Transcript
Speaker: Okay, welcome to Startup Impact Radio, the podcast about entrepreneurs and their vision for changing the world.
Speaker: My co-host is Scott Tobe, CEO of Signature Financial Planning, and I'm Joel Reed, CEO of OpenArk.
Speaker: Today we're talking about Boost with Mike Quinn, who has a mission to power growth for the 100 million underserved entrepreneurs in Africa's informal economy who are creating sustainable jobs and income for the future.
Speaker: Thanks for joining us, Mike.
Speaker: Thank you, Scott and Joel.
Speaker: It's a pleasure to be here.
Speaker: So, Mike, just to start off, why don't you tell us a little bit more about Boost?
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: So Boost is a platform business, as you mentioned, to really power growth for what we call convenience economy.
Speaker: And Africa, which is very similar, what you'd find across emerging markets is the majority of the population gets their food and provisions from the corner store, like the local mom and pop shop.
Speaker: That mom and pop shop is often
Speaker: run by a small, like informal entrepreneur.
Speaker: So somebody that, you know, probably doesn't have a bank account more often than not a woman and a first time smartphone user.
Speaker: So this has been the big change that's happened over the last 10 years is smartphone proliferation is everywhere.
Speaker: But these entrepreneurs still run their businesses largely offline where they're buying from multiple wholesalers and suppliers,
Speaker: at the local markets, paying in cash.
Speaker: There's not a lot of technology that's being used to digitize and to grow these businesses.
Speaker: And they're often short on working capital.
Speaker: So there's a huge gap between what people can buy or what people can sell rather and what they can afford to buy.
Speaker: And then if you go one step back in the supply chain, the small convenience retailers are supplied by also like family run small medium businesses that often have fleets of vans and vehicles like trucks that move the products between manufacturers like Unilever, who we work with and the millions of small retailers.
Speaker: They have the infrastructure to distribute these products, but also often lack technology.
Speaker: So they run their businesses with notebooks and spreadsheets, sometimes trying to find like SaaS products, but that aren't really designed for how informal Africa works.
Speaker: So, so boost is tackling this problem and we have, um, on one end, a very simple, um, ordering product for that last mile retailer for the convenience retailer to use, um, WhatsApp to, to trigger a catalog that they could browse.
Speaker: load a basket of goods and place an order, consuming very little data.
Speaker: And that's a key selling point because data usage is a main barrier to people using an app.
Speaker: And by using WhatsApp, it's a familiar product that people are using for chat, so they don't have to go into the Google Play Store
Speaker: And then the more that they order, we have an embedded working capital product that we call stock boost.
Speaker: So it's, it's kind of the combination of ordering and working capital for the retailer.
Speaker: But then the main platform is used by the distributor.
Speaker: So the distributor can then register all their retailers, have all of these inbound orders, and then use that to manage their kind of end to end fulfillment.
Speaker: So from like a,
Speaker: managing their product catalogs, their sales channels.
Speaker: It's kind of like a Shopify for distributors.
Speaker: So they can really manage their whole business.
Speaker: And then
Speaker: The data that we kind of capture from digitizing all of the orders and fulfillments, we are able to give visibility to manufacturers like Unilever that helps them really see what's happening in their supply chain.
Speaker: And then crucially in the future, offer specific promotions and product discounts to their retail channels that generally they don't have access to because there's so many informal layers in their supply chains right now.
Speaker: So I'll stop there.
Speaker: I could probably talk about this a lot more, but we can get into the conversation.
Speaker: Well, great.
Speaker: Yeah, thank you, Mike.
Speaker: And we definitely will dig in more to Boost.
Speaker: It sounds very interesting.
Speaker: But before we do that, I would love to hear a little bit about your background and how you got to the point where you launched Boost.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: So I am Canadian and I did an engineering degree that I graduated from in 2003.
Speaker: And I managed to get attached to what was a startup organization at the time called Engineers Without Borders.
Speaker: And so I knew nothing about Africa.
Speaker: I had like no previous experience.
