[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to Business Beyond Borders. I'm Cynthia Deiren. Many companies invest heavily in global strategy, but far fewer succeed in executing it once they hit real markets, real partners, and real complexity. Today I'm joined by Mike Todd, a senior advisor at Deiren and Associates and the person who works with our clients when strategy has to become action. Mike, welcome to the show.
[00:00:21] Speaker B: It's a great pleasure to be here.
[00:00:23] Speaker A: Now, as you know, you and I disagree on, you know, quite a few things, a little bit, often in fun.
[00:00:29] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:00:30] Speaker A: What is the thing that's happening in the world right at the moment that you think is having the biggest impact on international trade?
[00:00:38] Speaker B: The biggest thing across all of the things we're doing.
[00:00:41] Speaker A: Yeah, the, the most consequential thing that's happening in the world today with all the crazy that's going on.
[00:00:46] Speaker B: So I'll answer that in two parts. Okay. I'll give you the thing that I think is the, the, the bluff and bluster and things that's happening behind which is really going to affect things.
I'm not sure tariffs mean a great deal at this point.
I would go as far as to say that all the tariffs that have been put on so far haven't reached a P and L yet. So we can't really report on whether truly prices have gone up. Inflation sort of under control in the US So it's not making it.
[00:01:16] Speaker A: Prices of groceries have shot through the roof, though.
[00:01:18] Speaker B: That's true. And healthcare, well, healthcare is a massive, big. We could do a whole podcast on healthcare, but prices are relatively stable.
Balance sheets may put that through over the next 18 months, but at the moment I think it's more of a political tool rather than a economic tool.
My biggest worry is AI.
I think AI is going to have a massive effect over the next 18 to 24 months. And I think one of the, one of the things that worries me more than anything else is that the top five or six stocks are keeping up the U.S. economy and they could genuinely be overpriced. And genuinely the debt that's behind them is rolling debt. So Nvidia is providing capital to all these companies to build and nobody really seems to be talking about the power needed to run the data centers.
[00:02:13] Speaker A: And how do you see that having a flow on effect to international business?
[00:02:18] Speaker B: Because I think, I think if, if, if there is a, if there is a looming crunch and everything stops.
[00:02:24] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:02:24] Speaker B: And I think that there is a real good chance in the next six to 12 months that we could be in a position where there is genuinely. I won't call it a crash. I know it's a crash as such, but something that will wobble the market. And we're, we're into unknown territory now. Although some of the dynamics, I would say, if you really delve into it, they' as bad as 08, but they are pretty scary.
[00:02:50] Speaker A: So glass half full or half empty?
[00:02:53] Speaker B: Elon said something the other day on, on a podcast where he said, I am a.
I'd rather be a.
An optimist that got it wrong rather than a pessimist that gets it right. And I'm always an optimist because I always think there's an angle. I always think there's an opportunity to trade out of anything.
[00:03:10] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:03:10] Speaker B: It's what I tell my kids all the time.
Michael Caine said it best when he was acting and his director said to him, use the difficult.
So where's the difficulty on stage? Use that in your performance.
[00:03:23] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:03:24] Speaker B: And Michael Caine said to his kids, use a difficult. Where there's a difficult problem. Use that as your angle to get out.
[00:03:30] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:03:30] Speaker B: And, and I still maintain that.
[00:03:32] Speaker A: Now, now you have had an absolutely fascinating career.
You weren't always in international sales and execution.
[00:03:40] Speaker B: No.
[00:03:41] Speaker A: So, I mean, we could probably do a whole podcast on that too. But can you give us a, you know, a quick gallop through how you got your start and then what led you?
Because listening to your accent, most people can probably tell you, not born in Australia.
[00:03:58] Speaker B: No.
[00:03:58] Speaker A: How did you wind up here in Australia doing international sales and execution?
[00:04:04] Speaker B: Well, how I wound up here was meeting my wife in a very twee way at a wedding. And I decided to make her go after the bridesmaids, bridesmaid's daughter, bridesmaid's sister. Been really bad.
And that's how I met Reese Larisa, my wife. That was actually 22 years ago this Sunday, which I've just been.
[00:04:27] Speaker A: Congratulations.
Make sure you don't forget it.
[00:04:30] Speaker B: Three years off a life sentence as I might have been getting out by now.
