Bob Skinstad - Focus, Commitment and The Power of Choice

In this episode, I catch up with former professional rugby player Bob Skinstad who played for the Springboks. In addition to his time on the pitch, Bob also has a wealth of experience in the field of business and investments. From Stellenbosch University, Bob spent twelve years playing professional sport internationally.

In this episode, I catch up with former professional rugby player Bob Skinstad who played for the Springboks. In addition to his time on the pitch, Bob also has a wealth of experience in the field of business and investments.

From Stellenbosch University, Bob spent twelve years playing professional sport internationally. During his sporting career, he had a number of investments and co-investments which trajected his interest in the world business and entrepreneurship. He dabbled in a corporate role to learn the formal side of business, “learning how to dot the i’s and cross the t’s” and managed his own portfolio of investments. He is now a partner for investment capital management firm Knife Capital and is a venture partner for a family office in the United Kingdom.

Getting over the obstacles and learning through focus 

Facing a major injury in his career, Bob had to overcome the challenge of putting his body, mind and energy into adapting back into sport after three years out. To get himself, his BMI and his speed back in place, Bob had to put in an immense amount of effort to conquer the day-to-day struggle to get back to the physical strength necessary to perform and succeed as a professional athlete.

“That was the first time I realised that stuff that had come easily to me was genuinely a day-to-day struggle for a lot of people and it became a day-to-day struggle for me because of the new body type. It was a turning point in my life realising that when you take on big projects like this, there needs to an nth degree of focus and commitment and there needs to be a plan and roadmap and you need to be able to put milestones and grow. And when a lesson comes along like this, you learn it and you learn it properly.”

The fear of failure and reward of risk

Bob noted that risk and working through the fear of failure is a tremendous exploration, and it’s brave to talk about the fear because people don’t like the concept of failure. Without thinking about it, Bob’s default has been optimism and “what if I fail” wasn’t a question he asked. Growing up with supportive parents, he tends towards saying yes to risk and not getting wrapped up in the woes and worries of the fear of failure.

“Everyone believes entrepreneurs are completely on top of all the risk in the world, but actually the idea is calculated risk, not fearlessness. If I fail, the cost-benefit analysis is in my favour, so screw it, I’m going to go forward. The more you admit that failure exists, the more comfortable you get with the risks involved.”

Working in the present, with the future in mind

When working in business with different avenues of career at one time, it’s crucial to learn to say no to things. The more a person says yes, the more they risk feeling overwhelmed by having too many things on their plate. Bob’s approach to this is choosing the present with the idea of the future in mind:

“The future is not always going to provide the reassurance you seek from it, it’s actually just a little bit of what you feel right now, just in a few month’s time. The future, from my vantage point, is going to look very similar to what’s happening today. The new future is only just a couple of months ahead of that. And I think that’s okay.”

It means there’s a reason to say no, especially if you think you’re on the right track because you’ll get there eventually. Thinking about the future as the only pinpoint to strive towards makes it more difficult to enjoy the present without enormous pressure. But if you’re saying no to the wrong things for the right reasons, then that’s okay.

As Jeff Bezos famously said, people often ask what’s going to change in the next ten years, but there’s more interest in what’s not going to change in the next ten years. And that’s fundamentally true. So it’s better to play on the field that you have rather than focusing on trying to predict the future.

“And it’s freeing to mentally grasp it. You can sit here and wring your hands and say you need to change it. Changing the future will change it, worrying about changing it will not.”

Selflessness is a fallacy and altruism is a lie

Society has developed a sort of quasi-religious approach that giving everything to other people is the ideal to look up to, but it’s actually not the case. As Bob noted:

“I’m starting to understand that selflessness, complete selflessness is overrated and actually non-existent. This is especially for women. Particularly in the home environment, daughters and mothers are trained to be sort of be quiet and subservient and I think that’s a societal problem. A lot of women have fought this and are incredible in their roles.”

Instead of aiming to give everything to everyone, look after yourself and slowly things will be okay. The guy next to you will look after himself and the girl next to him will look after herself and joint and separately we will look after each other in the needs of our current endeavour. 

Give to the givers, don’t give to the takers

Prioritising yourself and your family doesn’t make you selfish. It makes you focus on improving yourself and your life, which sets you up to become the best you that you can be.

“If you want to survive in this world, give to the givers, don’t give to the takers. If you give to the takers, you’ll never give it back. If you give to the givers, you’ll get it back your whole life long. And that’s why I think selflessness is overrated. I don’t mean just look after yourself, I mean look after the people who will look after you.” 