Speaker: I'd never really traveled anywhere.
Speaker: But through that experience, I ended up working for them as a volunteer in Ghana and Zambia.
Speaker: So both West Africa and Southern Africa for two and a half years.
Speaker: And just really fell in love with the continent and the people and saw the opportunity, but also like the problems.
Speaker: And that led me to
Speaker: um, to London where I did a couple of years of higher education.
Speaker: So I studied international development, then got an MBA.
Speaker: Um, and then in 2009, like I was way overeducated at this point.
Speaker: And, um, I wanted to be an entrepreneur, um, and move back to Africa.
Speaker: And I, uh, convinced an investor, um, to, to buy me a plane ticket, to move back to Zambia.
Speaker: Um, and I pitched to them that I would go find you investment deals.
Speaker: And then I would stick around and help build the company.
Speaker: And I met these two brothers that were starting one of the very first fintechs in the continent, which was a company called Zona.
Speaker: So this was back in 2009 and I ended up working with them for 10 years.
Speaker: I became the CEO after the first year and we built an incredible business that
Speaker: ended up as a consumer focused company with a mobile wallet digitizing money transfers in a cash economy.
Speaker: And it grew to over $60 million a month of process value.
Speaker: We had like a quarter of the adult population in Zambia, so about 2 million monthly active customers using this product, raised $35 million of venture capital,
Speaker: in like a small African market.
Speaker: So we were kind of very early on this wave of like entrepreneurship, like tech enabled entrepreneurship.
Speaker: But ultimately we didn't get an exit and had a lot of like ups and downs, you know, as all startups do.
Speaker: But the end of my journey was a failure because the company reached this pinnacle and then had a failed big investment round and then got attacked by competition.
Speaker: And so in 2018, I left, or sorry, 2019 rather, after 10 years, and just really reflected deeply on all the things that I learned and all the things we did well and all the things we failed at and how I would do this differently.
Speaker: And that was like the foundations of Boost.
Speaker: So Boost is kind of, if you ever read like Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, I was really inspired by that book because I'm like, oh, well, maybe this can be the
Speaker: um, the foundations of, of like going and building another great company, like with, with Nike, how it started this blue ribbon.
Speaker: And it was like really the, the, the, the background for, for what became Nike.
Speaker: Um, and, and in this reflection process, I ended up actually publishing a book called failing to win, um, which was like my reflections initially that, um, kind of became a book, but.
Speaker: Out of that was the design principles of like, you know, if I could do this again differently, how could I, you know, how could we design boost so it could work across multiple countries?
Speaker: It could be B2B focused.
Speaker: It could be, you know, asset light and headcount light.
Speaker: So it's like optimizing for capital efficiency and scale and really working through partnerships with global companies like Unilever that could potentially take us into a lot of different markets.
Speaker: So
Speaker: Yeah, we're early in the journey still, but it kind of feels like I've been at this for, you know, 13, 14 years already now.
Speaker: Mike, so much to unpack on what you just said.
Speaker: I don't know where to start, but let me start at the, towards the end, you talked about how failure and adversity kind of, I think, brought boost to life or, and you, from that, you, it was births.
Speaker: Can you talk, maybe just share our
Speaker: one or two key things you've learned about how adversity or failure, you know, how you can use it positively in your life?
Speaker: Great, great question.
Speaker: So, um, like when I left my first company Zona, um, I, I very much felt like we had failed.
Speaker: And then I, I kind of internalized that, that I had failed and was therefore a failure.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And that was like a very,
Speaker: low period and I'm like a perpetually positive person.
Speaker: And I I'd been on this rollercoaster for 10 years, but always felt like I could solve the problem and, you know, be tenacious and just kind of get to like the next solution until I couldn't.
Speaker: And we got to this harsh reality that the company was like going to run out of cash, no matter what I did.
Speaker: And I had to leave and we had to restructure the business and the cap table.
Speaker: We were able to survive.
Speaker: So it was kind of a happy ending, but at a shell of what, you know, the vision was and what we once were.
