavoidable, but you don't get punished for failing in role. You do get punished for hiding it. and that I think is really key. And one of the things that he's implemented, which I've recommended many times on the podcast is to keep a failure log and every week or two go through the failure log and learn from those lessons, improve your processes, improve your approach question.
Marcus Cauchi: And this again, I think is part of that reflection piece, which is you have to ask yourself better questions. If you want better answers. And often the questions are not complicated. They're often very simple as in why do we do it that way? Why do we continue to do it that way? Is it still relevant? But far too often, people suffer from attachment and that attachment gets them into trouble.
That attachment is the root to all misery
Marcus Cauchi: The Buddha said it better than me. That attachment is the root to all misery. And in business, if you are attached to your processes, if you allow your ego to hook you into psychological gameplay and drama, inevitably, it's going to lead to problems downstream and terrible unintended consequences. Andries, tell me this, if you look back over the last 12 months and you could wave a magic wand, what would be the one thing that you would've chosen to do differently right from the off?
What would be the one thing that you would've chosen to do differently?
Andries Smit: That's a very tough question. I believe things follow a sequence and there's a, you have to go through a process of learning to get to where you are.
Andries Smit: So it's really, really hard to say that actually what I would've changed in terms of the product or what I would've changed in terms of the business. I think the one thing is we probably could have built some of the technology faster. I took a specific approach in how we created the technology and how we tested elements.
Andries Smit: A lot of the hypothesis were correct. A lot of the things that we ended up building was the right things, but we wanted to go through proper process and making sure that it is all tested and checked. We probably could have moved a little bit faster if I'm brutal. But again, that is hindsight is the luxury, you know, that nobody ever has in business.
Andries Smit: So I'm pretty pleased as to where we are and, and how far we've come to be honest. So, uh, yeah, I will bank what we have.
What that means in terms of risk appetite and your philosophy and approach towards risk?
Marcus Cauchi: Well, I'm curious about what that means in terms of risk appetite and your philosophy and approach towards risk.
Andries Smit: I take very, very seriously that the investors that have put money up for us, we have a large cohort of our own staff that's invested money. That's a big responsibility.
Andries Smit: And therefore I wanna make sure that every big decision we make where we are betting the farm, or we fundamentally picking a strategic direction, that we do that with the appropriate level of understanding and the appropriate level of validation. I don't like, and this might just be me personally, but I don't like these massive big bits where, you know, my gut says, this is the way to go.
Andries Smit: And then we need to just bid the farm. I do tho that a lot on small decisions, the opposite is also true. If it's a small decision where even if we fail it's half a day or a day's worth of rework or whatever, then it's almost counterproductive to think about it too much. Just do it, just go on and see, and, and, and, and test it.
Andries Smit: But there are a few, and especially big decisions where. I like to pause, call a time out and actually for the team to regroup and for us to talk through it, we, we actually have something called chew the fat. Friday morning tfor two hours where we just, we pause, we literally pause the whole business and we just say, okay, we really gotta think through this.
Andries Smit: This is an important decision that usually never gets us to a conclusion because it just flushes out more questions and more things that we need to do. But the clarity of thought and the almost the emotional flag that we raised to say, this is a big decision its super important for the organizational consciousness.
What are the ground rules associated with the chew the fat meeting?
Marcus Cauchi: And what are the ground rules associated with the chew the fat meeting?
Andries Smit: Counter intuitive, no agenda, everybody has to speak up. And this is deliberately where we are not allowed to talk about day to day to dos and tasks. And it's actually quite beautiful because we've never set that, but it's not written down.
Andries Smit: I'm trying to verbalize what's just happened in the sessions. It's very reflective. People tend to not sit back, tend to be nice sparring back and forward, but we've deliberately tried to put ourselves out of a different mindset because we have all these little rituals, as many, many businesses do, which is very task orientated.
Andries Smit: If you walk in, there's a list, there's a thing you run through it. There's owners, there's dates and so forth. But in a chew the fat, it really is about being with the problem as much as we can.
How do you go about synthesizing different, but related ideas in that context?
Marcus Cauchi: And how do you go about synthesizing different, but related ideas in that context, then?
Andries Smit: It happens quite natural, to be honest. Again, the, the beauty of not having an, an agenda is everybody has fair chance to bring either new ideas or new problems to the fore or dig up old problems.
Andries Smit: That's also quite liberating, because sometimes, there's reasons why certain things reoccur and then we have to have the ability to, to raise them again, even though we've spoken to it. Now, when it's an action and when you're in delivery mode, then that causes all sorts of friction and people feel unhappy because it's all about progress. Chew the fat is not about progress.