You have agency and the choices in life are up to you

When it comes down to choices in life, you get to choose what you like, you get to choose what you fail at. So if you’re going to fail, you might as well choose to risk failing at something you love.

No matter what the world tells you: In your life, in your side hustle, you have agency and you get to choose what you want to make from your time.

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

If you want to get in touch with Bob or find out more about what his venture capital endeavours, find him on LinkedIn, on Twitter, or check out Knife Capital.

Sell, sell, sell and other startup stumbling blocks

I was fortunate to be invited to mentor a group of startups at the 88mph work space. I sat with each startup for 20 minutes (timed) and asked them about their businesses, the problems they were encountering and the help they thought I could provide.Here are some of the main issues that came up.

Sell

Almost every startup I spoke to out of the nine were battling with one common issue - sales. It seems as though we're hellbent on building tech and improving it forever without focusing on either the business model or the selling of the business model. I was no different in many of my first startups but eventually you realise that your product is good enough to sell (not perfect) and that you need to go out and do this.Selling is scary for a few reasons:

1. What if I fail and no one wants what I'm selling?
2. What if I succeed and actually have to start building a business?
3. The embarrassment of the hard sell - this is an South African issue, we're too polite to tell people how amazing we are.
4. No understanding of sales tactics and/or sales cycles.

Once you understand the issues they are easy to overcome because they are simply not issues. If you don't know how to sell, learn. How do you learn? By selling. If you are fearful of failure you get over it by trying and failing or succeeding and vice versa for success. You wont be afraid of success once you are succeeding.Being afraid to hard sell your product means one of two things: You don't know how to do it or you don't think your product is good enough to sell. The best founders sell their products in their sleep, they just don't know it's called sales. If you love your product, if it's solving a problem and if it actually works, it's an easy sell for anyone.

Launch

The myth of the MVP is one that I am seeing pop up all over the place. Many entrepreneurs believe that an MVP is the worst possible acceptable version of your final product. This is sort of true but ultimately incorrect in my view. An MVP is the minimum viable product that you can put into a specific (and forgiving) market like early adopters that will allow you to gather valuable data and insight into the next iteration of your product.In short an MVP needs to help you deploy, learn, analyse and iterate. It's not a shittier version of your final product. It's a learning tool helping you move towards your final product.So what you need to do is plan and launch.

Growth

There is a buzz-phrase floating about the infamous tech blogs abroad and that buzz-phrase is "growth hacking". This is a painful phrase for me to hear. This phrase and concept is misleading and over simplistic leading founders and entrepreneurs to believe that growing a customer base is simply a matter of hacking, spending, developing and repeating.This might be true when you've got 10 developers, R1m to spend on marketing and A/B testing set up already but getting those things going takes time and effort (let alone money).Growth can occur in many ways with many different affects on your business.

• Rushing growth can destroy your service and flood it with spam, errors and server issues.
• Growing too slowly can tarnish the reputation of your community and stagnate growth further.
• Faking growth by buying users on advertising networks can provide the short-term illusion of growth but long term closure for your business.
• Growth without a plan, scaling in place and a revenue model will upset you, your investors, your customers and leave them searching for an alternative service.

I am a firm believer in organic growth especially if you are looking for those users to pay you for a service. It's tough to advertise blindly and expect a customer to pay you for something they've only seen through marketing. Organic word of mouth and peer-endorsement is often the best way to create viral growth. Although this type of growth requires a fantastic product and time to evolve. I met with nine startups who all believed they were fundamentally different to one another when in truth their problems were almost all the same. Business is business and problems persist no matter what business you're in. Learn to share your weaknesses and strengths and learn from the businesses around you. The best way to learn is to observe those around you.

How we got Venture Capital in South Africa

On August 1st, 2010 Vincent Maher and I Co-Founded Motribe; a mobile-web start-up. We launched the product on September 14th 2010. We received a seed round of venture capital from 4DI Capital and below are a few thoughts on my experiences with Motribe and what we went through to get our company off the ground with a Venture Capital partner.

The people

Some say that business partners are like married couples. I don't think so. Marriages are very easy to exit out of, divorce is rife. Getting out of a business relationship is exceptionally difficult and should be so for various reasons. I also think that the marriages are entered into after a lot of flailing about and stumbling. The business relationship that I've entered in to with Vincent is a very carefully considered, rehearsed and tested one. There are contracts in place, there are plans for the future and there are defined roles. We have worked together for about 3 years in various companies and in various roles. We know that we work well together in high-pressure situations and we know that we can make it work. How do we know this? Because we've done it before.The level of trust and work experience that Vincent and I have makes us a trustworthy and reliable partnership. It's hard enough to build a business, try building a business while trying to build a partnership. That's difficult.