Speaker: And it really took me to kind of sit down and like reflect very deeply to and to go back to the beginning of the journey to realize that
Speaker: we were actually failing the entire time, but it was like that process of failing that led to all of these successes.
Speaker: Cause like I was doing it for the first time, like first time founder, first time CEO.
Speaker: And like, there was no playbook for building like this, like, you know, payments, FinTech business in, you know, a small country in Africa or even raising money at the time.
Speaker: And so the whole process of, of,
Speaker: the success we achieved was because we were like failing and failing and failing.
Speaker: And then we'd have these breakthroughs and it was kind of like two steps forward, one step back.
Speaker: And I, you know, kind of got to this realization where I'm like, well, you know, that is actually, you know, the answer to like, not only like through personal growth, but like business growth.
Speaker: And then it was like the inspiration of like, if I could,
Speaker: you know, really embrace these, these failures and the key lessons that I learned from them.
Speaker: I could then like build a new business that could become better and more impactful and like, you know, reach, reach a much bigger scale.
Speaker: And it was, I kind of started thinking about it too, is like when you,
Speaker: you know, my, my mission in life of, of like living a purpose, um, purpose driven life and, and having like, um, impact and also, um, one day commercial success.
Speaker: Cause, cause I, I really believe that those two things need to go hand in hand.
Speaker: Um, uh,
Speaker: You know, it, the failure I experienced at Zona really was just like, you know, kind of like getting out of one car and then trying to get into like a much faster one, like, like putting the first vehicle, like my, my mission was still alive and well, if this makes sense, but the vehicle I was in needed to change.
Speaker: And so I kind of changed my entire mindset.
Speaker: to like failure being a real positive thing.
Speaker: And like failing is not the same as like being a failure.
Speaker: You can actually like objectively look at failure, review it, analyze it, learn from it, and then take out the good parts and like do things better as opposed to like the, you know, the feeling of being a failure, which is, you know, it's something we all go through and it's a negative feeling, a negative energy, and then you can kind of like wallow in it.
Speaker: And you can't really escape that.
Speaker: So I do believe that like when you fail at heart, it's hard and you kind of need to feel that pain and kind of live through the experience.
Speaker: But I now have used this as a culture building exercise for our new company where we we like encourage people to fail.
Speaker: We celebrate it, but then it's always like, what did we learn from it?
Speaker: And how do we move forward?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And you kind of get through that process much faster and and make sure, like, you know, if you're failing on the same things over and over, then something needs to change.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It's like you don't want to repeat the same mistakes, but you want to have that culture of innovation where you're not scared of failing.
Speaker: This is awesome.
Speaker: I love digging into this philosophy and I appreciate it.
Speaker: So I'm curious with that type of outlook,
Speaker: In Boost, you talk about how you're working with the employees to point out failures, not make them afraid of failure.
Speaker: But talk about for yourself, talk about what have you experienced as failure in Boost and how do you think you'll be able to take Boost and have the ultimate result not be a failure with that attitude of it's okay to fail within the company?
Speaker: So such a great question.
Speaker: So let me maybe give you a couple like tangible examples.
Speaker: And so one of the things like very early on, like as a design principle, I was like, you know, we're operating in Africa.
Speaker: Like we have to expect like the worst at all times.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: As I've just lived through like currency devaluations and like competitive attacks and change in regulatory environment and funding rounds blow up.
Speaker: And all these things that I experienced the first time around were like always so painful and hard and like, you know, these business, you know, catastrophes.
Speaker: Whereas like if we just actually design the company to minimize those types of risks, but also to expect them.
Speaker: And so this led to like a few really important decisions early on to say, like, well, how do we build this technology and the model?
Speaker: to operate across different countries by design so that if one country is not doing well, you have some kind of diversification.
Speaker: And how do we be as capital efficient as possible?
Speaker: And that means we're not always dependent on venture capital cycles.
Speaker: And that means also that you have to figure out how to do things with the fewest possible people and not accumulate assets and have complexity in your operations.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So it became really the design philosophy of the business.
