Stu Heinecke on How to Grow Your Business Like A Weed

Stu Heinecke

Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Subhanjan. Thank you for the Lit Fest. I think it’s a wonderful thing you’re doing. And so I’m proud to join you and all of these wonderful authors. Yes, Subhanjan, I think he put his finger on it.

It’s an odd thing to think about growing a business like a weed, but we all know what it means to grow like a weed, don’t we? I mean, that’s something that is known in every culture around the world. Everybody knows what it means to grow like a weed. I had a really interesting experience a long time ago. I was driving down the Santa Monica Freeway, and this is the origination story. This is where it all, for me, this is where it all comes from. I was driving down the Santa Monica Freeway many years ago, and traffic was moving very fast. It was a long time ago. There were six lanes of traffic going one way, six lanes of traffic coming the other way. As I recall, maybe a 40-foot-wide concrete median. And growing from a crack in the concrete median was a little dandelion.

And it seemed to be bouncing around happily, bouncing in the turbulence of the cars rushing by. And although it’s a place that no plant should be taking root, there are a lot of dandelions and a lot of weeds that do this all the time. So on the one hand, I could have just driven by and never noticed it. And just this, it just didn’t even register. But I said, “Okay, okay”, maybe subconsciously, “more weeds.” But this time I looked and I thought, “Well, there’s something magical happening there because, my gosh, we don’t see other kinds of plants growing out of cracks in the concrete. It’s just weeds. We don’t see apple trees or petunias or I don’t know, oak trees, whatever. We don’t see those things growing out of the cracks in the concrete in the middle of freeways because those plants don’t have what it takes to be a weed. They actually don’t. And so I thought, I wondered, in that split second, what is it about weeds that makes them so special, so unique, so uniquely qualified and equipped to be able to take on almost any challenge and beat it. Just think about it, as you’re driving by, you might be wondering, or you could wonder, “How did that even get there?”

What mechanism caused the weeds to even show up there? Well, we know exactly what happens there. We’ve seen dandelions. We’ve seen the seeds flying all over the place. And because their seeds fly around, they have an unfair advantage. Oak trees don’t, I should say acorns don’t fly around, which would be really weird if they did. But they don’t fly around for up to hundreds of miles. They just drop. Same with pinecones, same with most seeds. They just drop. And so I just wanted to know, what is it about weeds that makes them so special, so unique, so uniquely qualified to take over territory? Because if they have a model, and I wondered, do they have a unified model? And if they do, is it something we could apply to our businesses? Because if it is, then that’s extraordinary. It does mean we could grow our businesses like a weed. But what I discovered in all of the time since, because I’ve just been fascinated with it and committed to growing my own business and acting in business like a weed— so what I found was, yes, they do have a model. And not only is it a model for growth, I should say, is it applicable to the growth of our businesses, but I think it’s the theory of everything about growing anything.

So I know there are a lot of salespeople on the session today, and I think what’s interesting is you could apply it to sales. So when you listen to what I’m saying, just think about how it is that you might be able to turn some of this around and use it in your selling. I mentioned that they have a model. So what is that model?

Well, it’s a very simple one. They leverage a fierce mindset. Ought to think that something with no brain can have a mindset, but just watch them. Let’s say that they have an apparent mindset, because if you cut down a weed, it grows right back. We’ve seen it. We’ve seen it our whole lives. So when that happens, the weeds are just running their process, and they’re with no emotion other than, I guess, apparent notion of being aggressive and resilient and adaptive and aggressive. I think I might have mentioned that, but also urgent and so on, even optimistic. They have a fierce mindset and they leveraged that fierce mindset, again, and collective scale, I should say, they leveraged that fierce mindset and unfair advantages against collective scale. They do it according to a process that’s been honed, well, it’s really a well-developed process, honed over millions of years, but able to adapt on a diamond.

At just a moment’s notice, they can adapt to almost any challenge. If we have time, I don’t know if we do, but if we have time, I’ll talk about a few examples of weeds doing that because they’re stunning when you watch what they do. So that’s what they do. And so it leads to a nature of weeds that we can certainly take on. And that nature really is that they always deal with what is. They don’t have emotions clouding their decisions and their actions. They just deal with what is. They deal with it like, let’s say, a computer runs a program. They just deal with what is. They’re very straightforward.

It’s like that advice that we get about stocks. Buy low, sell high. Sounds so simple, but it’s not easy to do. It goes completely against our grain to, let’s say, buy when stocks are way down because it seems like the worst place you could put your money. Stocks have been going down. Why would I do that? Because they’re going to hit a bottom and when they hit the bottom, they’re going to come back up.

