Scaling up - Versus Socks

Deceptively Simple

I went to a talk by Hanno Lategan, one of the two founders of Versus Socks, talking about the success of the company. At one level it sounds incredibly simple - ambitious entrepreneur, start in your parents' garage, outsource production, have your mom as the bookkeeper, watch the cash, scale through listing in a major retailer, expand internationally … But unlike the podcasts this is harder than it looks as their overnight success took 11 years. They made smart decisions to build a community, to build a team, to invest in digital, to invest in systems, to self-fund incremental growth, allowing them to maintain ownership and control to name a few. I also liked the discipline of not overinvesting in offshore growth, ringfencing retained foreign income to scale.

Partnership and autonomy

For me the real story was the how they manged their partnership. Two founders, with different skills creating one effective team. Blending a focus on data, systems & finance on one side with creativity, marketing and sales on the other. A critical principle was autonomy on decision making rather than consensus building - make the best decision for the business, if it is sub-optimal, discuss it and fix it in the future. This enabled them to prioritise speed and created a culture of experimentation. There are enormous benefits of dual founders blending different skills, but this is often lost through either slow decision making or conflict.

Key skills of curiosity and adaptability

This same logic enabled them to empower their team, accelerating momentum in the business. "In the early days, being hands on was an advantage, but as we grow that same behaviour becomes a bottleneck." Great maturity to realise they were the handbrake, to get out of the way and to this avoid some of the common founder traps. These moves came from a desire to continually grow and the curiosity to learn new ways of operating. What got you to here won’t get you to there.