Chapter 8

The UnStoppable Six

How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business or a Start-Up the Rackspace Way (in about an Hour)

EVERY BILLION-DOLLAR BUSINESS begins as a scrappy small business.

Rackspace once had 3 employees. Now it has 5,000. Watching something that starts so simple and straightforward turn into a global enterprise so big and complex furnishes another insight that underlies just about everything in this book.

The insight is this: The core of any business, the original heart and soul that first allowed you to succeed with customers, never really changes for companies that stay vibrant and relevant, no matter how big they get. Inside that billion-dollar corporation, the value equation you first discovered is still just as simple—and most important, it needs to be, if you want to keep going and growing. The selling proposition that made them choose to buy from you—the values, the dream, the reason the market needed you—is still the foundation of it all. The idea you stand for must be reaffirmed by the decisions you make and actions you take every day.

This truth is as important to you as a start-up as it is for the biggest companies. And it’s based on an immutable concept called the Piper Cub Principle.

THE PIPER CUB PRINCIPLE

This little rule should boost your faith in what’s possible at any stage of growth because it applies in so many areas—from building things to operating things to designing things or just understanding in general. I heard it from an airline pilot who flies the Boeing 747–400ER—a plane that weighs 910,000 pounds, carries 400 people, and is as long as a city block. A Piper Cub, by contrast, is a tiny two-seater airplane whose first models had a 40-horsepower engine that looked like it belonged in a cartoon. Original Cubs were so basic, they didn’t even have a radio or a gas gauge.

The 747 captain told me that when he’s at the controls and gets in a jam, especially during training, he reminds himself, “Inside it’s just your little Piper Cub, pal—stick and rudder, power and pitch. Flies the same.”

Indeed it does.

The Piper Cub Principle offers two big parallels for starting and growing anything, and at the same time affirms Accelerated Proficiency:

Inside that massive 747 is a virtual Piper Cub that takes off, flies, and lands according to the same techniques and principles. And you control that 747—not just virtually but actually—with the same stick, rudder, and four instruments you’d find in a Cub, monitoring your airspeed, altitude, power, and compass, and keeping them all in balance. Those are the same four elements that are essential to fly any plane. That’s why, without exaggerating, if you can fly a little Cub, we can teach you to fly a $350 million 747 in less than an hour.

Today’s most sophisticated jets have the four instruments displayed on two TV screens on the instrument panel (a.k.a. the dashboard) right in front of the pilot. The one on the left has the flying info—the airspeed and altitude just mentioned. The one on the right has the navigation info so you can get to your destination. The whole airborne monster with 400 people riding in the back is flown from just those two screens.

The Piper Cub Principle is the reason why a billion-dollar business and a small start-up fly the same way. If you can manage one, you can manage the other.

THE UNSTOPPABLE SIX

Like the pilot’s handful of essential instruments, what we call The UnStoppable Six are the six essential priorities—three strategic and three tactical—that are the master principles you need to start up and run a successful, belief-based enterprise like Rackspace. They reflect the principles that Graham Weston and the Rackspace founders used to get ahead of their competitors and still use today.

As leader of your enterprise, you too will use a very small number of key instruments as your guides, constantly cross-checking and making adjustments. These are the daily questions you ask yourself on day one and every day thereafter, over and over again, to stay in flight and get where you’re going. You can share this duty with others on your team. But if you’re the CEO, you cannot delegate it. Too many CEOs nowadays try to hand these essentials off to surrogates. And their brands and businesses fly into the ground as a result.

The UnStoppable Six are organized in two sets of three: the Strategic Three and the Tactical Three. Balance these two sets, maximize them every day, and your business can fly—first as a Piper Cub, manned solely by your founding team, and later as a jumbo 747, with hundreds or thousands of employees and customers around the globe. The Strategic Three are Difference, Team, and Customers. The Tactical Three are Famous, Product, and Revenue.

Now let’s go into a bit more detail.

THE STRATEGIC THREE

1. Difference

Your unique difference is what sets you apart—the benefit your customers believe you give to them that nobody else does. Hence, you are their number one choice when they have a need for what you do. The difference must be a simple, measurable, and of obvious value to your customer—whether you sell a product or service, pipes or perfume. The more complicated it is to explain, the less of a real difference it usually is. Far more companies succeed with a difference in one specific thing than with a long list of generic things.

Finally, your difference is what your customers perceive and say it is—not what you hope or pretend it is. Without a real difference, the market really doesn’t need you.

2. Team

Like a SEAL team, your entrepreneurial team will consist of the people who have signed on to your entrepreneurial mission. They are steeped in a culture of values, rules, and traditions that you as the founder create. They vote on your success with their hearts, minds, souls, and energy, providing your business with its richest possible competitive advantage. Since team members own these assets outright, no leader or dictator can control them by anything but voluntary means. But team members give them freely, beyond any monetary consideration you can pay, when they are treated like valued team members who belong to a mission that matters. Being needed in this way is one of the most basic human instincts. Satisfy it and people will respond in kind by loving their company and their customers.

Finally, nothing is a greater multiplier of value than the synergy of a true team. When a true team is in action, 2 + 2 may equal 400,000.

