Here's How You Can Disrupt Any Industry: Think BIG

The Internet is making it easier than ever for entrepreneurs to think big, and disrupt slow moving industries.

We’ve seen technology revolutionise journalism, allowing only the best publications to survive the Web 2.0 era. Twenty years ago if you wanted the privilege of having other people read your words you had to start working in the mailroom of a big publisher and work your way up for a decade. Likewise, if you wanted your fix of daily news and editorials, you were forced to read whatever happened to be published. Now, anyone with a worthy opinion or something interesting to say can easily publish it online. Tools like Twitter, Medium, and Wordpress, have democratised storytelling. The big publishers now have to compete in an open market of ideas.

We’ve also seen technology revolutionise the entertainment industry. Justin Bieber managed to get millions of fans around the world after uploading a few videos to YouTube. Love him or hate him, he proved that the Internet shatters barriers that existed only a few years ago.

Similarly, in business, you don’t need a huge marketing budget to take on the established industry Goliaths. The winners in the business world are very quickly becoming those that know how to adapt and innovate, not those with the deepest pockets.

If I had to start Kogan.com 20 years ago, on Day One I would have needed showrooms all over the world stockpiled with millions of dollars of products. Then I would’ve needed a multi-million dollar advertising budget to get people into those showrooms. The Internet has removed these barriers.

Now, anyone can turn a good idea into a functioning business overnight, and find customers all around the world. But the ideas of years gone by will no longer cut it.

When somebody approaches me with a new business idea, I ask them three questions to evaluate the idea:

1. What is your competitive advantage? (This will ensure that you are differentiated from your competition and you stand out in your industry)
2. What is your value add to consumers? (This will ensure that there is a clear reason as to why a customer will want to transact with you)
3. Do people think your idea is crazy? (If everyone thinks your idea is crazy then it challenges the status quo enough to make a difference)

If you can answer these three questions well, there's a great chance you're on to something.

When I started Kogan, everyone told me I was crazy, and that people would never buy TVs online. My mum thought I was leaving a great paying job just to be a TV salesman. Business ‘experts’ said it would never work. In our home country of Australia, we were the first business to loudly and proudly tell people about the benefits of shopping online. Now we're the biggest online retailer here, and still one of the fastest growing companies. By thinking big, we've been able to gain significant market share from some of the biggest companies in the world, in one of the most competitive industries.

I get asked to speak at many community events, entrepreneurship courses, high schools, and universities. After the talks, I always have people running their big ideas by me. And quite often, I hear some great ones. Sometimes I’ll see that person six or twelve months down the track, and ask them how their business is going. Disappointingly, the most common response is: "What business?"

Thinking big is an absolute waste of time if you're not going to execute on your ideas. You can have the best idea in the world, sit on it for far too long, and have a savvy entrepreneur come along and beat you to the punch. Once you've got your crazy, disruptive, big idea, it all comes down to how fast and well you can turn that idea into a business. Here are some tips on how to turn these big ideas into a thriving business:

React swiftly and innovate

A jetski has many advantages over a massive ocean liner. As a disrupter, you must take full advantage of all your competitive advantages. One of them is speed and agility. The bureaucracy in traditional big companies means that they take a very long time to make decisions and adapt to changes in the marketplace. You must exploit this and ensure that your company is on top of all the latest consumer trends.

For instance, online retail has been prominent for close to 10 years. However, the largest retailers are only now starting to acknowledge that the Internet is real and here to stay. The businesses that recognised this trend over 5 years ago now have a significant footprint in this channel. It’s now the big guys that are trying to play catch up to established online stores.

One percenters

The big guys have deep pockets and huge advertising budgets to influence the public. To compete with this, a challenger brand must ensure that its organisation is as lean and efficient as possible. This isn’t easy, as there is no silver bullet for how to achieve this. It’s always made up by lots of little things – at Kogan, we call these the “one percenters”. For instance, when we buy Apples for the office, we compare Pink Lady Apples with Pink Lady Apples and order them from the place that has the best price. This attention to detail and efficiency is our duty to our customers, and it's something the big brands are generally too lazy to bother with.

