Why selling your business isn’t the only path to success

Prioritizing growth to sell is a perfectly reasonable business strategy. Being acquired by a larger group at some point (like Poppi’s recent sale to PepsiCo) makes sense for many—to generate cash flow for expansion, take a shortcut to economies of scale or market penetration, or just cash in for early retirement. But not for me.

Early on in my business journey at Bulletproof, we considered a buyout from a renowned global comms agency. But when they starting asking for growth projections and questioning whether we could achieve them, we walked away. We went on to smash those projections within three years—that’s when I truly started to realize we would be better off independent. Really, who would want to report to someone who doesn’t believe in your vision?

Putting independence first

Growing a good business is about relevance, internal culture, and excellence—qualities that risk dilution under a larger group. You can so easily lose your way and what you stand for—just look at the recent headlines around Ben and Jerry’s, with original CEO, David Stever, ousted for the political activism that was always at the heart of the original business. Also, as you relinquish control, you invariably compromise on how you pursue innovation or map the future. It’s why I’ve always put independence first.

But if you don’t want to bank on acquisition in your strategy for scale, how can you nurture expansion, while retaining your independent spirit? In fact, independence and global success go together quite nicely, you just need to embrace the right mindset.

Always striving for relevance

Different leaders will always have different qualities, but independence, to me, is about embracing a certain restlessness. A business shouldn’t just be about creating great work, but about being at the cutting edge of culture—about being relevant.

For that, you need to be constantly moving, searching, never settling. We could be a perfectly good business of 50 people in London, sticking to a clearly defined niche—very well-off but ultimately very bored. Or we can be the business that doesn’t settle, one that embraces new technology, new opportunity and innovation without having to deal with interminable layers of approval. It’s a choice you need to actively make and embrace.

Embracing imperfection

To do so, though, you need to allow yourself to make mistakes. In fact, being able to make mistakes, without being dragged over the coals for every misstep, is one of the biggest luxuries of independence.

We’ve made many mistakes at Bulletproof. For example, we messed up when we thought we could crack New York without having people on the ground and soon learned that it wouldn’t work. From a personal point of view, I made the mistake of thinking I could do it all—run the business and be the creative head. For a long time, I didn’t accept that there were people better suited to running parts of the business. It’s a mistake I wish I’d made a lot earlier. You don’t grow a business, you grow people.

So being independent is about embracing that imperfection and learning from those gaffes along the way. If you don’t, you never progress. It goes hand-in-hand with persistence. As a business founder or leader, you take things personally, so you’re protective over the business and its people. But you have to learn from mistakes and move on quickly.

The right approach to scale

Pursuing scale as a marker of success has its place. But progress means that you must grow for the right reasons—and without compromising quality. For us, scale is about growing talent and capabilities to complement our strengths. It’s never about scale for the sake of it.

For example, we dismissed the idea of franchising our name for global expansion, even though we received a few approaches. Maintaining control over quality was far more important than spreading our name in this way.

A better way to think about scale is that it’s all about the right talent. Hard work, determination, nurturing, kind individuals who attract the right work and embody your values. If you get this right, you can scale.

Articulate your vision

To ensure that quality, you also need conviction—and vision. People can help you with every other aspect of running a business, but the vision needs to come from the top. It needs to be both externally and internally facing. That way you will always have a road map of what you want to achieve and why, and you’ll always know how to take your team on that journey,

At Bulletproof, our vision is to challenge the creative agency networks through doing the most compelling, commercially creative work on the planet. To prove there is a different way of doing things.

Keep your fighting spirit 

But underpinning it all needs to be a fighting spirit. Things start to fall apart when you think you’ve “made it’” Don’t forget the early days, which invariably are hard. I didn’t come from a lot, for example.

You should always nurture the mindset to spot the opportunities when they present themselves. Diageo is now one of our largest clients, but it all started with a $20,000 brief for a cocktail in a can. Sometimes businesses reach a certain size and only go for the million-dollar briefs—but that’s not how you grow, especially not as an independent business. 

You can see this fight, this alertness to opportunity, in many of the world’s most respected entrepreneurs. These leaders always look to evolve their enterprises, both into new markets and within their business practices, and their fight and drive keeps them relevant. Nike’s Phil Knight is a great example. His book Shoe Dog is a personal favorite. In it, he speaks so honestly about what they went through, and the hustle of the early days.

It’s what makes running a fiercely independent business so rewarding. With it will come the growth that is truly rewarding—and the freedom to say no when a buyer comes knocking.