It was Kerry Packer, back in the heady days of the late 1980s, while having reportedly sold the Nine Network to Alan Bond for $1 billion and then buying it back for $250 million three years later said: “You only get one Alan Bond in your lifetime, and I’ve had mine”.
I think much the same can be said for Australian retailer, Ruslan Kogan, certainly from my perspective.
I met Ruslan when I was working for a large Sydney PR agency and was on the hunt for something interesting for myself and my team to sink their teeth into.
A small article in The Age introduced Melbourne-based Kogan as one of a new wave of “e-tailers”, people prepared to buck the trend of brick-and mortar retailing and offer big savings based on cutting out the middle-men.
I made a call. I did not think it went well.
I came to learn many years later that I was the only person who had managed to cold call Ruslan and sell him something, but I didn’t know that at the time.
He thought about what PR might do for his business, called me back, haggled, and the deal was done.
What followed over the next few years was a playbook many startup founders claim to want to emulate, but few have the combination of personality, strength of character, knowledge and self-belief to carry off.
The great thing about Ruslan, and his then team of about three at the time (I believe he currently employs hundreds across his multiple businesses), is that they were as proactive as we tried to be. And Ruslan operated on global time – if he’s was up, he kind of expected you to be.
He took to heart the fact that being the smaller competitor in what was up to then a very closed, select retail market for big box electronics, was to be controversial.
Think back to the things he took on in the early years, the TV interviews and the millions of clicks, page views and and pages of print he generated:
- Gerry Harvey and Harvey Norman: One of the best baiting efforts a business supported by PR generated in Australian history*. We suggested if he publically sniped for long enough, Gerry wouldn’t be able to help respond. Little did we know Gerry would basically do TV spots promoting Kogan in only a matter of months.
- The Million Dollar Bet: Kogan went out on a limb and bet that JB HiFi wouldn’t be selling Apple products in the future, and backed it with a personal bet of $1M with the then head of JB HiFi Terry Smart. And the media went nuts for it.
- Virgin Galactic: We had a standing challenge from Ruslan at the time that it would be bonuses for everyone if we could orchestrate a meeting between him and his business idol, Richard Branson. One of the team in a catch up meeting jokingly suggested he buy a ticket on Virgin Galactic as Branson was meeting everyone who pre-committed. At the time this only required fractional deposit of the asking price of a seat. Fast forward a few months and I get a call from Ruslan. He’s on the way to the airport. He’s getting on a flight to the Mojave Desert for the launch of Virgin Galactic, which he’d forgotten about and been called by Virgin Galactic and reminded of about an hour beforehand. Can we get him some press by the time he lands? Yes, I think we could manage that (as the only Australian at the launch and the world’s media in attendance), and he got his meeting with Branson.
I don’t think at the time there was a better client to be working with in PR in Australia.
One of the key people on his PR team was Vuki Vujasinovic, who has gone on to found Australia’s leading independent PR agency, Sling & Stone. The team there are still generating great PR for the now publically listed Kogan business as it expands .
So what can aspiring founders learn from someone who was running the startup PR playbook before the terms startup meant anything in the Australian context?
- Be Brave: There’s a fine line between bravery and stupidity, but provided you know your subject matter and won’t back down in a fight (a war of words in this case), this is crucial.
- Be Controversial: It can’t be said often enough that conflict is source of all news. If you want people to be interested in what your are doing then you need to be saying you’re doing it better, faster, stronger than the next business.
- Understand News Value: You launching your website is not news. You getting a million hits in the first day and generating $10 million in sales is. Step back from your business and work out what is amazing to those outside it, not those within it.
- Be a Media Whore: Make yourself constantly available to the media. Learn who they are. Build relationships with them. Hell, you might even genuinely like some of them. And when the time is right, they will pick up the phone when you call them or respond to your email.
- Trust your PR team: Strangely, these people who have been doing what they do for an extended period of time, are generally pretty good at it. They may not always agree with you, but when they don’t, it’s worth listening to why. Remember, their success is based on your success – it’s not (or certainly shouldn’t ever be) mutually exclusive.