So that's how I came to Australia. And, and, and we, when we got married, I was desperate to come straight away. I said, let's go to Australia. But she was in London and loved London. We, we, we just fell into the London lifestyle for seven or eight years. And then there was the financial crash and there was a real time in London where you really thought this was it. There's nothing left. So we use that as an opportunity to come back. So we came back in 2010 to a country that never really had a crash, but coined the acronym The GFC for never having actually had one, which is always fascinating.
That's why I came here. That's. That was my reason to come. Kids were young and we brought them up. And now izzy's just finished HSC, so that's 15 years ago.
[00:05:21] Speaker A: And in terms of your work, you didn't start out in international sales, did you?
[00:05:25] Speaker B: Well, you could say I did a little bit.
I now realize that my desperation to get out of house and home at 16 was probably mainly neurodivergent. That was sort of in me at 16, but now can be somewhat diagnosed.
But I needed to get out and off I went and that was it.
I joined the navy because my grandfather was in the navy.
And it was either that or the local nuclear power plant.
[00:05:59] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:06:00] Speaker B: It was true. It was either that or my friends did. Some were carpenters, welders, techs, and I thought, I'm not doing that. So packed my bags and got on a train at Carlisle and the next thing I knew I was having my head shaved in Plymouth and I'd signed on for 22 years.
That's it.
[00:06:15] Speaker A: Gosh.
[00:06:16] Speaker B: That was it, done and dusted.
I got out after seven, which you could naturally leave at seven. There was a seven. 14. And if you did 14 years, you might still do 22 to your pension.
[00:06:26] Speaker A: And you spent a lot of that time floating around under pack ice, as I understand.
[00:06:29] Speaker B: Well, yeah, I can sort of say that now because most of it's on YouTube. It technically should be secret, but given the fact that Greenland has just made everybody aware of the submarine routes.
We spent a lot of time chasing boats around the North Atlantic. Yeah, that's as much as I can say on it. We are probably shot now given the fact I've just said that on podcast.
[00:06:51] Speaker A: Oh. Otherwise you have to kill me after.
[00:06:52] Speaker B: Otherwise I'll have to kill you after. J.
[00:06:54] Speaker A: Fair enough.
[00:06:56] Speaker B: But it's interesting when I think about it now because I was always interested in international, always interested in travel and at the time we were doing a lot of our being at sea, we were technically selling British. So where we went there was always.
And. And you may know this from your own time in the Middle East, a lot of it was captain's parties.
[00:07:24] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:07:24] Speaker B: So if you, if you were on duty at.
At where there was an event, it was sort of a double edged sword because a, you were there and you went off. We've got to dress really well tonight. But you all got the scraps of food.
[00:07:38] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:07:39] Speaker B: And also all the dignitaries that came down. You could have a Lot of fun by telling people where to go to the loo or where they could go to get wherever and send them into completely the wrong direction.
So that was, that was fun.
[00:07:52] Speaker A: So how did you go from that to you know, what happened? Because at some point you must have left the navy and then so I left.
[00:07:59] Speaker B: I managed to persuade what was at the time Curry's Electrical now that you may know is Dixon Stores Group as a, as a big retail group in, in the UK A little bit like what do you, what do we have here? JB Bingley. Bingley about Bingley and JB sort of combined and I managed to persuade them that my naval service was equal to a degree.
It was really stretching it a little bit but I managed to get in on a graduate program and an early graduate program. I had my own shops in about nine months so I had staff and I ran shops all over the north of England and I loved it. I loved running my own shop, I loved my own sales profile and, and as you know I, I loved and still is one of my favorite jobs was selling washing machines. I still love the thought and the act of selling a washing machine.
[00:08:58] Speaker A: Why is that?
[00:08:59] Speaker B: Because you were selling a solution.
[00:09:00] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:09:01] Speaker B: And it's always I, I, it's still part of my sales training now you, you, you, you find what the, the customer doesn't know. They know. Yeah, you tell them that and then you just wait for the money.
[00:09:11] Speaker A: And how did that look?
[00:09:13] Speaker B: So it sort of went like this. So you'd have to imagine me now and it probably would be a pink shirt at the time.
[00:09:18] Speaker A: I had lovely tie on Cor somewhere.
[00:09:20] Speaker B: Here Curry's badge like Todd.
[00:09:22] Speaker A: Hello, my name is Mike.
[00:09:24] Speaker B: Yeah, I would, my hair would be great cuz it would be longer than it is now and I would sort of float down to the front of the shop and there would be predominantly at the time it would be ladies because the, the, the, the financial control of running the house in the, in the, the late 90s was, was the woman. So she was doing the, the shopping for the, for the, for the white goods.
