My biggest takeaways as a Founder CEO from Start With Why by Simon Sinek
I’m an avid business book reader, I don’t have a formal business education (I’m sure everyone would agree that a BTEC in Enterprise is not a business education — although it did give me a great start!). Because of that, I’ve had to learn through reading books and through mentorship.
I firmly believe that everyone has different take aways and lessons from books, depending on what challenge you’re over coming at a particular time.
Start With Why by Simon Sinek helped me structure our messaging for our pitch deck and business plan in such a way that has made it at least 10x more impactful.
As soon as we changed our narrative with suggestions from this book, we had people far more engaged, they were far more invested and I’ve had far more interaction from my personal content on LinkedIn when I followed this guidance…”Start with why”.
Throughout the book Simon Sinek dives into case studies from some of the worlds greatest businesses, including Apple, Microsoft and even Wal-Mart!
Here are the aspects of the book that had the biggest impact on me and my business:
- Don’t talk first about WHAT you do, talk about WHY you do it
I’ve been told from reliable, credible business people that the first thing a prospective client, customer or stakeholder should hear is some form of “We help X to do Y by doing Z”. So, from a previous business I set up, “We help startups to get custom websites live quickly and affordably by following our streamlined process”.
Cracking, did I sell many websites this way? No.
Now I look back retrospectively at the reason WHY I set up this business. It’s because, for simple Wordpress websites for startup companies, consultants and freelancers I thought it was taking far too long, costing them too much and they didn’t have much control, if any. I essentially felt these new companies were being overcharged for a product that took way too long to deliver. So I wanted to provide people with high quality, custom websites that were affordable and they had the ability to edit as their messaging and business grew.
Did any of my messaging convey this? No.
If I had communicated this with my prospective customers I firmly believe I would have been far more successful, my messaging would have probably gone something more like this:
“We believe startups should not have to spend a large part of their startup budget to get online, they shouldn’t have to wait weeks or even months, and they should have the ability to update and grow their website alongside their business — without having to pay again. This is why we have set up Slice of Pie, to give startups an affordable and fast option to get online, so they can concentrate on growing their business.”
As Simon Sinek explains it: “WHY: Very few people or companies can cleary articulate WHY they do WHAT they do. When I say WHY, I don’t mean to make money — that’s a result. By WHY I mean what is your purpose, cause or belief? WHY does you company exist? WHY do you get out of bed every morning? And WHY should people care?”.
Start with Why and people will personally buy into your values and mission, which is far more powerful than using manipulations…which conveniently was my next takeaway.
2. Manipulations
Simon Sinek talks about multiple manipulations that we see time and time again, and although they are a sound business tactic to drive sales, what they don’t drive is loyalty through people aligning with your WHY.
If you offer a sale for example, 50% off. Great, you should hopefully see sales increase, more people buying your service or product and everyone is happy right? What happens when the sales ends? What happens when someone elses 50% off offer drops their price below yours? People won’t have the loyalty to stay, they will be price driven purchases and move on. Who can blame them? Are you loyal to your car insurer?
So, the next year comes round, your sales are dipping again because someone in the market is able to underprice you, so what do you do, a brilliant and genius idea — 60% off everything sale!
Taking part and competing in these manipulations will cost you more and more as time goes on, yeah you might be able to hide behind vanity metrics of “our sale has increased our customer retention rate by X%.” But at what cost?
Returning customers and repeat business is not hard to achieve, if you can get the right manipulations to keep your customers coming back, which is often financially driven. But when you really achieve success is when you get loyalty, this is when customers will turn down cheaper, or sometimes even better products. Just look at Apple vs the rest of the computing world (I type on my MacBook Pro).
Simon Sinek explains it like this: “There is a big difference between repeat business and loyalty. Repeat business is when people do business with you multiple times. Loyalty is when people are willing to turn down a better product or better price to continue doing business with you.”
In conclusion when you can clearly articulate WHY you are doing what you are doing, and not just WHAT you do, you will be able to create more loyal customers, you will have no need to compete in manipulation tactics and it will get buy-in across the board from customer, staff and stakeholders.
I 100% recommend reading this book to see what your biggest takeaways are, if you have read it, or do soon, please leave a comment with your own!
You can buy Simon Sineks Start With Why here (this is NOT an affiliate link).
All credit for the concepts here go to Simon Sinek.
I’m new to creating content (as you can tell from my copywriting skills I’m sure), but if you did take any value from this at all please share it with someone who you think it would help too.