Speaker: And then in 2021, we had competitors like startups going to Y Combinator, raising tons of money, getting huge valuations.
Speaker: And we kind of had our heads down.
Speaker: And I was very confusing.
Speaker: Boost was very confusing to investors because they're like, Mike, you're living in London.
Speaker: You're launching in Ghana, South Africa, Nigeria, remotely during COVID.
Speaker: Like, just pick one market.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And, and why aren't you raising a big round and why are you not like, like we, we actually were, we're taking a bit of a longer view of saying like, let's not worry too much about revenue right now.
Speaker: Let's just really get the, the operating model.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It's like with as least cost as possible and get like product market fit and then kind of like slowly monetize.
Speaker: Whereas some of our competitors were like getting higher revenue by putting their investment money and buying like vehicles and warehouses and like, you know, doing the fulfillment side of the business.
Speaker: And then they fast forward a year and a lot of those companies now are struggling because they hit walls.
Speaker: They can't get the next round of funding.
Speaker: They were getting like, I know one that was getting like a 7% revenue margin, but they were spending 15% to get that revenue margin because their costs were so high.
Speaker: And now they're doing down rounds and some are like literally dying, unfortunately.
Speaker: But we kind of are hitting our stride and really differentiating because
Speaker: we figured out our model very leanly or with very limited costs and kind of got three markets working.
Speaker: And now we've expanded to six.
Speaker: But coming back to your question, Scott, around like a tangible failure when we have some like funding failures where, you know, we, we kind of, we're trying to get like investments a little bit faster, but like the one maybe that's probably sticks in my mind is, is we we wanted to, to go into Egypt and, uh,
Speaker: We very quickly, because we were like, we need to go quickly and we want to expand into lots of countries.
Speaker: And we prematurely hired somebody.
Speaker: We picked a market like Egypt is a really exciting market because of its size and scale and it's a new region, but it's a new language in Arabic.
Speaker: The language is right to left.
Speaker: It was very challenging.
Speaker: And the person we hired, you know, ended up not being a fit.
Speaker: Our product wasn't ready yet.
Speaker: We didn't have a good partner to go into the market.
Speaker: And it was a case where after six months we shut it down, but we had three other markets going at the time.
Speaker: And so we kind of, we celebrated that.
Speaker: We tried, we learned, we shut it down quickly.
Speaker: We didn't spend too much money because we didn't over hire.
Speaker: So it was an example of like something that didn't work out, but it didn't like kill the business.
Speaker: And it was just part of the strategy.
Speaker: And then fast forward a year, our product is much further along.
Speaker: We have this partnership with Unilever that's now spreading into a couple of different countries.
Speaker: And we've been able to hire a really high quality founder in Egypt, and we're now trying again.
Speaker: But we have like a much better strategy to do that.
Speaker: And so, and if I contrast that with my first business, like we had a failure, we went really deep in Zambia.
Speaker: We were very successful.
Speaker: We kind of went next market Malawi.
Speaker: We were somewhat successful.
Speaker: Then we raised a $15 million investment round and we sunk $6 million of it to expand into a third market, Mozambique, that completely failed.
Speaker: Um, and that caused, um, at that point we, we had like hired an extra a hundred people.
Speaker: We had like to renegotiate, uh, uh, uh, trunch fundraising from our lead series B investor.
Speaker: And it just like, it took us like 18 months to unravel and it just like nearly killed us.
Speaker: And it was kind of like part of the, the, the conditions that led to the ultimate failure of the business.
Speaker: Um, but, um, you know, just doing things where you're not scared to try.
Speaker: So we, we weren't like,
Speaker: Going into Egypt the first time with Boost wasn't like, I don't regret having tried because I'm actually really happy that we did it the way we did.
Speaker: We were too early, like objectively, we should have waited another year and the timing would have been better like it is now.
Speaker: But we were able to kind of fail in a way that we were able to get some learnings from and it didn't cost the business very much.
Speaker: And that's now become a bit of a culture of how we operate, where we kind of default to say yes to something if it's a good idea, right?
