Espresso: David Hieatt, Hiut Denim - Be a speed boat not a shipliner

0:00Morning, morning, or welcome. Yes, I have grown a tash, I have got a nose ring and I am covered in tattoos. I am your barista for the day. Welcome to Espresso short, snappy Espresso short podcast episodes. I've literally downloaded all the wisdom from all the founders and all the brands like Gude, Tills, Coconut Collaborative, Candy Kittens, Little Moons, Planet Organic and I've distilled it into this micro short snappy wisdom to give you a mahoosive edge on the day to kickstart your day. So look, without further ado, let's get cracking and enjoy this espresso shot. We're in a really fast world and the ocean liner is really slow, right?

0:41is slow to turn to change to stop i think one of the strengths of being like a small and a challenger brand is your ability to react and to be agile and in a way your biggest strength is your agility and ability to change really really fast and the important bit about the the ocean liner and the speedboat is don't drop anchor and that's what the big ships have to do right they have to drop anchor and they have to stay put and they have to do things how they've always done them and the ability to be fast and react is a incredible strength in a world that is completely changing on a almost on a daily basis that the one thing that shouldn't really change is your values and things that you believe in but your ability to get to them can change doing so for me it's you know like being small now is such an incredible strength the david and goliath story really speaks to me but there'll be a lot of people thinking oh we're too small we don't have the budget we don't have the muscle of the big boys we don't have the the strength when you said you don't have to drop anchor what what do you mean by that the big ocean liner has to drop anchor I mean it has to stop and it has to wait for the tide to turn so it can go into port do you mean like but this little cheeky little speedboat can zap around super fast and the thing is you want to react to something in an incredibly powerful and fast way the way to the future is to get there before others otherwise you're always going to be copying and you're always going to be behind and this little speedboat metaphor really is you going hey you can get to the future before anyone else and if you can do that your size doesn't really matter that much and people get too obsessed with size because right now in a fast changing world what's the biggest benefit is like you being slow isn't the thing that you want, right?

3:02So you can react, you can get to the future before anyone else. And so therefore you don't need to be the biggest, but you need to be agile and responsive. And you need to like read signals where others can't even see anything. And so you suddenly go, what does that mean? What does that mean to me? What could that mean to my business? And how can I go and respond super fast? this mindset now is the toolbox for a challenging brand is you've got a very fast changing world and you don't actually want to be that big because being big means you can't actually change super quick the best armies are the fast armies not the biggest armies and so i think we just got this opportunity in time to go like what do you need actually a big budget for the interesting thing about big budgets is you always have more people to be more worried about how you spend it i mean like yeah and when you have a really small budget nobody gives a shit and you can place small bets find out some data and then go and place a bigger bet because you got some data and placing small bets is a fantastic way to have ideas go and check things out go and see what the market actually thinks as opposed to what the research companies tell you.

4:25So the market always decides, but you can have a cheeky little small bet and just go, okay, I've actually learned something here. I think we're in this extraordinary time for small brands where, you know, like company of ones, company of tens, company of 20 people, they're all kind of small, but you can be incredible at being small the thing that i've always struggled with and we were talking before we went on air is really that thing of like this growth like on one level we kind of want it just because everyone else wants it and then you go like why do you want it and i think about growth in perhaps different ways now and and i didn't always think this way whereas i think now you can grow influence as opposed to size and that's really about quality how do you 10x your creativity as opposed to 10x the size of the company and we make jeans for you know renny rossetti in the past but he became world's best chef by serving 45 people and yet he's the world's best chef in fact he's won world's best chef five times he's not allowed actually to enter anymore because it's not yeah he's so good he keeps winning it's ridiculous growth can be really stressful and you think oh i've suddenly got all these mouths to feed and and then the company runs you and you stop running it thank you so so much for listening it honestly means the world to me i hope you enjoyed your morning coffee and go and have an amazing day let's be having you if you want the fun episode it will be in the show notes a link will be in the show notes the full episode thank you so much please stay friends as well it means the world to me