Mambo was amazing. It’s like a whole bunch of jokes and beautiful hijinks turned into a business. It was wholesaling $50 million worldwide so, you know, it was pretty good. I travelled the world visiting many people, doing business in far off lands and kind of learned from that stuff I suppose, but that was then and this is now.
It’s that old tricky question of your revenue versus your overheads. That’s what it is now, increasing the revenue, and keeping the overheads down. I mean, to begin with, I used to say that Deus is either a grand folly or an incredibly good idea, so I think it’s less and less folly now and more and more good idea, so I’ve just got to play that part of it now. But to begin with it was somewhat of an indulgence.
Well, I’m just much more disciplined about the way that I do things. I mean there’s a problem with guys like me, who have a big company like Mambo. And you go from that to starting from scratch and it’s very hard because you’re used to doing things on a certain level.
What some people in my position do is we create an overhead too big for the revenues that are available to us, so there was a bit of a back-up there for a while. It was great because everyone was loving what we were selling, but it didn’t make a great deal of financial sense.
We’re out of that period now and we now have that culture to ourselves. So, in hindsight, working through that indulgence, in the long term it became meaningful. That’s the stage I’m at.
Yeah. The revenue is paying for the overheads, rather than me putting in money to cover it.
I think now just slow and steady. We need a couple of years of good growth and profitability and then see what happens after that.
I was a product of the surf industry in my 20s, in the 1970s and back then surfing was far more open-minded. Surfing was just a great thing you could do and you could do anything you liked – and motorcycling, everyone I knew had a motorcycle and went surfing, there was no cultural difference.
But then big surf came along and marketed themselves as “You can only go surfing”, and they sold surfing like a fundamentalist religion, you can only go surfing. And now, there’s a reaction against that, and companies like ours are selling this idea about “We love surfing, we surf very passionately, but we also like these other things”, you know to build a rich and interesting life you need to have more diversity. I think that’s probably the pitch that we have.
Like I said, it’s sort of hard to put this in words, but I like to think of Deus Ex Machina as an idea, it’s like God is in the machine, and we like to see any God, any machine. It’s this idea of fixing things, making things, doing things. And because I really hated the way the surf industry became a mono culture, I kind of always pushed this idea that loving your motorbike and loving your surfboard is the same thing. So that’s the idea and that’s what I’m trying to get across.
And I think culturally at the moment there’s this generation of young kids coming through who missed out on dad who taught them how to change a spark plug or re-oil the car, so if they want to learn all these things, I think that’s the difference. It’s suddenly cool to have a spanner in your hand. Whereas 10 years ago, it was cool to have a computer, so it’s become a different thing.
It was a curious thing to do. They didn’t say, “We want to put you in with someone who’s diametrically opposed to your kind of business,” so my chat was with a delightful Indian chap, whose name you might know, Ajay Piramal, who was a billionaire who just sold his generic pharmaceutical company for $4 billion. So talk about the opposite end of the spectrum, it couldn’t be much more. But he was a lovely guy and it was interesting to hear about how culturally, his business had got that far. Some things were quite different and others were quite similar.
The need to survive and the need to make proper decisions, and his experience of selling his business and my business, they were somewhat differential in the value of the two. But the process was very similar. The big difference was that he’d come from a very strong family, and he had to deal with family stuff whereas I come from a completely different, dysfunctional family, it wasn’t an issue for me, my decisions were not based around family, whereas all his decisions were.
The Ideas Exchange is on BBC World News Saturdays at 12.30 (AEST)and Sundays at 19.30 (AEST). Dare Jennings’ chat with Ajay Piramal can be seen on September 22 /23.
Cara Waters is a former SmartCompany editor. Previously, Cara was a senior reporter for the Financial Times’ website and worked for The Sunday Times in London.
