Revenue to objective: Simon Griffiths shares his advertising, tech, and management suggestions

Simon Griffiths spent 50 hours sitting on a rest room in a chilly warehouse to crowdfund his, Jehan Ratnatunga and Danny Alexander’s enterprise thought — a rest room paper e-commerce enterprise which places its income into constructing bogs in impoverished communities.

Since 2012, it has made greater than $20 million in income, donating half to non-profit companions engaged on clear water and sanitation tasks.

Griffiths sat down for an interview, sharing his advertising suggestions, how he made tech options as the corporate scaled, and the way he’s tailored his management as the corporate grows.

Take photographs to hit homeruns

In 2018, Who Offers A Crap began a advertising marketing campaign providing a free trial pack to clients who signed up for a bathroom paper subscription, launching it on Earth Day.

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They transformed 10,000 new clients within the first couple of days. Earlier than that marketing campaign, the crew was changing 20,000 clients a month.

However ‘homeruns’ like that solely occur as a result of they take so many photographs, in keeping with Griffiths.

“Now we have advertising campaigns that fall flat each week, and campaigns that kick targets each month,” he says.

“Corporations that do effectively are simply having sufficient photographs to hit sufficient residence runs to get them to the place they should go.”

However you may’t simply maintain swinging ceaselessly, Griffiths notes. The corporate has the power to ship SMS messages and emails 24 hours a day, “however that might be a horrible buyer expertise,” he says.

The litmus check for him is whether or not it’s content material that he would wish to learn himself, and whether or not he can be excited to obtain an e mail and open it.

“We attempt to get to a spot the place if somebody sees us within the inbox, they know that it’s going to make them smile,” Griffiths says.

Gaffa tape tech options

As one of many early e-commerce firms in Australia on Shopify, Griffiths says they needed to make do with a whole lot of their tech selections as they grew.

“We felt like we have been all the time about six to 12 months in entrance of the event plans of the platforms that have been on,” Griffiths says.

To handle, Griffiths and the crew needed to accept choices that gave them 70% of the potential they wanted, and discover a solution to ‘gaffa tape’ the ultimate third.

One instance is WGAC’s resolution to supply free delivery to Australian clients of their early years, regardless of solely actually having the ability to supply it to seven out of 10 clients.

As a result of there was no plugin out there to calculate delivery value from postcode, the crew needed to manually examine every order that got here by means of, and if free delivery wasn’t doable for them, ship the shopper an e mail requesting $8 to ship their order.

The one different choice was to construct a full tech stack of his personal. 

Despite the fact that Griffiths had a background in laptop science, it simply wasn’t going to be a great use of his time, he determined.

“We had greater fish to fry,” he says.

How his management type has modified

When Griffiths began out, he says he felt he needed to resolve each drawback within the enterprise himself. The bootstrapped enterprise was brief on capital and new hires needed to be educated — it wasn’t doable to rent extremely skilled folks.

However as the corporate bought greater, the issues grew to become too large for him to even take into consideration fixing himself, he says.

“It’s a must to transition from this very form of drawback centered mindset, to now determining the way you encourage the crew to go and resolve these issues,” Griffiths says.

For him, it was a matter of evolving to be not close to the issues, and giving his crew the company to unravel them.

As an alternative of being within the weeds, he sees his function as inspiring and main them, in order that they’re attacking issues in one of the best ways doable.

Griffiths says he achieves that by explicitly linking everybody’s each day work with the general objective of the corporate — to verify everybody on this planet has entry to a rest room and clear water by 2050.

That’s the 30 12 months objective, which is then damaged down into 5 12 months targets, then one 12 months methods, all the best way all the way down to a person or crew’s quarterly objective.

Whereas not each small enterprise will probably be explicitly purpose-driven the best way WGAC is, each organisation has a objective, Griffiths says.

“Determining how you can discover that objective, and articulate it in a method that’s simple for folks to recollect and join into, is the most important problem.”

You’ll be able to watch the total webinar, Nailing Growth: Ambitious leaders reflect on their journey from purpose to impact, for much more insights.

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