LISA GORMAN
FASHION DESIGNER AND FOUNDER, GORMAN LABEL
Lisa Gorman has been designing and running her own clothing label since 1999. She was so dedicated to the concept of simplicity that she refused to hire any employees for five years. Now, with 32 staff and five stores along the eastern seaboard, Gorman is an established presence in the Australian fashion industry. But she never forgot those early lessons.
I denied I even had my own business for about four years. I didn’t want one, particularly in fashion. The idea of working in the fashion industry was loopy enough, let alone running my own company.
Ignorance is bliss, sometimes. My first shop was a family affair. My dad was cutting the walls. My husband designed the store. It was a very low-cost fit-out. The biggest expense was purchasing stock. We didn’t have much experience and didn’t know how much we were going to sell. You can buy too much or not enough and they can be equally problematic. We just worked our way through it, really.
I didn’t grow very quickly in the early days because I didn’t want to employ any staff. I kept thinking, ‘I’ll do it for another six months and then I’ll stop’. So I worked a lot of hours on my own, but it taught me every aspect of the business. I was fortunate that it just kept working, but I still kept the brakes on.
Every six months I’d do a small collection, maybe 30 pieces twice a year. Now we do about 140 pieces twice a year. Doing fewer styles is simpler, so you can manage it with fewer people or on your own. And I kept it simple because I wasn’t sure how financially secure it was. I kept working my other jobs, doing bridal consultancy for Mariana Hardwick and nursing on weekends for money.
I was just sort of going along, really. I didn’t have a book keeper and I’d only see my accountant once a year. The only way I knew I was making a profit was, when the next collection came around, did I have the money to do it? I never had a business loan until 18 months ago when we started opening our third and fourth stores.
Interviewed, edited and condensed by James Tuckerman
| To hear the full interview with Lisa Gorman, click here. |
ALAN NOBLE
ENGINEERING DIRECTOR, GOOGLE AUSTRALIA
After 16 years working in and around technology start-ups in Silicon Valley, Alan Noble returned to Australia to continue the journey. When the hottest technology company on earth offered him a job, he jumped on board. While Google is, by any definition, a very large organisation, Noble noticed straight away how much the tech giant still adheres to the simplicity that saw it emerge from the start-up undergrowth.
Fundamentally, users want simple products. They don’t want to deal with cluttered user interfaces with advanced features that they may not use. The challenge is how you present the simplest possible product for users while still providing the underlying capabilities for more advanced operations. You have to work very hard to create simplicity. It’s a balancing act.
The Google search page is an extremely simple web page containing only a few hundred characters – and yet beneath that beguiling simplicity are literally hundreds of different signals and parameters at work in returning the most pertinent and relevant search results to users.
We like to do rapid product development – you’re probably familiar with Google Labs. We don’t believe we have to present a perfect offering. We think it’s more important to get something out there for users to start experimenting with as a base from which we can start gathering feedback for further development. That kind of culture is quite common in a start-up company, but it’s unusual for a company of Google’s size to have such a strong core belief in rapid innovation. The philosophy is: get something out for the users as soon as possible, focus on the functionality users want and don’t worry too much up-front about return on investment and how you are going to monetise the product. I was at Google for a full six months before I heard a conversation about ROI on a product.
We have a number of what you could describe as “gatekeepers”. For example, Google’s Vice President of Search Product and User Experience, Marissa Mayer, is the gatekeeper for our web search product. No new feature will be added to that page in any country in the world without going through her first. That may sound draconian, but it is precisely that attention to detail that ensures that we don’t start to introduce unnecessary clutter.
You need to be always on guard for foes of simplicity. No one actively tries to complicate things. It’s more insidious than that.
Our goal is to organise the world’s information and to make that information universally accessible and useful. Our broad mission does require that we look at new products and services for users. Google Apps is part of a much broader trend towards cloud computing. That, again, is all about simplicity. What could be simpler than having all of your documents and applications residing in the ‘cloud’ and accessing them any time, anywhere, from any device?
Interviewed, edited and condensed by Paul Ryan
JAMES TUTTON
FOUNDER, MOONLIGHT CINEMA
DIRECTOR, NEOMETRO
James Tutton, founder of the hugely successful Moonlight Cinema, knows a thing or two about simplicity. After all, there aren’t too many things simpler than watching movies with friends and family under the stars. After taking the business national and finally selling to an ASX-listed corporate group in 2005, Tutton has now turned his sights to simplifying the medium-density property development sector, as director of Neometro.
Too many people over-complicate things and overlook simple answers.
I think that there’s often a perfect answer in simplicity, not so much in the creation of brands but in the creation of actual functional products.
I think Moonlight Cinema is, on a different scale, an example of something very simple that serves a need out there in the community. People in Australian cities want to congregate on warm summer nights, be with their loved ones and watch a film. So much out there in entertainment is highly complicated and tries to do too much. Moonlight is something people can emotionally respond to, and they love it.
I’ve always said that naivety is underrated in business. If you know all the facts you’ll never make decisions, you’ll never go forward, you’ll over-analyse. To an extent, you just need to go with your gut instinct. You see situations where someone’s trying to do a transaction, buy into a business and so forth, and they second guess, over-analyse, plan it inside-out.
Colin Powell said something like, if you believe that you’re between 40 and 70 percent right, that’s the time to move based on your gut instinct. Because if you’re more than 70 percent right, you’re too late. And if you’re under 40 percent sure based on intelligence, you’ve probably got it wrong.
Generally, seven out of ten business ventures I’ve been involved with have worked and the other three have failed dismally. You go forward and you never know, but quite often you just need to push. On the other hand, you have to know when to cut your losses and move on. That’s a very simple decision sometimes.
A good friend of mine describes the relationship between an excel spreadsheet and reality in business as being akin to the relationship between online porn and the reality of sex. You can put anything in an excel spreadsheet that shows that you’re going to make $15 million next financial year. However, there are a lot of people who just don’t put the truth to paper. It’s not because they’re being dishonest. It’s that they’re over-enthused.
As entrepreneurs, sometimes we need a bit of a reality check. Sometimes you sit there and say, ‘This is what it is. Time to put the bullet in it.’
Interviewed, edited and condensed by James Tuckerman
| To hear the full interview with James Tutton, click here. |