So you would get sort of very close to the lady. She might have a pram, she might have a kids with her, she might be, she might be on her own and she would immediately sort of put the barriers up and say no, no, go away, I'm just looking just. Oh no, it wasn't just browsing, just browsing. And then he would say that's okay.
And you'd sort of slightly turn and then you'd do A sort of a double take and say, just, just out of interest, how many kids have you got? And she'd go, well, I've got two. How old are they? Well, they're 8 and 12.
That's interesting. You're sort of at the wrong end. You need a 1300 spin. Why do I need a 1300 spin? Well, because if it's 800, it doesn't get the water out too well and you're going to dry on the line.
Um, at that point, once you'd engaged on the spin, that was it. The sale was going to come in because they were browsing. Nobody browses washing machines. Everybody that goes in to look for a washing machine, their washing machine failed the day before. Yeah, they're going to buy. So once the hook of the spin was in and they realized that wasn't a, a predator, then they would, then they would open up to what they were going to buy. What's the best washing machine? Which is the best guarantee?
And after that, I, I, I might as well have said, can I have your MasterCard? Would have been that, man. Can I have your visa card, your MasterCard? Because you're going to buy, it's just a matter of when.
[00:11:11] Speaker A: So this is not where I was planning to go, but what's the equivalent of the spin in an international sale?
[00:11:17] Speaker B: So that's a really good question.
It would be around somebody coming to you that says, you know my client base at the moment and I've got some interesting clients that I manage. So it would be around about what problem are you solving? So there's a really interesting brand.
Can I mention the brand on here? Because am I able to do that?
[00:11:39] Speaker A: Yeah, and if they don't like it, we could always bleep it out afterwards.
[00:11:42] Speaker B: Okay, so I have a very interesting brand that I did some work with last year, which is called Shewa.
And you may ask, as, as the audience may ask, what is she wear? So a great lady called Stacy had damaged her foot on a building site.
[00:11:56] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:11:57] Speaker B: Because she wasn't wearing the right boots. And she went to buy some new boots, some safety boots and she realized that all the boots she was buying were for men's feet.
Now you and your shoes, now your lovely heels. That's a woman's last. And my last is you can have a sports last and you're going to have a walking last, etc, but in safety boots nobody really cares. It's just a safety boot first. The fit and feel of it doesn't really matter.
And she said, well, actually There's a whole lot of women that are coming into the workforce who are, who want to be builders, who want to work on.
A lot of the ladies we see who do the, the work with directing traffic, they're all ladies and they need the right footwear fight. Right foot, yeah.
So she went out and crafted some boots that were specifically for women and that is clever. I like that. That's a solution to a problem that nobody knows there is a problem.
And then she's used those to get overseas.
And very interestingly, just as she's doing this, the European Union has put a directive out that says that all PPE now because of what's happened through Covid, etc which brings in safety, all has to be sized specifically for agenda and that is the angle. So the angle now is going out not selling the boot but selling the fit.
[00:13:15] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:13:16] Speaker B: And once you sell the fit, the boots.
[00:13:19] Speaker A: One safety boots that fit. Right, that's it. Fantastic.
[00:13:22] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:13:22] Speaker A: Let's go back to Corey's for a sec.
Can you just take us quickly through how you got from Curry's to sitting in front of me at this podcast?
[00:13:30] Speaker B: So yeah, there is, there is, there is a, there is a natural progression. So from, well, actually from Curry's. I, I, I wanted to get out of the retail side, the customer facing side on the shop floor.
A lot of reasons.
Retail's quite hard because you're working weekends and, and you've got a day off through the week. So that wasn't working for me at the time. Plus I thought I had a lot to offer on the brand side, so I liked the product. So I look at product and say, but that's not marketed correctly or that's the wrong price or if this was, if this was presented differently, we'd sell a lot more of it.
[00:14:05] Speaker A: Yeah.
So where did you go?
[00:14:08] Speaker B: Well, I couldn't, I couldn't get into marketing. So again, trying to get from where I was as retail into London head office to marketing was, was almost impossible. So I, I switched to a, to, to, to get into the smoke, to get down to London, I had to go back into retail. So I went into a sports retailer called Lily Whites and I ran their concessions at Heathrow and Gatwick and that then allowed me to sort of swap over into brands. So I went from retail into, into, into sports brands. So I worked for a number of sports brands. I fell into analysis and that then pushed me into the sales side of it and I, I tell you what, it was now I sat at Mizuno or Mizuno in their subsidiary in Reading. And there was this guy came in and he would come in infrequently and I'd watch him come in. He usually had a tan. And he would bring in a duty free bag. And inside the duty free bag, don't smoke, children don't smoke. Would be 200 cigarettes, okay. And he would give all the cigarettes out to the desk and it was his way of saying, I'm back from a trip. And I would say to the people on my desk, what does he do? Because he's never in and when he comes in, he's always got off a plane. And they said, oh, he's in charge of international.