Speaker: Like, let's try it.
Speaker: But how do we try it in a way that is like a test, right?
Speaker: As opposed to just throwing all of our eggs in one basket too early.
Speaker: You've adopted a lot of principles of lean and agile, Mike, and I think this focus on capital efficiency is going to suit you well with the current economic environment where the cost of capital is going up.
Speaker: So it seems like a perfect focus for you guys.
Speaker: I want to steer us a little bit back to the impact you're having on the world, making the world a better place, and maybe frame it by saying,
Speaker: you know, for these local small grocers that are, you're, you're helping and working with, what does failure look like for them and how are you trying to, um, you know, reduce the chance of failure for them or improve their chance of success?
Speaker: So such a, such a great question.
Speaker: Cause all, all the challenges like, you know, we have, and I have, or like, um,
Speaker: you know, not life and death as they are for many small entrepreneurs where, you know, they had to battle through COVID and now like we work in Ghana where like inflation's running at like 55%, right?
Speaker: And the currency's like halved since last year.
Speaker: And South Africa, there's no electricity and like Nigeria had a tough election recently.
Speaker: So like there's just like constant disruptions and that is the reality of these markets.
Speaker: And the customers, like the small retail shops and grocers that are our ultimate end user customers are the ones that people rely on to buy their food and their provisions.
Speaker: So they're not selling luxury goods.
Speaker: It's like these are the stores that people go get their groceries and their meat and their toothpaste and their soap and their flour and their cooking oil.
Speaker: And the biggest challenges they face are
Speaker: Often, inflation now is severely causing prices to rise, which means that the cost of purchasing goods from their suppliers is also going up.
Speaker: And so they have to pass that on to the consumers or result in margins that are shrinking.
Speaker: And also the stock that they're buying, because consumer preferences are changing, where people go from buying some products that are maybe higher margin to alternatives that are maybe not as good quality and they're lower.
Speaker: So they kind of have change in margins, but also change in like...
Speaker: in turnover.
Speaker: So like people are buying less, their basket consumption is changing.
Speaker: And ultimately what that means for like the owners of these small shops is like their costs rise.
Speaker: The access to capital was always constrained.
Speaker: It's getting more expensive now.
Speaker: If they have like microfinance loans, like the interest rates of those things are going up.
Speaker: And they just have less money.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And they're there are the key drivers of employment in economies because like the places we operate in, like 70 to 90 percent of jobs are from the informal economy from mainly these small mom and pop shops in lots of different segments and industries.
Speaker: And so when they have less money, they invest, especially women owners tend to invest their money in their girls' education.
Speaker: And so with less money that is like trickling down to their family, like people like literally may cut a meal, they have less income, they struggle to make school fees, clothes have to last a little bit longer.
Speaker: So like all those things happen within their households as owners, but they also create less jobs.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And you have the demographic where, you know, so many people are young because Africa's average age is 19 and like city like Lagos in Nigeria already has 20 million people and jobs are super scarce.
Speaker: So, you know, this is like not a not a rosy picture right this time.
Speaker: So if I think about like what what boost is doing,
Speaker: you know, we're making a marginal contribution right now, but like, we, we really want to play a transformative role, um, of just like, you know, digitizing like the, the basic principles of these businesses from like ordering to like the distribution and supply, um, can create a lot of efficiency.
Speaker: And, um, the analogy I, I like to kind of think about is when you, you compare it to like the U S market, like a North America and like Europe, right.
Speaker: Like go back to the early two thousands where, you know, coming out of the.com boom,
Speaker: But now like everybody has an email address, but most small businesses are still offline.
Speaker: And Shopify kind of created the opportunity for a small business to like put their business online.
Speaker: And then, you know, 10, 20 years later, that now creates like a whole new industry of people being able to sell anywhere in the world.
Speaker: And then they added things like fulfillment and payments and capital.
Speaker: So I think Boost can really do that for these businesses over time, where we're starting just with the basics of digitizing, like sales and payments and order, and then providing access to capital so they can make sure their shelves are stocked and they can meet their demand.