3. Customers

Customers might as well be air and water; your business has no life without them. Success is something you must learn from them because only they can teach it to you, through what they need, where their pain and pleasure are, how they want to be sold to, what kind of relationship they want to have with a company in your category, and so forth. Customers hold the answers to all your most important questions about your product, service, and brand. The Wonderful Paradox is that the secret of getting what you want is to think most about what they want.

For you, the trust of customers is your ultimate prize. It’s the must-have for anyone who wants to achieve entrepreneurial success. Nobody buys without it. The greatest businesses never stop learning how to succeed with their customers. Then they do one more thing. They perform. Always.

THE TACTICAL THREE

1. Famous

There’s that age-old question: If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If your product is the greatest idea in the world but nobody hears about it, will you sell any? I don’t know about the tree in the forest, but I can guarantee the answer to the second question:

No.

No business succeeds without customers, and nobody can be your customer if they don’t know your offering exists. Your job as a start-up is to build a working product that has a unique difference, get someone to pay you more than it costs to make, and build basic awareness—that is, get people to notice you among a hundred billion other products, services, and messages that whiz by every second in our hyper-communicated era.

Thus, your job is to execute on getting famous—in your neighborhood, your town, or your industry. You get famous by using marketing to develop a unique reputation—also known as your brand—and through actual, physical selling, which generates the revenue without which no business can exist.

There are many methods for getting famous: advertising, promotion, public relations, endorsements, events—and, today, social media, which is basically word-of-mouth (the most powerful fame vehicle of all) on steroids. There are a few big secrets and techniques in each method that can effectively boost your chances to get more for less money. These are the techniques that all great brand builders have employed, and you can, too, starting on day one. We’re going to cover them when we talk about branding and sales.

For now, just know that your job isn’t done when you come up with that better mousetrap, it’s just beginning. You’ve got to think seriously every day about how and why you’re going to get famous.

2. Product

Put a basic working prototype into potential customers’ hands as soon as you humanly can. We call it the Minimum Viable Product (MVP)—a product that actually works, for a price someone would actually pay. It’s as simple as that. And you have absolutely nothing but a pipe dream until you execute on this moment of truth.

The reason is that nobody knows anything ahead of time—and you can learn this right now the easy way or find out later the hard way. No brilliant venture capitalist, analyst, or fortune-teller knows whether you and your partners can succeed with customers until you have built an actual, tangible unit of value that a person with a need can try and buy. There are just too many known and unknown variables in people and markets to do anything else but build it, float it, test it, and if it even partly works, adjust it and improve it. If it doesn’t work, you can pivot to a better idea or plan with the least loss of resources.

The longer it takes to get to a MVP, the greater your risk. There are whole industries devoted just to reducing the time, expense, and risk of reaching MVP, like the CAD/CAM industry, which lets you create computer simulations in color and 3-D so you can virtually test your prototypes. As we’ve discussed, the speed, ease, and affordability of creating prototypes in industries like software is one of the huge blessings of the digital age.

But don’t feel discouraged if you’re not a geek or software developer. The world needs entrepreneurs in a thousand different disciplines beyond iPhone apps, and each one has its risks and rewards. People start new hotels, retail stores, even new airlines all the time. Prototyping is more complicated and costly in these fields than in the software business—but it can be done. The key principle remains the same: do it as fast and as cheaply as you can, and turn product version 1.0 into your springboard for a endless series of improvements based on market feedback. That’s how you get from an MVP to a world-class, world-beating offering.

3. Revenue

This one is the key for entrepreneurial start-ups.

Remember our minimally floatable boat? Well, now think about a minimally flyable airplane like the Wright brothers built, which did one thing no other glider had ever done: it stayed aloft. It only did for 12 seconds, but that’s all it needed to prove the MVP and change history. All the Wright brothers had to do was aim for that basic milestone, then revise the prototype from there—not aim to build the Space Shuttle.

Think the same way when it comes to revenue. Once you get yourself to the break-even point, you’ve broken the barrier, you’ve become a going concern—you’re a living thing. Now you can grow.

“Just break even” is one of the sagest pieces of entrepreneurial advice you’ll ever hear from veterans of the process, because it simplifies your team’s first financial mission. It aligns your little picture and your big picture. For now, your big picture, when it comes to revenue, is breaking even.

To get there you’ll focus on the little picture: Sales.

BUSINESS PLANNING: MAKE THE UNSTOPPABLE SIX YOUR TEMPLATE

The principles behind the UnStoppable Six will guide you in another big way. They give you the quick-step framework for vetting your ideas and setting up a business plan by lining up the obligatory questions that lead to the right solutions. You must always check and re-check the Strategic Three and the Tactical Three, and force yourself to give the simplest answers in the fewest words.

Here are the six essential questions that are raised by the UnStoppable Six:

Learning is the basis for any team or organization to answer these questions. Continuous, enthusiastic, open-minded learning. (It has to be continuous because the answers will keep changing.) Then, wherever you can, simplify with a vengeance. Learn and simplify and pass it on.

It’s not rocket science. It’s repeat science.

Asking the questions is your job as CEO, just as it is for the jet pilot watching those screens. They are the questions all the founders, and ultimately, your whole team should be asking.

Now let’s get to the specific skills and rules we need to learn in about an hour.