And I said, where's he been? Well, he's just been to Italy to see the distributor. And I went, that is a job for me.
So I then went looking for. And I sort of recraft myself to be that international person.
And I loved running brands across international. And that's what I did for many years before I. Then when I came to Australia, I sort of opened up my black book and said, well, I've helped so many brands into the Asia Pacific. I've, I've worked across Europe, I've worked across the States, that I then said, I'm here as a, as a, as a gun for hire. Go forward several years, I meet you in an event. And your ability to, you know, to, to add a lot more finesse to what I was doing has allowed me then to make that sort of transition complete.
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So what's the first global expansion you worked on that taught you how hard the execution piece of international expansion really is?
[00:17:09] Speaker B: The one that really had the biggest effect on me at the beginning was a colleague and I, we set up a small agency. Well, he Set the agency up and I ended up being his international guy and we had a contract with Deckers. Deckers is a, a corp. Out of California in Santa Barbara.
[00:17:33] Speaker A: And for people who don't know what it is.
[00:17:36] Speaker B: So Deckers, Deckers owns. Well, Deckers at the time owned the brands Teva simple and Ugg Australia.
[00:17:41] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:17:42] Speaker B: Now Teva is a, an outdoor strappy sandal brand for, for people who do a lot of hiking. It's now a bit of a trend item, so kids know it now, but at the time in, in the early 2000s, it was just a, just a hiking, walking, hiking brand, outdoor brand.
Simple was escape brand of which was when simple was more Californian, it then turned a bit aggressive. So simple as a brand was buried, but a great brand.
And Ugg Australia was a little known sheepskin brand that back when we all.
[00:18:12] Speaker A: Thought that Ugg boots were the worst item of footwear one could possibly own and nobody would be caught dead in a pair.
[00:18:18] Speaker B: So. Well, when, when Reese and I got married, which we marry very quickly, that's another podcast. At some point. But when she came to my flat in London on my, on my table, and this might get bleeped out because we might be able to say it, but I had Danny Minogue's boot.
[00:18:37] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:18:38] Speaker B: And we'd done a painter boot competition to try and get some traction.
[00:18:41] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:18:42] Speaker B: And Reese looked at this boot and said, oh, what is that?
And I said, oh, it's an Ugg boot. What do you think? And she said, I hate them. And she used this, she used a slur at the time, which is very bad. She said, oh, they're very westy. And I said, what is westy? I realize that's not a particularly nice term to use, however, go forward about three months from that point.
[00:19:03] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:04] Speaker B: And all the press that Ugg was getting, she said to me, can you get me a pair of boots? I said, I'll try and get a pair of boots. Those boots, by the way, my daughter's wearing now, they're 20 years old.
[00:19:14] Speaker A: Gosh. So they last.
[00:19:15] Speaker B: Not only, not only have the boots lasted, but the brand is that strong. The, the, the, the, the that my daughter still sees it as a signature brand and still wearing it the same way.
[00:19:27] Speaker A: So this, I mean, it kind of sounds like a fairy tale. So which bit of this equation was the bit that was hard execution wise?
[00:19:33] Speaker B: So I, I, and again, this is a, this is a bigger part of the story. I always say to myself, what's worse? Chasing sales or having too many to deal with?
That too many sales is dangerous because you, you never get ahead of the curve. And when you're in the, the, the, the tragic situation of, of having an Italian distributor that says I want 50000 pairs and I need it by this time, you tend to then lean all the way into, or try to lean into production as much as you can. You, you, you, you maybe don't get, you never catch up. And then you've got finance because some of these distributors we know that they'll over commit and then really have problems in paying because 50,000 times an FOB process a chunky bit of change, you've got to pay for production and then to get, to get shipping done.
So, so that was at a point where it scaled very, very quickly. From one distributor In Holland called Mart, he was buying 8,000 pieces.
And from, from, from that one distributor over a period of seven months it went to multiple European distributors. So it went from 8,000 to quarter of million pairs. And wow, that's ever.
[00:20:49] Speaker A: How many months?