The business plan

Our business plan grew and moulded and changed over a period of 4 months. The best thing to happen to our business plan and revenue models was pitching to Venture Capitalists (VC). Through the pitch process and a very humble approach on our side we managed to weed out the bad parts, the unnecessary parts and the long and boring parts. In the end we were left with a business plan no longer than 10 pages in total that outlined our business idea, our revenue streams, our first 18 months of expenses and potential and projected revenue.

It's about the jockey, not the horse

Ideas are everywhere. If you've got an idea I can promise you there are many other people with the exact idea or at the very least something very, very similar. Do not hedge your bets on a good idea. Truly great, unique and new ideas are come around once in a generation and no offense but you probably don't have it (I sure as hell didn't).So what you need is a good jockey to build the idea. You need to be an executer, a builder or someone with more than just an idea. You need to know how you are going to make money from your idea, how you are going to grow and you also need to prove that you have the skills, the experience and the potential to get it all done.

Timing, timing, timing

I actually cannot express enough the importance of timing. Sometimes good ideas emerge, launch and fail for one reason: Bad timing. Sometimes an average idea with average people behind it in an average market will make it big because the timing was right. We've had a hefty dose of good timing and better luck. We built our business plan over a holiday, the very first VC we met with was the right one, the other VCs who turned us away (and yes there were many of those) did so for the right reasons, we resigned from our jobs, moved to Cape Town, had the right experience, met the right people, tipped in to right market from the right country with the right relationships all the almost perfect time. Everyone says mobile is booming right now and we're riding that wave. People need what we have right now, not 6 months ago or in 6 months time, right now. It's about timing.

Domain Expertise

Once you think you have an idea that might become profitable, you have a business partner (or are going it alone) that can't help you travel down this path, the next thing you need is domain expertise. Don't go to a VC coming from a street-sweeping background and tell them that you have this idea to build the next space station close to Venus. You don't have the domain expertise to do this and they will point that out. If you are pitching a mobile company then you need to prove that you are an expert in the field of mobile and that you have a track record that reflects this.No one is investing on a hope and prayer, no one is going to give you money because you ask them to politely. You need to be one of the very few people in the industry, country or perhaps even the world who can execute the idea you have.

A Non Disclosure Agreement is NOT a dealbreaker

If the VC, investor, advisor or loan manager wont sign an NDA, who gives a shit? As I've said and will say again, you're idea is not new. The best advice that we received regarding NDAs was this: If you force a VC to sign an NDA you are showing weakness and lack of faith in your idea, you are also showing a lack of trust in the VC and yourself. If you back your idea and yourself, if you have an execution plan and are ready to roll with it then who cares if someone else builds it, you need to know that when you build it, it will be the best, the first and the only.There are obviously exceptions to this, if you have a unique, once in a lifetime, groundbreaking, revolutionary idea and there is a reason that you believe someone could take your idea, then defend it, but not so violently that you lose sight of reality (If you think you have one of those ideas, contact me).

Shop around

Don't be naive enough to think that the first person you go to will look over your business plan, look you in the eye and hand you a cheque for a bazillion dollars. This will not happen, ever. In fact it probably hasn't ever happened. The process is long, arduous and treacherous. There are risks involved so try and mitigate that risk. Take your business plan to various investors, VC firms, angel investors, wealthy people you know and see what they say, get responses, learn and wait. But please, don't think that the one VC you got to owes you anything, they don't and nor does the second or third VC firm. But if you shop around and plug away at it hard enough, one of them will start to take you seriously.

Go with your gut

We did shop around for various offers, as I have stated above. But in the end we went with the firm that we met with at the very beggining. We partnered with the guys who were the most honest, the closest fit to our culture and the most open and transparent.4Di Capital told us to shop around, they told us to use lawyers of our own to check through contracts, they offered us a deal that we felt was fair and they gave us terms that we understood and we felt comfortable with. In the end, we went with our guts.

Risk it

I resigned from my job well before we knew that VC was coming our way. It wasn't about the VC. We were going ahead with our business whether we had a financial backer or not. If you don't have this level of belief in your business, business partner and skills then don't bother asking for VC.

Keep at it but listen

People will tell you that you are stupid, that the idea is old, outdated, lame, can't monetize and wont work. But listen to me when I say this: If you have domain expertise, experience, a track record, the right idea, the right partner, the right timing and a pure unadulterated faith keep at it. However when people tell you that there is a problem or a hole somewhere, mend it, fix it and mould it. There are people out there, many of them, who know better than you or I. Learn, listen and keep at it.

Venture capital is not for everyone