Andries Smit: It's about being with the problem, as I said earlier. I, I, I'm sorry. I'm struggling to articulate that, but it's really hard if you're sitting in that, then it's, it's the way you, it makes you feel and the way your brain thinks in a different way.
Marcus Cauchi: Certainly I find that working collaboratively with others allows me to spark off them and join the dots in ways that I can't on my own.
Being CEO is a lonely job
Marcus Cauchi: And a as a CEO, I'm curious how you manage the isolation that many CEOs feel, because obviously at the end of the day, People are looking to you for leadership and it, it must be an interesting challenge to manage inclusively, but also know that at the end of the day, you have to make a decision.
Andries Smit: Yeah, I think I'll acknowledge.
Andries Smit: I mean, being CEO is a lonely job, but I think it's lonely for a different reason. The point is you've always gotta be conscious of the shadow that you cause. And therefore where yes, we all have our bad moments and our outbursts and our moments of depression and, you know, you know, being worried about the business, you've gotta be really selective in terms of when you are vulnerable.
Andries Smit: That that is dangerous. I've been in situations where being too vulnerable completely the whole time. And so forth, doesn't relay the confidence that is necessary. That is of course, unless you have a very, very strong team. The beautiful part of having a very strong leadership team is, as a team, you can carry the confidence and that's, I'm very, very fortunate and grateful to have that at Upside, but that was not true for many other businesses I were in.
Andries Smit: And if that's the situation, if you, if you do not have a confidence layer that lives at the exec team, then it's, it's an impossible job, as a CEO. It's a very, very lonely and depressing job because you can never be vulnerable because then the whole business has ructions around the confidence, whether it's investors or even team members, new recruits, and so forth.
Andries Smit: So my encouragement would be really make sure that you surround yourself with a very few close, close leaders who understand that, who have been through that situation themselves, if possible. I'm a bit of an oversharer. So we talk about that. I, I just tell my team, we have this wonderful tool, which our performance coach have given us.
Andries Smit: It's a line, that's it. And then all you do is you just say, whether you are above the line, ie you're in a good frame of mind, or you are below the line. ie I'm not in a good frame of mind. And just sharing that context at the beginning of a meeting is super helpful because it means I'm not mad at you.
Andries Smit: I'm just happened to be below the line because the dog bit me or something, but it gives you a like a two second language to just overcome a lot of the issues, uh, and you can deal with it.
The Five Temptations Of A CEO
Marcus Cauchi: I'm minded of, uh, fabulous book by Patrick Lencioni, The Five Temptations Of A CEO, and, um, the, the five temptations of choosing status over results, choosing popularity over accountability, choosing certainty over clarity, choosing harmony over productive conflict and choosing invulnerability over trust.
Marcus Cauchi: And I think very, very often CEOs can fall into the trap of worrying about their status or looking invulnerable and falling into the trap of, uh, avoiding conflict and, uh, making the mistake of trying to make things certain rather than communicate with clarity and wanting to be liked.
Marcus Cauchi: And, uh, again, from my experience with working with a lot of CEOs over the years is the best don't fall into those traps. They do, but they recognize it and they also have a good lieutenant who, or a coach who reminds them when they're, they're getting too big for their own britches. So who do you take advice from?
Who do you take advice from?
Andries Smit: We've got a very, um, extroverted team. So my, my team constantly remind me whether I am falling into one of those five traps, but also Jamie, our performance coach. One of the wonderful things is, again, I've worked with Jamie in previous organizations. Uh, we've known each other for nearly five years now. He he's bold enough to just push my BS button and say, look, no, that's not what you mean.
Andries Smit: That's not where you are. What's the real situation. It's very liberating. But again, that doesn't happen on day one that comes from years and years of working together and having a relationship where you can just cut through and really get to the heart of it. But it is critical. It is absolutely critical.
Andries Smit: And I would highly encourage everybody to make sure that you have that accountability buddy.
So you've got a golden ticket and you can go back and advise the Andries at age 23, what advice would you give him?
Marcus Cauchi: So we've come to the top of the hour. Uh, this is whiz by. So you've got a golden ticket and you can go back and advise the Andries at age 23. What advice would you give him?
Andries Smit: I dunno. I really don't know. I I've had so much fun during my life.
Andries Smit: I think one thing I would've prepared myself i,s so back in 2010 to 12, one of my previous businesses is -
Marcus Cauchi: When you were 23, of course?
Andries Smit: Thank you very much. Not true, but, uh, I'll take it. I'll it's the, it's the comforting filter lens on you got on here. So in 10, 12, I had a business, which we grew way above expectation.