[00:20:50] Speaker B: Seven. Gosh, seven. It was, it was horrendous. And, and what it then led me to try and do and which we've refined and refined over the years is that we, when we're looking at sort of the 10 must haves that a distributor has got to have in order to make them trade to the best of the brand's ability and the best of their ability that wasn't thought about. It was who can you give it out to quick enough to get and contracts. I don't have to think of that now. Let's get them trading. Yeah, let's get them, let's get them transacting and we'll do the contract later. Yeah, which we all know now.
[00:21:21] Speaker A: It left an absolute, definitely no, just.
[00:21:24] Speaker B: A horrendous mess that, I mean we left a marvelous profile. And then I went from there to work for a sailing brand.
So I was proud of what I'd done. But I also recognized that building quickly is, is a challenge without the structures behind it. And sometimes you've got to sort of say you've got to slow down a little bit in order to let the system catch up.
And I'm very proud of what happened with Oak because I, I, I look at boots now and, and how, and how famous they are. I wish I'd bought stock by the way, at $9.
[00:22:00] Speaker A: What is it now?
[00:22:00] Speaker B: Well it topped out at 165.
No, no split, no nothing.
And deckers with all of that money went on to, to, to buy hoka.
[00:22:10] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:22:10] Speaker B: And Hoka is now a billion dollar brand within their portfolio. So what they learned from, from, from Ugg, it's, it's catapulted that company to be now a, you know.
[00:22:21] Speaker A: So if you worked on that again, what would you do differently?
[00:22:26] Speaker B: I, I would, I would put a lot more processes in, I would try to be. Which again, it's not now, but it, the sort of international, international expansion 20 years ago was a little bit gung ho, it was a bit cowboy.
You know, I, I don't say this with pride that I've done maybe 12 Vegas shoe shows and I really can only remember about six. I mean, in truth there were six of them, which they're sketchy because it was just one massive party party.
[00:22:56] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:22:56] Speaker B: And, and we were partying relatively hard. You go back 20 years previous to that and I can't tell you how they parted.
[00:23:03] Speaker A: Right.
[00:23:03] Speaker B: If you can go back to LA Gear, there's some stories that come out about LA Gear, which is truly, that's an X rated podcast. You sort of go one step up.
[00:23:11] Speaker A: We'Ll put that inside the members.
[00:23:13] Speaker B: That'll be bleep bleep bleeped out. If I said everything that I was told, never, never witnessed.
So I'd slow things down, I'd make it more, more organized as, as organized as there's demand. If there's, if there's a pull from the market, you've got to, you've got to manage that pull.
[00:23:30] Speaker A: And look, that's a great segue for where I want to go next.
You often say, you know, strategy is just theory until it's tested on the ground. What do you mean by that?
[00:23:39] Speaker B: Oh, well, I mean it's a little bit like, you know, I'm trying to think of the apt sort of. And you may know this from, from, from where you've worked in the Middle East. I mean all strategy, all strategy melts when, when you're confronted with the enemy, it's gone.
[00:23:56] Speaker A: I mean you can spread on paper and then you show off and then you show up.
[00:24:00] Speaker B: It doesn't work. It's completely different.
And, and that is international business because you end up with all, all of that sort of theory. We're going to do this and then the rubber meets the road and you've got to adapt.
[00:24:12] Speaker A: That said though, going with a strategy is still better than going with no strategy.
[00:24:15] Speaker B: No strategy. At least you've got, I mean I, I, I love, and I don't want to take us down the rabbit hole, but I loved Shell with its Invention of coming up with. With strategies. Strategies, things that never happen. So if, if you know, if.
[00:24:34] Speaker A: What's the scenario planning? Scenario planning non unknowns. Unknowns.
[00:24:39] Speaker B: And Shell realized, I think it was one disaster and the disaster came out and said, well, we don't know what to do. But this is, this is a predictable problem. We could have an accident, so what do we do? So they created a scenario planning department and I love the thought of people sitting around a table saying, can we, can you give us an idea of what could happen? Well, that's a, that's. That could happen. Let's plan around that.
[00:25:02] Speaker A: I think the funniest thing though is where you do that exercise because I remember a time when we did that exercise in our team for something that we were doing and we thought of every terrible thing that could go wrong.
It was to do with an event actually. And we worked out contingencies for all of them and we turned up the next day and the one thing that we hadn't banked on happened and the room was not available.
[00:25:23] Speaker B: Yeah. Ah, well they, they. You go back, Michael Caine would say lean into the difficult on that.
