You have a young team – what were your experiences of taking on leadership at a young age?
It’s hard to get people to take you seriously sometimes. Sometimes the people you meet in other businesses have years of experience and you worry that you’re not up to the mark. Sometimes you have to excuse yourself – just say, “I’m young and I didn’t know that”. The benefit of being young is that if you fall you can pick yourself back up. This is the first time I’m starting a business so if I fail, that’s life, and I know that I was meant to learn these things. Maybe if I started a business at 50 years of age, I may be more afraid, and so I would reduce risk. When I’m young, if I fall, I can pick myself up again.
To be honest we’ve had a multitude of failures. It looks very sweet on the outside, but you fail multiple times on the inside. You might have chosen the wrong things for the business; we’ve had staff who have been dishonest. We had a lot of fakes come onto the market six months after we started. Initially we started suing a lot of people, but after we sued a few people we realised the only person you’re really paying is your lawyer. China is a very difficult market to work with. Sometimes you’ve got to take things with a pinch of salt over there. After a while we realised we were doing it the wrong way – we were throwing so much money on the legal side.
What we should have done was pay our engineers more and get them to innovate even faster. And that’s what we learned: the way to work against counterfeits is to innovate even faster. We have a different system of paying our engineers. We make sure our engineers are also shareholders in the business, they get paid according to how many units we sell – and so we can train a lot of talent because we can pay them well. And that’s also why we make such great products.
"The fear of failure is interesting.
Failure is a key learning experience."
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ENTREPRENEURSHIP