Short read: from 0 to £1bn revenue in 4 years — startup lessons with Greg Jackson
If you are on a journey of launching your startup or looking for some business ideas, you might want to have a look at some tips from one of the most successful leaders of our time — the founder and CEO of Octopus Energy Greg Jackson.
At the end of last year, right before we all got locked up in our homes, I had a chance to attend an event full of curious insights into entrepreneurship and leadership from Greg Jackson. Greg is a successful serial entrepreneur who founded Octopus Energy and took its revenue to over £1bn in four years, making Octopus Energy one of the UK’s fastest growing companies, and one of the top 50 UK privately held companies.
With its 100% renewable electricity and affordable prices, Octopus Energy scored five out of five stars in Uswitch’s most recent survey of 17,000 UK energy customers, pulling out an Overall Customer Satisfaction score of 92% in the survey.
Octopus Energy is also a subsidiary of Octopus Group, a British asset management company, which, as of September 2019, has more than 750,000 customers and manages more than £8.3bn on behalf of its investors.
Brought up by a single parent in a humble upbringing, Greg felt like he had nothing to lose. “Enormous amount of love and little money” — this might have been his biggest key to success, he believes.
Another driver to success, and a little less poetic maybe, was his great dislike of authority. We hear you, Greg.
Greg’s charismatic personality and unconventional wisdom could’ve been a key to success by itself, but let’s have a look at the advice he shared with us on entrepreneurship, team-building and customer success.
On entrepreneurship
Execution is everything, everything else — excuses.
Identify for yourself what the solution is and pursue what you think is right. You’re never going to be ready 100%, so you should decide: you either going to do it or you’re not. The only protection is speed. Relentless pace is everything.
On building a team
Start with a mission. Instil the mission and empower the people to take it further.
Autonomy, technology and culture are the key principles of success. Always de-centralise: make small autonomous teams, instil transparency and cohesion and get the real problems solved — not KPI-s.
‘We come together, we celebrate, we share success, we remind ourselves how F-cool we are — we are here for the same thing.’
Relationships endure beyond the business. Treat people well — with total respect and integrity.
Most people are pretty awesome, most companies eliminate the awesomeness out of them. Shape the job around the person, don’t shape the person around the job.
On customer success
Send personal emails to customers and stay relentless about the service.
When asked how he chooses the partners to work with, Greg replied:
‘Best pitch starts with: “Here’s something you’re not doing and this is how you should be doing it…”.’
Chuckling he recalled how he almost got fired from Procter & Gamble… three times. He doesn’t regret anything and still believes that despite the hardships of entrepreneurship, nothing compares to the freedom it gives.
Greg’s book recommendations:
- ‘Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In’ by Roger Fisher, William Ury, Bruce Patton
- ‘More With Less: Paul MacCready and the Dream of Efficient Flight’ by Paul Ciotti
- ‘NASA Apollo 11: An Insight into the Hardware from the First Manned Mission to Land on the Moon’ by Christopher Riley, Philip Dolling (this one is “on a geeky side”, Greg added)
- ‘Superfast: Lead At Speed’ by Sophie Devonshire.
It was an inspirational talk with a few laughs and a good banter, you can check it out in full on Upstream’s podcast.