[00:25:29] Speaker A: So we definitely did, you know.
[00:25:31] Speaker B: So this, this meeting has immediately turned into a meeting at the bar. Yeah, that's. It has to be somewhere. So we're gonna have to, we'll have to make do and do something different.
But it's, you know. Yes. You've got to have a plan, you've got to know what, what and you've got to understand the, the, you know, one thing that Australia, bless it in a way doesn't really get a lot of, is that because of where we are in the world all the way down at the bottom, our seasonality is completely turned around.
[00:25:58] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:25:58] Speaker B: So there's only us in South Africa that has the same seasonal calendar. Everything else.
No, if you look on the matter, they still use a spring summer, is that right? Yeah, they still.
South Africa that truly operate counter cyclical.
So.
So any Australian business that's selling Northern hemisphere has to really run a two critical paths because it's got to have a. An Australian launch and it has to have potentially an EU launch. It's also also going to got to plan its finance and budgeting because you guarantee to sit in the meeting and say we need to do this and we've not budgeted for that. So you need to think long term.
[00:26:32] Speaker A: And I know you've seen some, you know, again, we won't breach anybody's confidentiality but I know you've seen some examples of that quite recently people have said, we're going to do X, Y and Z. And then, you know, the CEO says one thing and you go and you talk to the CFO and they're like, oh, we have no budget for any of those things. And you're like, how will we progress this?
[00:26:48] Speaker B: Well, it's all, it goes to some of the models that we love selling things like the strategy session. Because on that you'd ask people those direct questions about things that they need to think about if they're going to go international.
[00:26:59] Speaker A: Do you have any money to do this project?
[00:27:01] Speaker B: I mean, you can do it bootstrapped. I mean, you can do it from the cash you've got, but you've really got to think long and hard about where you're going.
[00:27:10] Speaker A: Yeah.
Is it going to be worth that risk you'll take and the investment you'll make to do it?
[00:27:14] Speaker B: And I mean, interestingly, I always think that the risk is worth it because I think the reward is huge. You get it right. The reward is massive. And, and as Australia, you know, Australia is a small, it's a, it's a large country, small population, relatively small market.
So if you're, if you're really successful here, what could you do outside?
[00:27:35] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:27:36] Speaker B: And in reality, you, you could be treble.
[00:27:39] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:27:40] Speaker B: You know, your European office will swallow your Australian office.
[00:27:43] Speaker A: I know you've got clients at the moment that are on track to do that over the medium term. And you know, that's very gratifying when you see that happen from a relatively modest beginning.
[00:27:51] Speaker B: It is. And one of those clients we had a.
We're bringing on board a PR company now to begin to tell the story of what we've achieved. And it's. They're amazing stories. They're amazing what this company's managed to do in, in 18 months and actually, you know, find itself in the position of being awarded a pr. Awarded a.
What am I looking for? It's an award that it's got for innovation by a sports organization in Germany.
That award alone, once we get the words out there, whereas we would sell 2 and 3,000 of their product here, one order in Germany could be 30,000.
[00:28:36] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:28:36] Speaker B: And that isn't even scratching the surface of an 80 million people market that ineffectively invented walking around in hills for fun.
[00:28:47] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:28:47] Speaker B: So. So, you know, the opportunities for a lot of amazingly good product here to sell that Australian way of doing it overseas. I mean, I am the best. I, I am the best non Australian to sell Australia.
[00:29:00] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:29:00] Speaker B: And I sell it Very well.
[00:29:01] Speaker A: I agree with that. Especially the hat.
[00:29:03] Speaker B: Yeah. Where's my crocodile?
[00:29:05] Speaker A: I don't know. Didn't bring it to you.
So we talk a lot about structure at DNA, you know. You know, I'm very keen on structure.
Frameworks, dashboards, play Playbooks. But you always remind me that none of that works without relationships. Let's, let's talk a bit about that.
[00:29:23] Speaker B: I, I maybe should have said when, When I joined the team a couple of years ago that I, I can, I can sort of break things down in, in, into, into, into parts very, very quickly. So I, I like to get to know the person behind the brand, because once I know the person behind the brand, then I can, I can sort of. I can get to know what they're thinking and then make that work.
The entrepreneurs behind some of the brands that we deal with are. They're an interesting bunch. They're how they've got to the point they are. They, they, they've, they've created something which is theirs personally. They've got, they've got vested interest in it. So I like to get a relationship. I am a bit more collegiate. I like to, you know, most of the.
