“Throw your heart over the bar and your body will follow.”
— Norman Vincent Peale
Early in the life of a company I co-founded, we were hopeful that a multi-millionaire investor, “Gene”, would fund us. Gene’s adviser had flown to visit us from the US and the noises were positive. We were almost out of money, no VC in Ireland would fund us and we were too early-stage for any international VC or multinational to fund us, yet it seemed likely we’d get a big investment from Gene who we’d been engaging with for over 6 months.
It was coming up to Christmas and I went away for the weekend on a Friday, taking my first day off in almost two years. As I boarded the plane, Gene’s adviser called to say that Gene was going on holidays for 2 months and couldn’t make an investment decision till he returned. I called my co-founders to tell them the news.
When my co-founders & I met up on the Monday to discuss things more fully, they announced that they’d revised their CVs over the weekend, convinced we had to abandon the business. This wasn’t unreasonable. We’d previously been let down by a government institution that had verbally committed to fund us, resulting in us having to put the entire company on “short time”. Add to this the fact that every Irish investor we spoke to was focused on either software or property and wouldn’t consider investing in “real physical-world engineering” (when I told people we were developing a new innovative engine, they’d invariably ask: “a search engine?”)
This was where my stubborn belief refused to accept “reality”. We had a great idea, we just hadn’t found the right investors yet.
There was no way we could let our world-changing business die!
Over the Christmas “holidays” I emailed everyone I’d ever met who might possibly have a few thousand euro to invest. This covered a handful of friends & family, and almost everyone with whom I’d ever had any kind of business or working relationship since I’d left school.
The email was a very soft sell – Hey, this might be interesting to you – here’s the story – if you’re interested the details are below, no worries if you’re not interested.
Rough figures… I sent 700 individually tailored emails; heard back from 400, had email discussions with 200, spoke to 100 and met with 40 people.
There was no secretary or admin support to help. I came up with the investment instrument and put together all the info on the company and supporting documentation (final legal documentation was edited by our corporate lawyer). It was exhausting – the process took almost 4 months with no weekends off. (The effort required to get an individual to hand over €5,000 is sometimes just as big as it is to get a much bigger investor to hand over €1m.)
But it was worth it.
30 people ended up investing an average of €12,000 each – €360,000. And on the back of this, Enterprise Ireland invested €150,000 and another state agency invested €100,000. My co-founders shelved their CVs and were able to continue with the critical engineering work. And we were able to hire more people.
8 years on, the company has raised over €50m; and myself & the other shareholders remain bullish about the future.
Research, Not Delusion
The important thing about self-belief is that you’ve got to be sure it’s not self-delusion. We’ve all seen the US Has Talent-type TV shows where a terrible singer rants at the judges, often with their “supportive” family in tow, claiming they’ll make it in the business and how the judges will regret rejecting them. The problem is that this happens all the time in business. We’re all capable of self-delusion, of believing our ideas are great. Friends and family want to support, so they’re often the worst judges of merit.
Hence the need to do proper research before you commit to your idea and business as discussed in a previous blog.
I couldn’t have emailed 700 people and laid my reputation on the line without having a lot of evidence that the technology behind our company was sound. I’d seen prototypes work and had interrogated the logic behind the development plan.
The quote at the top of this note from Norman Vincent Peale refers to a trapeze artist who was asked how anyone could possibly start out in his line of work and leap from one trapeze to another for the very first time. How could they overcome the fear and the paralysis which would surely come from trying to calculate all the moving parts and tell your body to do so many things at once?
His advice: “Throw your heart over the bar and your body will follow.”
Clearly this only works if you’ve done the preparatory training and studied what others do. In a startup setting this is analogous to doing your research.
But at some point, you have to make the leap – and really go for it!
Passion or Obsession – Another Example
When I self-published my kids’ novel, Tommy Storm, I had the novel sent to a group of 9-12-year-old boys & girls who didn’t know me. When a book is over 100,000 words long, you’ll hear quickly enough from a 10-year old if their attention is not being held! I also managed to get it into the hands of some literary critics who were unknown to me before they received the transcript.
Thankfully, the feedback was very positive. And then I completely went for it, keeping the funding requirement as low as possible without compromising on quality.
When it came to producing the book, I worked out how to produce the correct ISBN book barcode on the internet, printed it out myself and went into a book shop so they could scan it and ensure the right number came up. I visited publishers to understand the different paper types they use and came up with my own legal copyright blurb at the beginning of the book by borrowing the best bits from other books. And when it came to designing the book cover, rather than paying a big fee to a professional who might not be too enthusiastic about the job and might not welcome ongoing input from me, I put ads up in an art college to find an art student who’d be delighted to produce a book cover she could put in her portfolio. The result was a wonderful book cover which was a lot of fun to produce and didn’t cost too much!
Self-published books have a reputation for poor quality, so I wanted my book to be better quality than most books, yet had to keep the spend as low as possible. I arranged to get the book printed in China, and stipulated that the book be stitch-bound rather than the normal glued, and also it should have a glossy cover.
This was in 2006, before the internet & communications were as sophisticated as they are now, so when the Chinese company sent me proofs of the 300+ pages, they emailed them over a phone connection, which cut-off frequently, and took over 10 hours to transmit! I was getting up at 2am to check for emails and give my responses, then back to bed till 6.30am when the day would start in earnest. For the last three weeks before the book was finalized, I worked 130-hours a week! It was bananas! I remember one day throwing water on my face at 7pm and it was the first time that day that I’d even visited the bathroom, never mind getting a bite to eat.
Some months later, when I’d managed to get the book into every bookshop in Ireland (which is its own story), I travelled the country and visited almost every bookstore. My secret was not to ask anything of any of the booksellers. Instead I gave them something. I’d had thousands of bookmarks printed along with the book and I always arrived with a handful of them. Invariably the bookshop employees asked me to sign their supply of Tommy Storm books and then they moved their stock of TS books from the back of the store, with spines only showing, to the front of the store with the front covers showing.
Whenever I’d arrive in a town, I’d park and then run from bookstore to bookstore, trying to get to every store in the town. Typically I’d hit 4 stores in 2 hours so I could be back in my car, travelling to the next town. I emailed and called all the local radio stations weeks earlier, often getting no reply, but would call them back when I was travelling to their city on the “book signing tour”, telling them that this was their last chance to get me. It usually worked – resulting in about 15 interviews, including some on national radio and TV.
In the end I produced over 5,000 books, got them into every bookstore in Ireland, took out trademarks on the Tommy Storm name (and dealt with objections from multinationals such as Nestlé), set up a website for the book that could take orders & payments, and became the best-selling self-published author in Ireland at the time. All this for less than €7,000 (about $7,500).
I had to print another 10,000 books and achieved my initial objective of making a big enough splash that I was offered a 2-book deal by Quercus (a UK publisher that published The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo). They paid me enough that I didn’t have to do anything but write for a year.
Prepare to Leap!
This is not a complete success story. For various reasons, which I may discuss in a future blog, I did not sell as many books as JK Rowling and, ultimately, I decided to quit writing for a while to focus on other opportunities. But I’m hoping this tale conveys something of the level of hard work and passion that can be required to bring an idea and a business to fruition. I threw my heart over the bar and not only did the rest of me follow, but countless others did too.
With your startup, be prepared to throw your heart over the bar!
© Alan Healy
