Your weekly disruption
Your weekly thought-provoking exploration into building disruptive capabilities.
Drew Bilbe: Taking The Right Risks
Starting something new means taking a risk. But in our society, the word ‘risk’ has assumed mostly negative connotations. When someone tells us ‘that’s risky,’ most of us have a visceral, fearful reaction.
Download the podcast on iTunes, subscribe or click to listen: Superior Sales Disruption Podcast: Episode 8
This did not perturb Drew Bilbe who with his business partner Troy Douglas went ‘all in’ in the burgeoning area of wellness drinks with the launch of Nexba. Hear this fascinating tale of courage and taking on the ‘big end of town’.
Download the podcast on iTunes, subscribe or click to listen: Superior Sales Disruption Podcast: Episode 8
Making The Leap
Naïve Experts
Embrace Constraints
Troy and I are just super passionate about being a challenger brand and innovating and coming up with things that just hadn’t been done in the market. Our recent launch of our fermented range of kombuchas and other fermented products that will be bringing out are a really good example of that. An ambient shelf stable kombucha hadn’t been done in Australia. We knew we had an opportunity, we just didn’t know if it was possible. But if it was possible, we were absolutely going to find a way to do it. So that’s a really clear differentiated mentality that I think business owners have, as opposed to people that aren’t willing to take that risk or just don’t want to don’t want to find a better way, I guess, you’ve got to have that passion to want to innovate and challenge the status quo.
Living Your Passion
I definitely have a deep passion for health and well-being, in particular seeing and understanding what sugar was doing to the world. Diabetes is the sixth highest cause of death in Australia…in 2025, one in three children will be obese. So, if we don’t do something to curb that, we’re going to continue to see all these really drastic health concerns in the Australian public, and it certainly doesn’t need to be like that. I grew up playing sport and was always really passionate about health, and I’ve actually now got three kids my own and I really want to see, these kind of products, which are naturally sugar free and better for you, not just in beverages, but in all foodstuffs. Having kids is probably one of the bigger motivating factors. Having an impact, making your mark as well, is something that I think a lot of people want to do, I’m having a positive impact on the wider community, we’re all living in this space, and whether it’s Australia with the global community, if you can have a positive impact, I think that’s a really good piece of fulfilment in life.
Battling Entitlement
At the start it is difficult to have conversations with the major retailers. It can be a challenge to get through the door, not because they don’t want to range you or they don’t want to have the conversation with you, it’s more that they know that you don’t have the above the line budgets to give this product that kick over the line that it may need. So early on, definitely some of those conversations were difficult in those meetings, were challenging to get in front of the right buyers. The retailers want a return on their investment & shelf spice; they want product to move quickly, and want category growth. If you can share to them that your products are doing that, and particularly if you got runs on the board as well, it’s much easier to have those conversations and much easier to get ranging. You have to make every dollar work a lot harder than what you would if you were at a multinational, as you don’t have millions of dollars at disposal for above line budgets. It is much more considered, and you have to be really sure that you’re getting a return on investment for the likes of digital and point of sale material.
Leading Innovation
When we are up against some industry behemoths it is vital to be leading innovation, the differences in the category and the category expansion. We are certainly keeping an eye on overseas markets and seeing what’s happening in the trends. We’re also using the available data that we have to get access; whether its flavour trends, or functional trends or different things. We then use our advisory board, to use it as a spit ball and talk about what we could possibly go in the various directions. For every product we launch, we would have talked about 100 other products that that didn’t go to market either. So, we have to be at the forefront of that. We are able to do that much better than multinationals can because their process is incredibly longer. So, it’s important for us to really keep our finger on the pulse and actually be the ones that are launching that innovation first.
Beginning Is Half Done
There’s never a really good time to launch a business, you just need to be really sure that or you need to always believe that you found a niche, or an opportunity, which you can capitalize on. And then you just got to take that first step, because you’re never going to have the perfect business plan, you’re never going to be really well funded when you are going to start a business. But if you if you take the first step, and at least just starting to walk…and yes you’re going to see speed bumps…and yes you’re going to have hurdles that you have to overcome. But if you never took the first step, you’re never going to see any of that in the first place. Really giving it a crack and taking that first step is probably the advice that I would give a young entrepreneur for sure.
It’s interesting, the term disruption because disruption for me is change for the better…because you’re not going to disrupt for the sake of disrupting or making the market worse. So our approach is, how do we look what’s currently happening? How do we improve on that? How do we make it better? How do we bring in a completely new product, which is the best? This drove us to launch our ambient shelf stable Kombucha range, which has proven efficacy as well. And it’s proven to promote good gut health. That’s a really big one for us. When we started in on that journey that hadn’t been done before, we had to come up with new techniques, new ways of doing things to launch a shelf stable, ambient, kombucha, which stayed living without being chilled It is now really quickly become the market leading ambient Kombucha in Woolworths. Which is really exciting for us as when you look at the entire beverage aisle, for example, you’ve got steep decline in sugary sufferings, you’ve got a really nice area of growth with the sparkling water flavoured sparkling waters in particular. So, there’s nothing really happening there. So, it is creating a bit of a vacuum for these new products. It’s going to be a really big place for Nexba in the future. And a really big place for many other brands as well, as we’ll see a lot of the soft drink is going to more functional, fermented type, beverages. People are expecting not to drink these days for refreshment; they want the functional benefit, they want to drink something which tastes great, and is going to make them feel better.
So many great takeaways from this conversation. Listen to the episode in the player below, or download, subscribe and enjoy it on iTunes.
Download the podcast on iTunes or click to listen: Superior Sales Disruption Podcast: Episode 8
If you want your Sales team to Gamify it’s performance please contact us at https://www.superiorsales.com.au/contact-us/
Next week we are going to delve deeper into the elements of Creating The Game.
If you are looking at running a Sales Game workshop either email Mark at mark.truelson@superiorsales.com.au OR dig for more information at https://www.superiorsales.com.au/storytelling/workshops/
At Superior Sales we build programmes leveraging all the core drivers of capability – organisation, people, process and culture, not just skills. Refer to our white paper at https://www.superiorsales.com.au/storytelling/whitepaper/
At Superior Sales our capability experts work extensively with companies to equip sales teams, and indeed the whole organisation, to deliver a better customer experience. Please get in touch at https://www.superiorsales.com.au/contact-us/
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