[00:30:10] Speaker A: What does it look like in practice?
[00:30:12] Speaker B: Well, as they say, most grave parties end up in the kitchen. Most of, you know, and, you know, don't drink, kids. But most of what you can get on a really nice. A good night out or a trade event will give you really down to the insights of what that brand is, the absolute essence of what it's trying to sell.
[00:30:31] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:30:31] Speaker B: What solution is it actually solving? What is it?
[00:30:34] Speaker A: What are they really struggling with that they're not telling you about?
They won't say in the boardroom, but.
[00:30:39] Speaker B: They will say, they'll say it over dinner. So. And that's why I've always liked this job, because it is very much a. It's a collegiate exercise. It's. You've got to get to know that person, you spend a long time with them, you're going to spend a lot of their money because this is not a cheap exercise to go overseas.
So you want to make sure that you've got.
You, you've got as much knowledge about them as you possibly can to make sure that you're carrying their dream to where they want to take it.
[00:31:07] Speaker A: Yeah. And just following on from that, how do you think relationships accelerate or block sales once you actually get into market?
[00:31:16] Speaker B: Well, you know, it, it. And there again, it's a very, very good point because so, so, for example, I mean, you, you speak Speak beautiful French. So you've, you've an affinity to the, to the French nation and we have some French colleagues who work in the company.
Selling in France is not easy.
The agents you need to use, they can be prickly, they can be difficult to manage.
So. So your ability to understand relationships, if you haven't got that at the beginning, you try landing in a country where you're dealing with a whole lot of agents or a whole lot of people that have their way of doing things and you coming in telling them what to do is never going to work. You, you've got to work alongside them to get the best out of what they can do. And of course, some brands are sinned differently in market, what you think you're selling, when you get into market, the market can twist, can sort of move the brand into an area that you never thought you would get into.
The client in question that won the award, won it in a category that it never really was going for, it just happened that its product resonated differently in another market.
We can make a kit like that and that kit eventually is the best kit that anybody had ever thought about.
Those relationships were important.
And also understanding, you know, if you're dealing with distributors, who are the actual people in the company that, that move the needle?
[00:32:49] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:32:49] Speaker B: And it may not be management, it may be somebody, you know, getting to know who does shipping, getting to know the clerks who do the invoice raising. Yeah, you need to know these people in order to fast track things, especially if you've got. So for example, a couple of minutes ago, a brand sending me some samples, so sending samples here to Australia.
Um, now I know that it needs a commercial invoice.
[00:33:11] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:33:12] Speaker B: Now I need that commercial invoice like straight away because it's because samples that get stuck in customers. So I need to tell the, the who. Who the person is at the desk exactly how I need that invoice to be done for Australian customers. And I need it done like tomorrow.
[00:33:26] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:33:26] Speaker B: So figuring out who these people are at the beginning will save you, could.
[00:33:31] Speaker A: Save you 10 days use of your life and millions of dollars.
[00:33:35] Speaker B: Exactly. And we're talking about things that are, you know, this, they're consumer goods. If you're talking about things that are big ticket items.
[00:33:42] Speaker A: A tunnel boring machine, for example.
[00:33:44] Speaker B: Yes, exactly. So, you know, you need to know who in the company actually gets.
You believe this. I get done. Yeah, that's the person you need to know because that's the person you need to be able to push things through before There is a structure because you tend to be a lone gun doing the work, building things, and then the structures build around.
[00:34:03] Speaker A: Yeah. I want to take a minute to talk about the blueprint for international success, which, as you know, is our proposal right through framework for taking clients into international markets. I use it a lot in my strategy work, but I would love to know, how do you use that framework in the execution work that you do with clients?
[00:34:20] Speaker B: So I like to get to a point where, not that I'm sort of shining it back to them all the time to say, listen, we did this six months ago. How are we doing on this particular framework now? Have you improved this?
And again, with a number of clients, because of my tenure here at DNA, I'm seeing those CEOs, managing directors that started with us, that knew nothing, and now, and it's really interesting because some of them tend to be, oh, no, Mike, we can't do that now. And I go, okay, all right. You'd have to tell me, I told you that 18 months ago. But somehow, yeah, okay, you now understand it, which is good.
[00:34:59] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:35:00] Speaker B: Because you're telling me to slow down. You're telling me that you, you need to, you can't do that, Mike, until we've got this. Yeah, okay, that's on, I know that's on the bit of paper we did, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, you're right. So it's, it's, it's really good when you get qualification from a client of all the work you've done in the past.
