How do you build a puzzle? We’ve all done it. Whether it is the 30-piece puzzles attempted by my young child or the 1500-piece monsters beloved by my wife and our extended family, there are a few critical components to finishing a complex puzzle:
Understand the Big Picture.
Create the framework first, by looking for the corners and building out the borders from there.
Identify patterns and objects within the puzzle, and group pieces that look like they belong there.
Have patience and persistence as you often get it wrong on the way to getting it right.
And, most importantly, give it time. When you find yourself frustrated and fatigued, step back. Take a breather. Take a view. Go for a walk. Come back, maybe attack the problem from a different angle, but always work towards the big picture. Unless you are blessed with supernatural pattern recognition and analytical ability, most people will get there, but it will take time… faster if you are a few collaborating, of course.
Business is like that, too. Building companies often takes longer than you thought it would, you need a fair bit of teamwork to get there, there are frustrations along the way, and the people working on the puzzle with you might even change along the way as collaborators rotate in and out. Fresh eyes are often good that way, and can help solve certain pieces… but everyone needs to understand where you are at, and where you are going. Without a clear big picture, it’s a really really hard task to put the pieces together.
And that vision – that shared idea of what the final image looks like – needs to be crystal clear, agreed upon by those working on the puzzle, and kept visibly clear to guide behaviour every step of the way. Let’s look at a few people that started in business, without the big picture being clear…
Andrew Smith and Shane Dryden’s partnership was founded on a clear shared vision and strong values, nurtured through their church community in Pietermaritzburg. The two friends, after moving to Cape Town, started a digital web agency that would leverage their complimentary skillsets: Andrew's expertise in technology and operations and Shane's knack for identifying appealing products.
The company that would make them celebrated entrepreneurs and public figures was founded in 2006, and they called it Yuppiechef. Shane, a foodie, spotted a gap in the South African retail marketplace for a larger variety of high-end kitchen appliances and goods. The lack of choice was a function of the system in place, where larger retailers needed to carry a limited range and focus on their own branded goods to protect their margin.
They would focus on online retail. Not by choice, but by necessity. They simply didn’t have the capital to carry stock or pay rental or outfit physical stores. They figured, correctly, that discerning shoppers would Google for their favourite product, and they would be the only ones to stock it. They could therefore quickly acquire customers without necessarily building a strong own brand. The online space allowed them to leverage their skills in IT and web development, offering an attractive interface with a broader range of kitchen and home products than any physical store could manage.
They had a big advantage there: The online retail marketplace was still in its relative infancy and had low barriers to entry. Public trust in online shopping in South Africa was still low and no big players, including Amazon, were in the local market. The two friends founded Yuppiechef as one of their many entrepreneurial side hustles, while still focused on their web agency. Aligning and offering well-known brands not otherwise available in South Africa, and being able to effectively market them online, gave them a differentiating edge that helped customers overcome their resistance to online shopping.
Little did they know that their little bootstrapping venture would take off, and become their bread and butter. And this is critical: Their vision was not to pioneer online shopping in South Africa. Their vision was to find a niche product and approach, to play where others couldn’t, to make use of their limited resources but abundant talent in the way that made the most sense for them to put bread on the table. They were textbook entrepreneurs: There was a knife that Shane couldn’t easily get because nobody was importing and selling it, so they decided to fix the problem themselves.
Their focus on founder/problem fit helped escalate Yuppiechef into a market leader, not only in online retail, but ultimately in omnichannel retail solutions. Once they had amassed the capital and know-how to go to physical stores, they did.
Worth noting about Smith and Dryden: Five years into bootstrapping their venture, they made the decision that they were building to sell. The landscape had changed, major competitors were coming in with significant capital resources and online was a winner-take-all game. They could no longer survive with modest organic growth, and they decided to escalate their growth efforts with an injection of capital from Tiger Global, a private equity firm. This change in growth, culture and vision was aligned with their ultimate objective and vision to build a significant player that would earn them a handsome multiple on exit. In my book Boks to Business, I talk about how partner alignment is critical in making these kinds of deals. They had a shared vision with their new partners… but not necessarily a shared strategy for how to get there.
That’s the thing about vision and the big picture. Some people have it. Take Elon Musk. He was clear, both with Tesla and SpaceX: Build Electric Cars! Save the planet! Build cheaper rockets so we can colonize space because NASA stopped caring. And we need to save the human race!
But it started with Elon Musk being a space geek, and his frustration with NASA. NASA had stopped investing in space, there was no plan to go to Mars… and Musk felt it was contrary to the human value of exploration, and a species-ending mistake. He wanted a rocket to take men to Mars, and if nobody else would do it, he would get cracking, and throw most of his considerable fortune at the problem.
Or consider Douglas Hoernle, the visionary founder of Karri Payments.
Karri is an online payment application used, in 2024, by over 2000 schools in South Africa and abroad. It is the dominant solution for parents who need to buy extras at the school, such as excursions, yearbooks, uniforms and fundraisers. And it is an incredible tool for overworked school administrators to collect, track and account for the vast amounts of money that need to be collected and channelled from parents to the school. It solves the problem of kids carrying cash in South Africa, where high crime, indifferent teachers and corrupt administrators in many of our public schools make cash hard to track and risky to have. It helps make schools safer, schools more prosperous and teachers and parents more proactive.
And it started, as most of these things do, with solving a problem.
Doug’s wife Nikki was a teacher. One night, he watched as she spent hours reconciling over a 100 R50 cash payments from parents for a school trip to the Aquarium she had arranged. Who paid and who didn’t, which parent needed to be chased up, which kid would be disappointed… it was messy, time-consuming and ineffective. Surely there was a better way, thought Doug.
Doug was already an entrepreneur who had tried his hand at a number of industries. He had a background in technology so was pretty sure he could build a strong application solution. He also thought it would be easy to sell into schools, after all he had been doing it with communication systems for years.
Understanding that there was a problem, and thinking he had the skills to fix it, Doug went to work. He was sure he could build a decent business by filling a gap in the market.
He was right, and he was wrong. I’ll write some more on Doug in my next newsletter.
The point here is: When you are presented with a clear and compelling big picture, it is relatively easy for you, and your team, to assemble the puzzle, as long as there is a strategy, time and resources to build it. But jigsaw puzzles are not companies. Companies have products that people need to buy, and you don’t always know if you’re going to have a market for what you’re selling. Sometimes, when you start, you don’t even exactly know what you’re selling.
But founders and leaders take a leap of faith. They jump, sometimes recklessly, and often they don’t land safely or immediately. They have no idea what the big picture looks like, but they go anyway. They sweat and pivot and adjust and persevere until the big picture presents itself. Most are forced to quit way before that happens. The ones that tend to stay the course and win are people like Doug, or Andrew and Shane. People who have the right skillset and tackle the right idea at the right time. They combine talent with persistence and relative experience… and what they don’t know they figure out along the way until the picture presents itself. And they get lucky.
This is kind of what happened to Rassie Erasmus. The Boks to Business book goes deep on his leaps of faith, too.
PG’s PRO TIP:
If you’re going to attempt a big task, best you keep the ultimate big picture close and front of mind. Makes it a lot easier to assemble the pieces in a methodological way. Beautiful big brilliant dashboards are always a good idea…
Comments