Adapt what is useful
Bruce Lee, Thank You notes and using whatever works
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Now when it comes to styles, I got several
Sharper than the swag or dagger all metal
- ‘Swagger Like Us’, kanye West, Jay-Z, Lil Wayne
I have been a fan of Bruce Lee since I first saw ‘Enter The Dragon’ as a child. I was amazed at the athleticism and skill level required to do what he did.
I made sure to buy all the videos of his other movies I could find (for any Gen Z readers - explanation here for what a videotape is!) and to read any books I could find to help learn as much as I could.
Bruce Lee had a huge influence on martial arts and the way martial arts were portrayed in movies across the world, despite him only appearing in 5 movies in the 1970’s.
He died tragicaly aged 32 but his influence has lived on in his movies, but more importantly, in his teachings on martial arts and his philosophy on life.
Jeet Kune Do, a hybrid martial arts philosophy drawing from different combat disciplines that was founded by Lee, is often credited with paving the way for modern mixed martial arts (MMA).
Bruce Lee has many famous quotes about numerous topics but the one that has stuck with me over the years is “Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it.”
It is a particular philosophy that I have tried to carry into my personal and work life over the years
Why should you care?
I previously worked for Future Finance, which was UK's first private student lender, where I headed up the Underwriting team. Future Finance provided online lending to students studying undergrad/postgrad courses in UK universities.
I joined very early in the journey, the team had only 10 people at that stage, and we were growing the business at a crazy pace. In the almost 2 years that I worked there, we reviewed applications for £500m+ of lending.
The ultimate aim was to automate the entire process, from application to approval, and we were fortunate that there was huge amounts of helpful data (such as 4+ years of credit data, data on completion rates and average expected salaries for courses in the UK, etc).
The final piece of the process and biggest stumbling block to making the process efficient that we came across was the requirement for us to verify with the university that a student was attending the particular university.
For obvious reasons, we needed to externally verify this information but it involved an email or call to an admissions office in a UK university and was taking an average of 5 working days to verify this information. Far from ideal for a fast growing startup!!
What did we do?
Years earlier I had read a biography of Ingvar Kamprad, founder of IKEA. He started IKEA aged 17 by selling watches, pens and other small items by mail order. Happy to make any sale, Ingvar used to send handwritten Thank You notes to every customer.
From a Future Finance point of view, we realised that the blockage was due to a civil servant sitting in an admissions office somewhere in the UK, dealing with an endless amount of queries from students, etc and also having to deal with emails and calls from an unknown company based in Dublin.
What that person didn’t realise was that every verification they gave Future Finance was one extra person funded to go to university.
So we rounded up all the contact details we had for all of the admissions offices of the universities that we had dealt with to date, and created a care package of branded swag (notepads, hats, pens, etc) along with a handwritten note from our CEO, thanking each person for helping Future Finance to support a student to attend university.
The average time taken to verify that a student was attending a particular university dropped from 5 days to less than 2 working days.
And we built up a strong relationship with admissions offices at different unversities.
So, Thank You Ingvar Kamprad!
Inspiration and ideas are everywhere.
Don’t be afraid to look outside your area of expertise for inspiraton, you will be surprised at what could be useful.
“Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it.”
Tell me why I’m wrong…
- Eoin
Left Field
How do I describe ‘Left Field’? It’s a place to put the content (newsletters/articles, etc) that we have amassed over recent weeks or previous years that really make us think or change our thinking on a particular topic. All the content will offer an alternative view of some topic in financial services, technology or sport (or a combination of all three!)
This is a fascinating article from the ‘Modern Tire Dealer’ website announcing Les Schwab as ‘Tire Dealer of the Year’ in 2000.
Starting as a penniless orphan at age 15, Les Schwab has not only built an independent tire dealer empire, but also given scores of honest, hard-working store managers the opportunity to become millionaires.
Les had a very simple formula. You lay out simple ground rules for running the business and you hire good people to carry them out.
You get good people by giving them a share of the profits they help you earn (in this case, a share that now totals more than 51% before taxes).
Now led by CEO Jack Cuniff, Les Schwab Tire Centers has $1.8 billion in annual revenue, and more than 450 locations across 10 states in the US, along with a real estate portfolio worth at least $2 billion.
Anyway, I won’t give away any more. Enjoy the article and feel free to get in touch to discuss more!
- Eoin
Can’t Sleep?
MoneyNeverSleeps podcast episode from this week:
Episode 95: Money Talks #19: Twitter Gets Hacked | Ant Goes Marching | Instagram Goes Shopping | Robinhood Goes Home
In this week’s Money Talks segment, we dig into the recent Twitter Hack and how it might have been much worse, the Ant Group IPO and their status as the ‘online mall for everything’, Instagram’s opportunity to become America’s favorite shopping mall and Robinhood dropping out of the UK before launching.
Audio version on Transistor, Apple and Spotify
Podcast Recommendation: Check out The Full Ratchet by Nick Moran from New Stack Ventures. Pete refers to the 200+ episodes’s he’s consumed as his ‘Masters in VC’; although the best kind of learning is on the job, listening to the top minds in VC walk you through every possible angle of investing in startups is almost like Neo from the Matrix learning Kung Fu.
Book Recommendation: Bruce Lee: Fighting Spirit is a very detailed and balanced view of the life and tragic death of Bruce Lee and the book truly gets under the skin of this iconic figure
Article/Newsletter Recommendation: if you haven’t heard of him already, check out the writing of Ari Lewis. Ari’s writing is primarily focused on the ‘Attention Economy’ and he has been quoted in publications like the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Forbes and Business Insider.
This newsletter has been written by Eoin Fitzgerald and Pete Townsend
Want more MoneyNeverSleeps?
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