But I also like when, when we actually run through is getting, is, is getting the client in a position where they're honest with themselves.
Can you do that? And it's okay to say you can't.
[00:35:31] Speaker A: And sometimes people are not honest about it at the strategy phase because they don't want to have a scorecard that has lots of red orange on it because it feels like showing people your financial statements or your dirty laundry. But how does I mean, when you get to the execution phase? I'm hoping that people are being honest at that point, because at that point, money is getting spent, resources are being deployed, risk is being taken, real risk.
[00:35:53] Speaker B: Well, I, I, I, I've had a, I've had a, I've had a meeting this morning. Won't mention the client with what's called effectively the cfo, but I think they're called the Growth or Revenue Office or something like that.
And I, I have a little bit of an interesting dynamic between the, the founder and CEO. And really what's going on internally and, but interestingly between both of us this morning, we've, we've, we're both going into lean into what the CEO founder wants to see. We've got to give them something to allow them to, to mentally see where this is going.
So in some ways and I, I, you know, if there was ever, if we could have some form of training going forward, I'm a really big believer in nlp and I think you've really got to if NLP techniques are good for international because we really need to get to the core of how that person thinks. When are they, are they not being honest about something and dragging it out of them? And I think if we, you know, I do it sort of automatically. I, I'm sort of, I'm good at getting to the, to the, I think I am getting, getting to the bottom of what, what people think.
So I, that, that to me is important, the blueprint to make sure that you get the real honesty at the beginning but the relationship good enough that they can tweak and come back and say I know I said that, but I really don't know how to do it. How do we do that?
[00:37:18] Speaker A: And if you had to pick out one execution habit that separates companies that actually scale internationally from companies that say they're going to do it and then never really get there, what would that one execution habit be.
[00:37:33] Speaker B: In terms of? What I would like them to understand is areas around.
I love the word forecast. Forecasting to me is a really interesting word because nobody can predict the future but you can begin to put some milestones in to give you the best ability to be ready for the, for that future that's coming.
[00:37:54] Speaker A: He who predicts the future controls the future. Right.
[00:37:58] Speaker B: And I lean into that a lot.
I also want, I also, as we know, I lean into pricing. I think pricing is massively, importantly, often ignored. It's massively ignored.
And, and I've changed my stance on this a little bit and, and you know, you and I have a difference of opinion sometimes on tariffs and that's, we could do a whole tariff thing.
I, I understand why tariffs exist for any country to, to use them as a political tool, but I also want the consumer doesn't really understand where the pricing of some product is. I mean you, you, you take a 30 product at a shop, you half it. It's because a retailer takes half, the retailer takes all the money. I mean in truth, when you look at the margins before that it gets less and less and less.
So it's Very, very important at the beginning to understand where the price breaks are, because you need to ensure that everybody's making money. If one, if one piece of that chain doesn't make money, then, then, then nobody makes any.
[00:38:58] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:38:59] Speaker B: And you set yourself up for disaster. And, you know, we've done some pricing exercises before where we've said, you know, we're out, you've got a good cash profile, but there's, there's nothing left. There's nothing left. And you're, you're kidding yourselves if you think that you can carry on because all you're doing is digging a hole. You might as well stop and start again.
[00:39:17] Speaker A: So, coming back to where we began this episode. Before we wrap up, what is your one piece of advice for CEOs and founders scaling internationally in 2026?
[00:39:29] Speaker B: So I would say, and we come back to what I said before, that I am a, I'm an optimist that would rather get it wrong. And, and I think that Australia is a unique, massively unique country in what it creates here has an Australian lilt to it that I, I think I can look at a product, I can look at its packaging and say that that's Australia. I know that's Australian. It stands out on a shelf.
It is a country of invention. You know, it's girt by sea. So it has to come up with its own.
It's got its own internal challenges.
I often say that Australia, you know, the reason that Mad Max exists as a movie is because I think that's what we turn into. We just have to re engineer everything all the time that was left because you're not importing anymore.
[00:40:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:40:19] Speaker B: So that car has to become a crane, has to become a plow, whatever it needs to be. It's got to cover a whole load of bases.
[00:40:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:40:28] Speaker B: So we naturally invent things. And I would say to the CEOs, don't be afraid of international.
Embrace it, plan for it and get out there and explore. I mean, we sell our unique viewpoint of the world to everybody else and they all love it.
[00:40:47] Speaker A: Mike, great to have you on the show.
[00:40:49] Speaker B: Thank you very much. Been a pleasure.