Speaker: But then it creates these new opportunities where the dreams of these small entrepreneurs to open another shop or to add new product lines, to have the data, to know what are the things that are higher margin so that they can make better decisions of what they're selling.
Speaker: And ultimately the opportunity not to grow their income by like, you know, 10, 20%, but by like three to four X, I think is very, very tangible.
Speaker: And for somebody that's making like, you know, 500 to a thousand dollars a month of profit, like that is a really material amount of money.
Speaker: And then like, then you think of like how that trickles down, like the things that are not trickling down now, like that extra income does really allow them to hire an extra couple of people.
Speaker: to put their kids through school, to make sure that better food on the table.
Speaker: And then one last thing I would just mention as well is that like we have right now, 11,000 monthly active retail shops using the boost platform.
Speaker: The, you know, 95% of them are women owned.
Speaker: Um, and, uh, like the concentration of this is, is a big project we have in with Unilever in Nigeria, which is like specifically designed to support women retailers.
Speaker: Um, and so there's like a huge impact component, like just from that, um, as well.
Speaker: So the, the efficiency of just running better businesses, but also, um, the kind of the, the girl effect you can trigger from supporting women owners who then, you know, have daughters and are, are, are tend to take care of like the girls and their families.
Speaker: Um, usually the data shows better than men.
Speaker: If you put more, more money in a woman's pocket, it kind of, the development impact is stronger than, um, than it does for men.
Speaker: Very cool.
Speaker: Sounds like you are having multiple layers of impact, which is just awesome.
Speaker: So congrats on that.
Speaker: So I'm intrigued by this idea of the Canadian guy living in London, doing business in Africa.
Speaker: I mean, you talked to us about some of the challenges in terms of, you know, certainly inflation, in terms of the lack of electricity, but talk to us about culture.
Speaker: I mean, what's it like to do
Speaker: business in a culture that is not the one you grew up in and is certainly very different from North American culture and certainly different from European culture.
Speaker: I'm curious just, you know, what challenges does that present and how have you overcome those?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I'll go back to what I said at the beginning about like how I got my start as like this volunteer with Engineers Without Borders, because so much of the answer to your question kind of comes from that experience where, you know, I was thrown into these like situations where I was young in my, you know, my
Speaker: young in my early in my career and like a young kind of early 20 year old, like, so very foundational experiences for me, but, um, where I, you know, was living on like $300 a month, um, stipends, I had to find my own place to live, um, and was encouraged to like very integrate, um, into the local communities.
Speaker: Like, so I lived in both Ghana and Zambia with local families.
Speaker: I learned part of the local language, um, and, uh, you know, took, uh,
Speaker: you know, the local transport everywhere I went.
Speaker: And so it wasn't the experience of like a Westerner coming in and, you know, driving around in a Land Rover and kind of spending three weeks on the ground and leaving.
Speaker: And that really influenced me because, you know, I learned what I, you know, the connections I could never make.
Speaker: You know, I saw poverty, I experienced it, but I also knew I was an outsider all the time.
Speaker: the humility and just started thinking a lot about my privilege and how I could harness that to actually, you know, lead to lead a purpose-driven life and figure out things that could actually make a difference.
Speaker: And when I've kind of been in the CEO role in like these two companies, but really think like always drawing back to these early experiences and trying to be very humble, but I,
Speaker: relying a lot as well on, on finding local champions and entrepreneurs and leaders.
Speaker: And so that that's kind of become a bit of like the superpower I've really tried to develop of knowing like, I'm not going to be the guy on the ground who's going to go and solve all these problems myself, but I can now I've just, just doing this again through a lot of failure and like hiring and partnerships is like,
Speaker: identifying local champions and boosts like founders of the companies where the countries we're working in that have the experience, have the knowledge, have the entrepreneurial drive and have become my co-founders in the business.
Speaker: So
Speaker: With the boost model we have, like myself and my two co-founders, Mary and Will in London, like building the technology, focusing on like capital raising partnerships, like overall strategy.
