To build a business, believe in your vision and take some risks

I’ve always preferred running to swimming, but when Sir Richard Branson tells you to jump overboard, you’d be a braver person than I am to refuse. Plunging into the Caribbean Sea alongside the founder of Virgin was bizarre, yet here I was, swimming up to Necker Island with one of the UK’s (and the world’s) most famous innovators.

Dash Water used to be part of the Virgin StartUp accelerator, which offers funding and mentorship to early-stage businesses, and they asked me to do a talk on Necker Island. I learnt a great deal — mainly by keeping quiet to listen. And during one conversation with Richard, I had a real moment of realisation when he said to me: “Other people will try to stop you from scaling Dash Water. Don’t be afraid.”

I realised that whether I’d known it or not, it was this lack of fear which had underpinned some of Dash Water’s most memorable successes. They’d come when we stopped focusing on external factors, shut out the noise around us, and doubled down on what we believed was right.

Being able to do all that is a skill — or at least a mindset — which isn’t always easy to execute. But the rewards on offer are considerable. You can grow when others are standing still, or even going backwards.

Before Covid, cafés and restaurants accounted for 65 per cent of Dash Water’s total sales. Overnight in 2020 this went into hibernation.

A lot of the advice I got was to just put the team on furlough and go into hibernation ourselves until the market recovered. Instead, we did the opposite by hiring an outstanding e-commerce director who took the platform to another level, significantly increased digital marketing and did not put any of our team on furlough. We put in a new subscription service on our website and started making record sales. As Churchill said, never let a good crisis go to waste.

Of course, you need to be able to back your execution. I remember meal subscription services during the lockdowns foundering on dated IT and logistics, for example. But I also remember how Airbnb successfully pivoted its strategy by promoting local stays and “staycations” over international travel. Or how LVMH shifted production from luxury perfumes to hand sanitisers and won not just business but serious goodwill as well.

There’s opportunity in adversity, and the popular choice is not always the best one. If you always play it safe, you’ll struggle to build an audience for your product. Another piece of advice Richard gave me on Necker Island was beautiful in its simplicity: always continue to think big.

Going against the “safety first” approach can also reap rewards when you have a set of values which underpin your business.

In our case, Dash Water has been happy to call out the “big boys” from day one, who continue to spend millions marketing their sugar or sweetener-laden products, especially to children.

There’s growing scientific evidence that despite the much-vaunted switch from sugar to artificial sweeteners like aspartame, there’s still an increase in the risk of serious disease by consuming them in soft drinks instead of cutting sugar from your overall diet. Large soft drink multinationals are simply not doing enough with the information provided to them. That’s why we’ve continued to go toe to toe, from comment pieces to billboards.

This has been extremely stressful at times. For years we’ve had industry players try to warn us off, and pressure us into watering down our position. They weren’t empty threats. For a rapidly growing, but still challenger, brand like ours, the prospect of losing shelf space at supermarkets if big brands lent on retailers was a huge concern.

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Thankfully, the only voices we did listen to were those of our customers who liked what we were doing and didn’t want us to change a thing.

I have also been inspired by other brands such as Lucky Saint, who have really helped turn the narrative on low and no-alcohol beer around in recent years. When they first started, the market for low and no was small and filled with options that didn’t exactly appeal to the consumer. Big beer brands may well have liked it that way. But Lucky Saint did something else, which would have pleased Branson — they stuck to their specific mission, to create a good-tasting product. It’s been a great success.

You don’t have to hear it on Necker Island to know that it’s true. While others may attempt to hinder your progress, staying committed to your mission, remaining aligned with your core values, and believing in your product will enable you to overcome most obstacles.

So, the next time you feel like outside voices are holding back your growth, remind yourself that the riskiest approach you can take is not to take any.

Alex Wright is co-founder and chief executive of Dash Water, a £26 million turnover healthy soft drink brand sold across 25 countries

This post was originally published on here