That’s how you make money from stocks. And when the prices are too high, wow, why would I let go of my stocks? They’ve been climbing and climbing and climbing in value. Why would I let go of them? So it’s really tough. Our emotions get in the way all the time. In ways, certainly in ways, weeds don’t have emotions. They get in our way all the time and they create inferences that weeds never have to deal with. They just deal with what is. And the next thing is, they never do anything without an unfair advantage. We’re going to talk a little bit more about those, but they never do anything without an unfair advantage. We saw that in the example of the dandelion in the freeway median. The dandelion has seeds that fly all over the place and probe every possible opportunity to take root. That’s not what other plants are doing, which is why other plants aren’t showing up in all these other, let’s say, unique places. That’s also why they don’t take over very quickly. They don’t gain territory very quickly. They deal with what is, and then they never do anything without an unfair advantage.

Next, they never do anything alone. What I mean by that is they do things alone, I suppose. But when you spot a dandelion in your lawn or in your yard, you’ll notice that, well, if you’ve only seen one, then look up because it’s never there alone. They’re always showing up at scale. There’s always dozens, if not hundreds, of dandelions nearby. And if it was just one dandelion showing up in your lawn, it wouldn’t be a factor. But hundreds of them putting out 15,000 seeds for each plant over their lifetime is a force you’re never going to get rid of them. They never do anything alone. They’re natural collaborators and they create new unfair advantages through those collaborations. They always focus on what makes them win, which is, again, it really is analogous to their process. Their process is their evolution. And so because it’s their evolution, it’s just programmed into their DNA. They don’t have to be trained on their process. They just run it. Again, like a computer runs a program. And I think one of the other things that’s really amazing about weeds, about the nature of weeds, is that they thrive best in disrupted ground.

Isn’t that interesting? They’re not doing anything differently when they encounter disrupted ground. And by that, I mean, well, let’s say our yards are disrupted ground, or our gardens. We’re the ones that go out and disrupt the most space in the ground. And so when we plough a field, when we plough an agricultural field, we’ve just disrupted a big swath of territory that weeds are absolutely perfectly developed to colonize quickly. In fact, their seeds are probably already in it. But if they aren’t, their seeds will find it very quickly. So that’s the nature of weeds. What I want to do, though, is I’ve just unpacked a lot. We can’t cover all of this in a session this short, but what I’d love to do is actually just let’s focus on one part of that, which is unfair advantages. If you don’t have an unfair advantage in your business, you’re not going to be in business very long. The best businesses that we know of and the top entrepreneurs that we know of have created all kinds of unfair advantages. If you think about, let’s say, I don’t know, let’s say Richard Branson. He creates unfair advantages almost in his sleep.

The way that he opens new markets, the way that he launches new brands, they’re always under his one single brand of Virgin, which is interesting. That continuity creates an unfair advantage because Virgin is quite well known and it’s known for good things. So when he opens up a new, let’s say, a new Virgin cellular service, well, people take notice. And when he puts these events together, these stunts together, the whole country that he’s launching in notices it. So that’s an unfair advantage. Another great example of an unfair advantage by another space entrepreneur is Elon Musk’s Falcon X, or I should say, Falcon program. It wasn’t all that long ago that we were watching as he would send these… Well, actually, some of these exploded on the pad. They never even took off. But others would take off. They’d explode on the way up or on the way down. But what he was trying to do is something amazing, magical. We’ve gotten used to it now. But he said, “No, you know what? Rather than throwing away these boosters every time we launch a cargo into space, we want to reuse these boosters.” It was unthought of.

It was unthinkable back then. But we want to have these boosters come back down and land propulsive-ly. We don’t want to use, I don’t know, parachutes or something and crash part of it. We just want them to land intact so that we can turn around and use them again. And it sounded crazy at the time, but they pulled it off because eventually they started sticking the landings on land, and then they stuck them on barges. Before you know it, they were doing it all the time. I don’t think they’ve missed a landing in four or five years. That’s really amazing. Here’s what happens. Because Elon has done this, he has a booster system that takes off, delivers cargo in space, or maybe to the space station, maybe geosynchronous orbit, etc. He’s delivering stuff up in space, is the point. Then the boosters come back down. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a chance to see that, but I was at Gerhard Gschwandtner’s Sales 3.0 conference last year in December at Cocoa Beach. We watched this take place.

It’s stunning to see it take place in person because we’re so used to rockets going up on Saturn, and so on. All of the rockets that mankind has been using have gone up, delivered their payload, and then crashed to Earth. They’ve never been reused. But when you’re doing this, by doing something that no one else has pulled off, that’s because that’s what’s happening, is that they tried, failed, tried, failed, tried, and then succeeded. They ended up with a process and a set of tools that allowed them to deliver space cargo and reuse those boosters and had cut the cost of delivery of cargo to space, I don’t know, in half or less than that. And that becomes an unfair advantage. It becomes, by that, I mean, an unbeatable advantage, something that your competitors have a difficult time matching, if at all, if they can do it at all. And I don’t know. If we think about just the sources of unfair advantages, they could be talent.