Speaker: But then we've, we've recruited co-founders in South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, now Kenya and Egypt in our new markets that are from those markets that are entrepreneurs themselves.
Speaker: And we treat each country like a startup almost.
Speaker: So it's very much a mentality, but it's different from like, you know, you're just going to like go hire a team and like kind of roll out your model.
Speaker: It's very much like
Speaker: We have our model that we go to market strategy, but we want to really find like those one to two to three, like local co-founders that, um, really buy into the boost philosophy and are, are in charge of their market and, um, are the founders of those businesses.
Speaker: Um, and we all work as like one, you know, one brand and one team.
Speaker: Um, and, uh,
Speaker: Like, I love this because everywhere I go, I realize I'm like, I still travel a lot.
Speaker: Cultures are very different.
Speaker: Ways of working are very different.
Speaker: But the challenges are pretty much the same.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And whether you speak Arabic or French or, you know,
Speaker: Cosa in South Africa or whatever local language, like you get into these supply chains and small retailers still need working capital.
Speaker: They still need to order from their suppliers.
Speaker: Distributors still have like the same challenges of like moving stock from a manufacturer to a warehouse, to a van, collecting payments, operating in a cash environment.
Speaker: So, so like the business problems tend to be the same, even though the contexts are very different.
Speaker: And, um,
Speaker: the one thing that kind of becomes the glue that we really focused on, like, you know, maybe landing on your culture point is, is, um, de designing what the boost culture should be.
Speaker: Um, so at the very beginning, we created a set of, uh, of virtues and principles.
Speaker: So it was like a, you know, several page document, um, with your, like our five, like, you know,
Speaker: values, but we, we kind of refer virtues as like action oriented values, um, that are like the kind of the foundations of the culture.
Speaker: And then here are like 10 principles of our ways of working.
Speaker: Um, so things around, um,
Speaker: like listen by default and how we make decisions.
Speaker: And then like a bunch of, we have now 10 like business principles around like being like asset light and how we think of strategy and like not running out of cash, like being capital efficient, right?
Speaker: But we designed these very early on and then we were able to attract people and onboard them into that culture.
Speaker: So even though people come from different places, work completely remotely together, there's something that ties them to boost.
Speaker: And I never could have done this if I didn't spend 10 years failing at it, my first company,
Speaker: you know, we, we did it the opposite.
Speaker: We hired too many people.
Speaker: We, we didn't onboard people.
Speaker: Well, we didn't think enough about like the culture.
Speaker: And eventually we kind of figured a lot of that out.
Speaker: Um, but, um, with boost, I, I kind of knew cause COVID was also raging.
Speaker: I'm like, okay.
Speaker: I'm like, I can, even if I could be on the ground, like I couldn't be on the ground everywhere at the same time, I would never, you know, be as knowledgeable about that place as if somebody was from there.
Speaker: And so,
Speaker: The design challenge was not, not how do we have like a go to market strategy in Nigeria?
Speaker: I was like, well, how do we find an entrepreneur in Nigeria that can implement the boost go to market strategy and then find somebody in South Africa that could also do that.
Speaker: And then what is common between those two and how do we get them to learn from each other to accelerate each other?
Speaker: And, and the advantage of like kind of building the business during COVID is we've kind of had to figure out how to do it remotely.
Speaker: And now we have the opposite challenge of how do we, everybody's so used to being remote, right?
Speaker: It's like, we're missing things by not being face to face.
Speaker: And we're now trying to kind of swing the pendulum back a little bit more, you know, to make sure we aren't like too robotic in like our digital meetings all the time.
Speaker: Cause you do miss like that team building and bonding that you have when you're having dinner with somebody or you're running a workshop, like when you're all in the same room.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: And I wish we were having this conversation in person, Mike, over a drink at dinner.
Speaker: That'd be awesome.
Speaker: Well, I want to bring this in for a landing.
Speaker: As you were talking about those business principles and virtues, I was thinking, I wonder if those are trade secrets or if Mike would share those with our listeners, but they sound amazing.