Andries Smit: It, it caught us off guard, but it made, it made us cocky. We thought this was the one we thought this is the meal ticket. We are gonna ride it all the way to the top. And actually, uh, we, we experienced some leakage in the business model, so big traffic, big consumer base, but actually no profits. It just didn't manifest into margins.
Andries Smit: And when that then ultimately failed and, and closed. Again, it was this point of identity. I felt like a failure. Well, be clear, I did fail because I did not spot the problem. And I did not fix it in time.
Marcus Cauchi: That was a function of role.
Andries Smit: Well, absolutely, absolutely. But it took me a good two years to work through that and get to the other side of saying exactly what you've mentioned earlier.
Andries Smit: This is not about your identity. This is about the role. This is about the learning. This is about working through it. So, you know, I would've slapped the 23 year old me in the face and just said, look, you're not gonna die. Right? Do your best keep cracking on the various different things. I think it was now, when I look back at that, I feel it was a critical part of my development.
Andries Smit: It was super important for me. It has enabled me to do a lot more understanding and learning around strategy and around business models and really trying to look around the corner and, and, and plan better for business, but just don't take it that personal. I would argue. Uh, and that's the advice I would give.
Marcus Cauchi: Interestingly enough that mirrors, the advice that Daniel Marcos gave on the podcast, uh, Daniel is Verne Harnish's torch bearer, uh, around the scale up Institute. And he grew a business to 200 million and he thought he was invincible. Then, uh, Lehman's crashed and overnight it literally just everything disappeared because, uh, he was providing Latinos, subprime mortgages in the US and Andries' eyes, uh, bulged at that moment.
Marcus Cauchi: So literally from one day to the next 200 million to nothing. And it took him a long time to recover from that because the inner dialogue was telling him that he was a failure and it was only when Vern took him aside and gave him a bit of a psychological beating to get him back on track. And he ended up running Google in Mexico quite soon afterwards. And then he decided, because the coaching that he was doing and he's helped 500 CEOs scale their business since.
Marcus Cauchi: So I, interestingly enough that beating both by the market and by Vern think has paid dividends and almost never do you get any really good sustained lessons from your victories. It's from a damn good kicking.
Andries Smit: Unfortunate, but true.
Marcus Cauchi: Excellent. Okay. So what would you recommend people read what's or listen to in order to help them build a really good either career or a great scale out business?
What would you recommend people read or listen to in order to help them build a really good, either career or a great scale out business?
Andries Smit: Marcus, contrary to what most people will probably say my argument is I'm less fussed about what you read as long as you do read.
Andries Smit: I've got two sons and within, within reason, now I should say, uh, after that, uh, look, you've just given me, but, but my point still stands in terms where, in terms of personal development or business development, one of the wonderful things that I fell into when we immigrated out of South Africa in South Africa, you drive a lot.
Andries Smit: Everything is so far, you spend hours and hours a day in your car. And this was way before audiobooks, of course. So when we fell into the UK and started commuting on the trains, I had this half an hour, an hour, an hour and a half a day, which I didn't know what to do with myself. And I, and I came fully fell into this rhythm of, of reading on the trains.
Andries Smit: And actually that has stuck with me for forever. I have a, a huge, uh, bookshelves with loads of books and different things that I just read constantly. I sort of try and follow my nose. So if there's a specific topic that is of interest. Then I follow 3, 4, 5 books in that direction. And then I pivot the other way around and I would hard to, I would struggle to recommend stuff because people are at different stages in this.
Andries Smit: My, my argument is find the first one, whatever it is, doesn't really matter. And then follow your nose, but do it diligently, do half an hour, a day or an hour over weekend. Uh, and just read because you, soon, once you've picked up the habit, the content will find you.
If you don't pay attention to history, economics psychology, and you're not paying attention, reading widely in business
Marcus Cauchi: It's really interesting. I think that so many people become functionally illiterate when they leave school or university, because the most they read and maybe the red tops and the sports pages.
Marcus Cauchi: And that is a huge, huge loss. Since I was 21, I put in between one and six hours of study a day and it's paid massive dividends because the exposure that you can get, and it's important to read widely. If you listen to audiobooks, there is a publisher on audible called The Great Courses, and these are university lecturers and, and they're all starred, uh, with reviews.
Marcus Cauchi: So go for the ones that are good, but, um, the Mineral Evolution of Earth was fascinating, Mr. Fineman, in terms of, uh, quantum physics, but the history of China from about 3000 BC to today was absolutely fascinating. And what we forget is the history has a tendency to repeat. And I think many of us don't really read history, but what people don't realize is 3000 years ago, the Chinese had an empire of a billion people and they're used to playing the very long game.