Just personally, they could be talent that you might have that other people don’t have. I’m one of the Wall Street Journal cartoonists, and that’s a big unfair advantage. That has opened all kinds of doors for me, and it’s an unusual talent to have. Advanced degrees or certificates, obviously, those are great differentiators and qualifiers that help buyers say, “I want to work with you rather than your competitor.”

And let’s say also, I don’t know, unduplicated intellectual property. I have test history from using personalized cartoons in direct mail that no one else has. And it’s worth millions of dollars because a lot of the top direct marketers use it, and we’re still using it to help clients break through to their top accounts. We still use cartoons to do that. So that’s an unfair advantage that I have. My books are an unfair advantage because they go out into the world and they establish new credibility, new expertise. Well, I should say just authority on the expertise that I’m bringing forth. I wouldn’t be on this stage without that. Those are unfair advantages. We know that we can cultivate all kinds of really interesting unfair advantages. But like the one that I just described to you, Elon Musk’s Falcon system, a booster system, I think one of the best unfair advantages that we can develop in our businesses is the ability to confer unfair advantages to our clients. So Elon does that. He does that with the Falcon booster system because he’s cut the cost of putting cargo in space in half, let’s say. It’s probably less than that.

But he’s cut the cost down by a significant factor. That’s an unfair advantage, a new one. When I helped sales teams break through to their top accounts and then they break through and their scale changes, that’s an unfair advantage. Those are the best kinds of unfair advantages that we can have.

Subhanjan just mentioned a collaboration that I have with the Nasdaq entrepreneurial center, and we’ve launched a new award called the Tudel Reed Award from the book. One of the winners of the award, we just awarded the first ones at the end of May, one of the first winners is CLEAR. And Subhanjan, are you traveling a lot? I think we’re all traveling a lot, right? And you get to the airport, this is a universal problem, we get to the airport to check in, and then there’s that long line to get through security.

And if you’re just getting into the TSA line, that could be an hour and a half wait. And then let’s say, though you’ve done a little bit of preparation first and you have TSA PreCheck status, you have to get a background check and pay a fee and so on. But then you can get into a shorter line. But then there’s Clear. Clear has these lines, these lanes that are right there in those collaborative lobbies. They’re empty. And all you have to do to get into that empty line and go right to the front of the line is, of course, you have to join Clear, but they’ve made this joining process, this sales process, just immediate, very quick. You just go up, they take a scan of your iris and your fingerprints. You sign up real quickly, and then they escort you to the front of that whole mess. What an incredible unfair advantage. Well, there are two things that are an unfair advantage there. One is that they alleviate the pain that you’re feeling right now when you’re trying to check in and get to your flight, get to your gate, and maybe you’re worried that you’re not even going to make it.

They could solve that for you in an instant. The other one is, who knew that you could put in… These are crowded spaces. Who knew there was even room for a third lane operated by a private company. That’s just incredible. And if someone else wanted to compete with that, how are they going to… There’s no room. So it’s a great unfair advantage. Subhanjan, we could go on and on about this, but there are a lot of great ways to create unfair advantages in our businesses. There are a lot of great ways to create those through radical collaborations as well. Another topic and we could go on and on. But I think we need to draw to a close.

Subhanjan Sarkar   

Yeah, sure. I think this is great and it’s a great primer for anybody who is thinking of how to create those modes because every business needs a mode. And it’s always a challenge. It’s not easy to create a mode because pretty much everything can be replicated. I create a mode, my competition does it tomorrow or day after tomorrow. So that goes away. And one thing is very clear that modes created through pure technology is not sustainable.

Stu Heinecke

Can be. It’s a temporary one, but it can be a great one.

Subhanjan Sarkar  

Yeah, sure. Of course. People will catch up. But if you take Elon’s example of continuing to invest in reusable boosters, that’s also technology. But I think there is a bit more than technology in that story.

Stu Heinecke  

Yes. It is a technology and a process that they’ve… I mean, they’re developing their own and everything, well actually, all of the equipment. So there’s a lot of proprietary IP in that and so on. So that’s a big challenge to overcome. Also, it’s very expensive. So even state space programs… I mean, none of them are doing it. Even Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin isn’t doing it. But they’re going up to the edge of space, the carbon line for tourism, but they’re not delivering payloads. They’re not delivering anything to the space station, for example. So Elon and SpaceX are the only ones doing it. I know the Chinese space agency is trying to duplicate it. They’re all trying to duplicate it now. But Elon has been so far ahead of them. Now he’s developing Starship. We just saw that one go up and explode. It’s the same process. It’s so funny to see stories emerge in the press about, maybe they don’t like Elon, I don’t know, but about, “Oh, it just failed.” No, this is just a part of their process to shoot these things up and learn every time they shoot them out into space. And that’s what he’s doing.