Speaker: To be honest, so the book, I've got a copy of my desk.
Speaker: I'm not meaning to self-promote, but Failing to Win on Amazon is
Speaker: That is like the so that it's in three sections.
Speaker: It's like founding, which is like just the origin story of my first company, Zona.
Speaker: And then like the main meat of the book is failing.
Speaker: So it's like the eight biggest failures and what I learned from them, including the penultimate failure that that led to my departure.
Speaker: But then the last section is winning.
Speaker: And it's like how the origin story of boosts.
Speaker: And it lands on these virtues and principles that then became like the virtues and principles for boost.
Speaker: So they are just by the book.
Speaker: That's great.
Speaker: Buy the book.
Speaker: And I think I posted them on Twitter once.
Speaker: So you can go to my Twitter account if you want the short version.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: That's great.
Speaker: That's wonderful.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So just to bring this in for a landing, maybe two quick questions.
Speaker: If you had just a short bit of advice to give your younger self, what would you tell yourself?
Speaker: Oh, good question.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I would tell myself things are never as bad or as good as they seem.
Speaker: I think that's the one thing I've taken of just like growing up and becoming a bit more mature and hopefully a bit wiser.
Speaker: It's like, and I do this a lot with my team.
Speaker: When there's a crisis, it's like step back.
Speaker: It's not as bad.
Speaker: Hopefully every once in a while there's a bad one, but nine times out of 10, it's not as bad.
Speaker: But it's also when things are going really well.
Speaker: That's when I'm like,
Speaker: I used to just high five everybody and like, I would like sit back, but now I'm like, I'm a lot more anxious now.
Speaker: Like, okay, what's coming around the corner?
Speaker: Because often it could just be like the economy or other things that are driving that, that, you know, artists, artists, business drivers.
Speaker: It's great.
Speaker: Great advice for all of us.
Speaker: Scott.
Speaker: So yeah, Joel mentioned that dinner that I wish we could have together, but hypothetically we're at that dinner.
Speaker: What, what drink are you ordering?
Speaker: What drink am I ordering?
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: Probably just a beer, to be honest.
Speaker: Maybe I've lived in London too long.
Speaker: I have too many pints.
Speaker: Gin and tonic, if it's like really like a kind of a party atmosphere.
Speaker: But I think having a pint at the pub and like sharing stories is kind of my scene.
Speaker: I lived in London for a little while and I'm familiar with the drinking the pint at the pub concept and I certainly enjoyed quite a few pints there.
Speaker: So yeah, and probably maybe for you guys in Pittsburgh, hopefully there's a hockey game on.
Speaker: So it's the Calgary Flames have been my long team because I grew up in Calgary, but I have always been a major fan of Sidney Crosby and the Penguins as well.
Speaker: And
Speaker: And you took one of my players, Jerome McGinley, once upon a time.
Speaker: We, I think, did a short stint in Pittsburgh.
Speaker: I'm a big Crosby fan, big Penguin fan.
Speaker: We are playing well below our potential, and it looks like we're going to eke into the playoffs.
Speaker: So we'll see what happens.
Speaker: Good luck.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Well, thanks everybody for listening.
Speaker: If you enjoyed this episode and would like to help support the podcast, please share it with others, post about it on social media, or leave a rating and review.
Speaker: It all helps.
Speaker: You can follow me on LinkedIn at joel-reed-oa and follow Scott Tobe on LinkedIn at scotttobe-sfp.
Speaker: And Mike, if people want to follow you or learn more about Boost, what should they do?
Speaker: Yeah, so Boost is, the website is withboost.co.
Speaker: There's a bunch of other Boosts, so that's the one you want to go to.
Speaker: I'm on Twitter, Mike P. Quinn, and I think LinkedIn at the same, you can just Google Mike Quinn and Boost.
Speaker: So you'll find me that way.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Well, Mike, you're an awesome guest.
Speaker: Thanks so much for joining us today, and thanks everyone who listened.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Bye.