Marcus Cauchi: If you don't pay attention to history, economics psychology, and you're not paying attention, reading widely in business. I think you're at a massive disadvantage.
Andries Smit: Absolutely.
What are the best decisions that you have made around people?
Marcus Cauchi: Okay. Tell me this. If you look back at the best decisions that you have made around people, what were they and, uh, what drove those decisions?
Andries Smit: Over my life there has been probably four or five teams, which I'm super, super proud of. And I say that very specifically because picking one superstar is very, very hard, picking a superstar team is even harder. And what I always try and do is make it in such a way where. The team comes together and, and high performing back in, uh, I was out in Asia, uh, a few years ago, uh, and we brought together a whole team to deal with this large insurance companies, Asian and digital strategies.
Andries Smit: And it was a spectacular team. Came together over a few months, like five or six months. We pulled the whole team together, ended up being nine people and it was phenomenal. To this day we are still in touch with each other. Before that I was responsible for a large insurance company buying another one.
Andries Smit: And we were the integration team, same thing. We're a team of 10. We built them up over four, five months. And to this day we still stay in touch, uh, ever so often when we are allowed to go out for a drink or so and achieved great success. But that was not about a single individual or a single hire. That was about selectively picking the teams we even had in both those examples, including, uh, uh, at Upside, we had situations where we brought people into the team it didn't work. We had to bring in other people. It's never one and done.
Andries Smit: I see too many, um, young startup, uh, entrepreneurs I speak to. For them, it is about hiring one role. That's their life obsession. I need to bring such and such a person in, well, actually you can't think about it. This it's not a puzzle.
Andries Smit: It's not something that you just fill in. And once you've put in the little picture it's done, it's a constant evaluation, it's a constant dynamics. It's a constant molding and moving and so forth. And at certain times things don't work and then you change and then you mold it again and so forth. But I would say that that would be the stuff I'm really, really proud of is having had the experience and opportunity where I could do that.
Andries Smit: Now 3, 4, 5 times in making sure that we build that team. I think that's critical.
It is not just you, it is about the team
Marcus Cauchi: Absolutely. And it it's through collaboration that success is most likely to be achieved. The idea that you can operate as an island just is, I don't think it's ever worked, but particularly in this day and age, Collaboration is the key to success in the future.
Andries Smit: And one thing I read quite a few biographies, and one of the common issues I have with the media is there's always the hero that shines and you know, is on the front page of the book mm-hmm . But actually, if you go back through it, it was only through many dozens of other people that were at the right time part of the organization, part of the teams, part of it that built that, you know, into the trillion dollar organizations that they are.
Andries Smit: And, you know, for me, there's a lot about recognizing that a whole outcome. I wish I wish that they could put a picture of the, of the team up and I get the team changes and I get the politics involved and all those wonderful things.
Andries Smit: But I think the one thing I want those magazines and, and books to recognize and teach our children is that it is not just you, it is about the team. Get good at that. And you will go far.
Marcus Cauchi: I think that might be a cultural thing. So the Graco Roman and Anglo-Saxon kind of philosophy is that it's all about self sufficiency, but the reality is it almost never is. Montgomery didn't succeed because he was, uh, just a great general. He had, um, you know, tens of thousands of people who followed him, but they, each of them played their part.
Marcus Cauchi: You're absolutely right. It's critical that we focus away from the hero worship and the cult of the hero and focus on the cult of the team. And that's why I think we have a, um, we're at a disadvantage in the west because so often we don't think collectively, uh, I'm not a big fan of the Borg and, uh, that whole idea that we all need to be assimilated, but I think there is a, a middle ground and where people are driven around shared collective values.
How can people get a hold of you?
Marcus Cauchi: Andies, how can people get a hold of you?
Andries Smit: I'm on Twitter, @andriessmit or you can find me on LinkedIn, Andies Smit, or my email address, Andries@upsidesaving.com. Uh, happy to, to be in touch in any way.
Marcus Cauchi: Excellent. Andries. Thank you.
Andries Smit: Thanks Marcus.
Marcus Cauchi: So this is Marcus Cauchi, signing off once again from The Inquisitor Podcast. If you found this interesting, then please like, comment, share, and subscribe, and think of one individual who might benefit from it. Maybe it's someone in the marketing team, maybe it's a CEO or a founder, and please tag them and share this episode with them.
Marcus Cauchi: If you wanna get hold of me, my email address is marcus@laughs-last.com or you can DM me on LinkedIn. In the meantime, stay safe and happy selling. Bye-bye.