He’s doing the exact same thing he did with Falcon. And pretty soon we’ll have an amazing new system that we can fly to. We may be able to fly from, let’s say, Los Angeles to London in 20 minutes on a Starship, or fly to Mars, and certainly the Moon. All of that is coming. And it all comes from that process of try, fail, try, fail, try, succeed. And suddenly you’re doing something that no one else can do. And you have an incredible new unfair advantage.

Subhanjan Sarkar 

Yeah, it’s very inspiring. Before I let you go, any other story of a regular small entrepreneurial business which is using the ideas in “Grow Your Business Like Weeds,”?

Stu Heinecke   21:28

You can look around and see it. You can see it all around you, actually. When businesses are thriving, they’ve figured this out and they’ve developed some unfair advantage. I’m on an island a little bit north of Seattle. And so it’s a small market place, but you can see the same thing happening on the island that happens across the world. For example, there are business service shops on the island. A lot of people now work from home all over the place. And they’re doing it from the island here as well. So we all need business services. But one of them functions as a collection point for FedEx packages. That’s brilliant because it brings all these business customers in to buy all their services. Pardon me. I thought it would hold it out. But it just brings more people in. They don’t have to pay for it at all. It’s promotion that literally pays for itself. It’s never an expense to them. So you can see things like that. You can see that there are brands. There are certain restaurants that have dominant brands and reputations in the marketplace. So they’re the ones that are frequented most.

During the pandemic, those same restaurants that couldn’t accommodate anyone in their dining rooms, the ones that were collecting email addresses and had been developing relationships with their customers that are direct and not necessarily having to take place on their dining room floor, were the ones that were thriving with takeout services and so forth. You can see it all the time.

And there it is. It’s like, what is that? Here we go. There’s the book. We just took it up.

Hey, can I mention one thing? May I mention one thing? I’d love to have, if you’re interested in this at all, I’d love to have you come to my website. That’s my name, stuheinecke.com. You can see it’s spelled on the book there. Come and join my email list. I would love to send you the first two chapters for free. I’m developing a new special report on how to generate unfair advantages in your business. I’d love to send that to you. But I also would like to have you either connect with me there or on LinkedIn because I’m also collaborating with the CEO of RevCelerate in London, and we’re putting together a free workshop on the 12th.

I’d love to have you join us there to actually examine what are your unfair advantages. Because you have them now, you probably don’t realize all of what they are, but when you do, then that makes you far more well-equipped. You can focus on those and bring them to the fore and use them to gain even more leverage in your marketplace, but also to develop new ones. And there are some really interesting ways of doing that. So we’re running a workshop on the 12th, and if you connect with me on LinkedIn, then you’ll hear about it quite a bit.

Subhanjan Sarkar

So Rajib has put the link to Stu’s website right there, and you can find him and go for the two chapters. I say go for the book, but it really helps you think differently. I think that’s the starting point. And I guess that’s the core idea of coming up with such stuff. I know looking at the weeds growing through the concrete was not enough to make the book. The book came from somewhere else.

Stu Heinecke

No, it was a bit more work than that. Exactly. I will say that the things that I’m saying about developing unfair advantages, for example, it’s not rocket science. We know that we need to have competitive advantage challenges. It’s been the circumstance since we’ve had commerce. But the thing that’s really interesting about weeds and weed strategy is that it becomes this framework. You use the entire framework, and when you do that, you will grow your business. You can even grow your sales this way, but you can grow anything. But if you’re focused on your business, you grow your business. You also will grow value in the business. So if you’re looking to maybe sell the business at some time down the line, weed strategy helps you with that. If you follow the whole framework, it actually builds a business. It’s incredible. It’s really amazing how it works. You mentioned Nasdaq, and I mentioned a little bit, the Total Weed Award. That’s a manifestation of weed strategy that is creating all kinds of new unfair advantages for me and for the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center. That’s just incredible. I can’t believe I have a collaborative operation. Really, it’s a partnership with Nasdaq.

But the weed strategy took me there. And so it’s this framework that really does foster growth. It’s really an amazing thing.

Subhanjan Sarkar  

Absolutely. I’ll just take 30 seconds. Anybody have any questions for Stu before I let him go? I’ll wait.

Stu Heinecke

We’ll let them do that. Come and join us then on the 12th if you’d like.

Subhanjan Sarkar  

Yes, absolutely. If you share the link with me, I will share the details with them once again, once the event is over. So I’ll be happy to do that.

Stu Heinecke

Thank you so much for putting this on. You’re doing an incredible thing. You got a lot of great authors together. And I have to say, bless me. But no, you have gotten a lot of great authors together with some really interesting titles. And thank you for doing this.

Subhanjan Sarkar

Thank you for coming, Stu. Talk to you soon. Guys, see you in a bit. See you in the next session with Bill Price. Thank you.

show less