A few more examples of this are:

• We run a paperless office. Not only does this make our business more environmentally friendly, it saves us lots of money and enables our staff to provide even better service because we can find information quicker.
• We have improved the packaging of all our products to make them smaller and sturdier. Again, this is not only better for the environment (we can ship more using less space) but it also saves money. Although the sturdier cardboard may cost a little more, It also means products don’t get damaged in transit and we save by not having to send out replacements.
• Our business is run entirely on cloud based architecture. This saves us money by not needing to support an internal data room with servers. It also gives our staff the flexibility to access any of their work securely from anywhere in the world.
• We use Skype for all our international phone calls.

As a price leader, all these “one percenters” reduce our cost base and help us take on the billion dollar companies. After all, thirty "one percenters” adds up to 30%!

Walk before you run

Don't let a bit of success at a small scale get you overly excited. By all means celebrate the early wins -- your first customer, your first million dollar day, winning a big account, etc. But don't lose sight of the big picture by getting too excited about the small stuff. At the same time, ensure you are learning to walk before you run. At Kogan, we perfected delivering products in Australia, before launching in the UK. Then we perfected efficiently servicing the UK market before going global. Even though you might be perfecting one market to start with, you can secure your future path with very little cost if you act fast. From personal pain, I can't stress enough the need to secure your intellectual property rights early on. We didn't get the kogan.com domain name when we first started, and as a result we recently had to buy it for a dollar amount with many zeroes on the end of it.

It’s not a short sprint, it’s a long marathon

Always remember that business is not a short sprint. Never let short-term profitability or a few early successes deviate you from building a strong business that will be here for many years to come (like the big companies you are taking on). It is important to have a clear goal and vision about what your business is out to achieve. This vision will make you and your team wake up every morning.

The big guys have been around for a long time, and you won’t beat them overnight. It will take a lot of hard work, determination and perseverance. A lot of people who don’t know much about business often tell me: “Wow Ruslan, you’ve become an overnight success”..I tell them: “Yeah, it’s taken me 31 years to become an overnight success.”

Learn from others

A fool learns from his mistakes, a wise man from others. Always keep an eye on what others are doing around you. It's far too easy to get stuck in your own world. It's much cheaper to learn from someone else's mistakes, than your own. Get inspiration from what others are doing right, but get just as much from what they're doing wrong.

Be objective

Base your decisions on objective facts rather than emotions. We think big, but we also have to take on businesses that have much bigger budgets than we do. We can't rely on expensive focus groups, hefty market research, or estimates to figure out when we should stop manufacturing and marketing heaters and when to start air conditioners. We look at purely objective data about when shoppers in any one country stop looking for one and start looking for the other:

When you're thinking big, it's easy to sometimes get carried away with your dreams and emotions. Sometimes, tough decisions have to be made. Make sure you always accept reality for what it is, and always have a clear strategy in place for how you're going to achieve your lofty goals. When Sir Richard Branson said he wanted to take people into space, it may have sounded like pie in the sky thinking. But he had a clear plan and is executing that as we speak with Virgin Galactic.

Shake things up

Only a big, crazy idea can shatter the status quo. The best businesses do things in a way that no one has ever done before. Facebook changed the way we communicate. However, if Mark Zuckeberg told us ten years ago his website would one day have more hits than Google, everyone would have laughed. Now, Facebook has over one billion active users. True entrepreneurs are inventors with the self-belief to take new steps down untraveled roads, shatter the norm and find imaginative ways to improve our lives. If you need any more inspiration, just take a look at Apple's "Think Different" advertisement.

Each new generation is a beneficiary of the great minds of the generations before. However, an inventor needs to build upon what he has inherited. Previous generations inherited the book, and created the computer. Today’s generation has inherited one of the greatest opportunities in the history of man with the Internet. Now, the craziest and most original minds among us have the ability to fully explore its best potentials.