【Lesson #7 - Zoom in, zoom out】
For the last post in this mini-series of "7 lessons from 7 early-stage founders" I spoke with Jackson Aw, the founder & CEO of Mighty Jaxx (AW#20), the region's leading platform to purchase limited edition collectibles. With over 8 years of experience as an entrepreneur, Jackson touches upon the danger of short-term thinking, especially when it comes to decision making, while highlighting the importance for founders to both "zoom-in and zoom-out."
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As founders, we often speak of vision and long-term thinking, but seldom put it into practice. With the amount of years that I’ve spent in entrepreneurship, I’ve come to learn that every single decision you make eventually comes back around.
Establishing distribution and finding channels to expand our products’ reach has been my core focus at Mighty Jaxx. A few years ago, I was looking to expand our company into Country X (anonymized for sensitivity purposes) in response to increasing inbound interest. Given the nature of the market, we needed to find a local partner but unfortunately none of the big fish wanted to work with us. Desperate for any way possible to get our foot in the door, I settled with the first partner that responded to our proposition.
The deal was inked immediately, closing in just a few days with haphazard terms that recently came back to bite us in the butt. With 65% of our sales now coming from Country X, we far outgrew the original partnership and our partner was no longer suitable to handle our future growth. Unfortunately, the terms of the deal didn’t allow for any clean way to get out of the arrangement and we quickly found ourselves stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Ultimately, money was used to resolve the issue. Looking back, I would have structured the deal more carefully, thinking at least 3 steps ahead and projecting multiple scenarios, particularly ones with more upside and optimism. But as a founder you tend to get caught up with the day to day fights, losing track of the bigger picture.
How I approach decision making is worlds apart now. Anytime we’re doing new distribution deals, we’ll have 3 - 4 sessions with the C-level, collecting information from each department to provide a 360 of the company, sometimes taking upwards of 4 months. But, of course, execution speed is an important consideration for startups; that’s where Colin Powell’s principal comes in handy: pull the trigger on a decision when you have anywhere between 40% to 70% of the information available—nothing more, nothing less.
Calling all founders targeting SEA, AI/IoT, or Blockchain/Defi, applications for AW#22 are open till January 4 -> https://bit.ly/3hrPQFE
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