Shouting From the Rooftops

The other day, I received an email from a friend of mine. This friend is a highly successful technology entrepreneur. He has started, grown, and sold several businesses over the years. In fact, his last business sold for an amount with sufficient zeroes on the end of it to allow him to settle in a grand part of New Zealand (read: expensive) with no particular need to work again.

My buddy has enough money to live out his days making investments, having adventures, and generally enjoying life. It’s a great achievement and an example of how the benefits of a successful entrepreneurial endeavor can accrue to individuals. However, the note my friend sent wasn’t related to any of his past ventures or recent investments. Instead, it reflected on something he had read recently on LinkedIn.

My progeny, being of a certain age, are quite keen to express opinions and observations regularly in public. I can already hear the howls of derision, so I will accept that their willingness to do so may have less to do with demographics and more to do with the gene pool they inherited from one or other of their parents. Actually, that propensity to share (and, even, overshare) opinions publicly is a topic I’ll come back to in another article.

Anyway, the lads wrote an update about some promotions they’ve had at work. Their work is, of course, the family business, Cactus Outdoor. The theme of the post was a very bullish message about a global opportunity, a mission of high importance, and an absolute excitement about the journey ahead.

One would have thought that my correspondent, having spent a couple of decades building tech businesses worth hundreds of millions of dollars, wouldn’t have been particularly excited or impressed by the opinions of individuals working in a much more conservative business. However, quite the opposite was evident. My correspondent was almost emotional at the fact that what we were doing was sufficiently real, tangible, and tactile, and that we had a crew around us who were so invested and excited. He specifically referred to the fact that I was so blessed to be able to work with family on building this thing.

It got me thinking a little bit. As I’ve written here before, I’ve always been guilty of being a bit humble about our business. Despite doing it numerous times for other businesses, I’ve never done the big pitch for investment or presented at startup events extolling the virtues of what we were doing. Indeed, when, as regularly happens, I bump into someone who starts raving about what we are doing at Cactus, I tend to downplay it a little bit. While I’m stoked to be doing what we do, I almost apologise for what we are—slow growth, long-term, and intergenerational.

Meditating on this, I see something quite interesting for business generally. There seems to be a real division in the business landscape. Startups, tech companies, and small, high-growth organizations are expected to talk it up, be full of energy, discuss missions, build empires, and hustle. At the same time, more mature organizations are expected to be much more circumspect and simply get on with their business.

It strikes me that, in some cases, all this posturing overstates the impact, success, opportunity, and execution of the startup world while greatly understating the importance of longer-established enterprises. If I think about our own business, just the other night, someone came up to me at an event talking about various products he has owned of ours over the years, trying to recall whether his first Cactus product was purchased 28 or 30 years ago. The fact that he still has those products and uses them regularly and that those products embody countless memories of incredible days, amazing experiences, and good friends, is quite inspiring. The fact that a significant number of people have chosen our products for some of the most important days of their lives, including weddings and, in a couple of cases, their own funerals, indicates just how important what we do is to these individuals.

So, you might see the framing change a little bit in the future. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not going to be doing 20-second elevator pitches or talking about how my business is going to change the world and impact billions of people. I’m not going to deploy the rinse-and-repeat Silicon Valley shallow marketing model. However, I (and we for that matter) are absolutely going to talk about the epicness, the joy, the passion, the hustle, and the impact that comes from building a truly sustainable, intergenerational, and purpose-led organization. And I’m going to stop apologizing for that in its entirety.