An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Be yourself. You don’t have to act like some corporate high flier suit-wearing robot. Being yourself is more honest and in today’s world, completely acceptable. You’ll come across as more natural, more confident and get better results.

As a part of our series called “Making Something From Nothing”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Alister Punton.

Alister Punton is a principal founder of Storylines at Sea, a liveaboard private residence ship which continuously travels the world, offering an international lifestyle for a community of global citizens. He brings more than 20 years of experience in business planning and strategy to the expanding residential yacht and ship market. Alister oversees the development of the lifestyle side of the Storylines brand while his business partner Shannon Lee oversees the ship’s construction.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?

Growing up on a farm gave me an unfair advantage as an entrepreneur. A farm life is the essence of ‘making something from nothing’ and very quickly from a young age I learnt how to make myself an income, and by the time I was 18 I had nearly a dozen micro-businesses which ranged from seasonal work to mini enterprises selling products in the town nearby. This all played a role in where I’d end up today; that I’m sure.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“Don’t mistake my kindness for weakness. I am kind to everyone, but when someone is unkind to me, weak is not what you are going to remember about me.” Al Capone
There is a great lesson here, you need to be kind, caring and compassionate as a leader, but you need to know when to step in and control the situation. Finding the right line between interfering with your team and appropriate action is a key life skill. Al Capone had different objectives and delivery methods, but the philosophy is relevant to business management.

Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

I’d have to say author and physicist Stephen Hawking and his book ‘A brief history of time’ really made it clear to me that we are all just talking monkeys on an organic spaceship flying through space. It’s humbling to think about, but also motivating to think that there is so much we don’t know, so by inventing a new thing maybe I’m helping to bridge that gap in some weird and wonderful way.

Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. There is no shortage of good ideas out there. Many people have good ideas all the time. But people seem to struggle in taking a good idea and translating it into an actual business. Can you share a few ideas from your experience about how to overcome this challenge?

Ideas. Everyone has them. But making them into something; that’s the hard part. First you need to find a problem people have, and then solve it. That’s most businesses in a nutshell. These fixes may be obvious or hard to understand at first, but if it’s a genuine problem you are fixing, people will pay money to do it which brings us to revenue models. What is yours? Is it sustainable? Do you have capital? If not, where will you get it from? A little trick I was taught by a billionaire is to double your costs and half your revenue number…if it still works you have something worth pursuing. Now granted that’s not suitable for all business models, but it’s something to think about.

Often when people think of a new idea, they dismiss it saying someone else must have thought of it before. How would you recommend that someone go about researching whether or not their idea has already been created?

Welcome to the magical world of the internet; it’s all there, might not be on the surface, but it’s all there if you look hard enough. Start by looking to see who else is doing it. Dig deep. Find the research that has been conducted on the topic or the problem you are looking to solve, and of course there are likely discussion groups on social platforms already talking about this. These are great to get a pulse on the idea.

For the benefit of our readers, can you outline the steps one has to go through, from when they think of the idea, until it finally lands in a customer’s hands? In particular, we’d love to hear about how to file a patent, how to source a good manufacturer, and how to find a retailer to distribute it.

Let’s think of the key steps you must go through.

1. Identify and define your idea. What is it really, is that a go-to-market idea? What’s your elevator pitch? Can you explain your idea to a five year old? Get your business plan in place and continually update it so it stays relevant. That’s a critical step at this early stage.
2. Get support. It’s going to be a long road, so get some support from future consumers, friends, investors!!!, manufacturers, etc. Start conversations early with as many people as possible — they can be your best resource and give you an unbelievable amount of knowledge and direction to better define your idea and maybe even new revenue streams you hadn’t thought of.
3. Chunk it down. You can’t possibly do everything all at once, so chunk it down into smaller manageable parts with clear outcomes. This will ensure you see progress and keep motivated.
4. Be prepared to learn. You will need to be the jack of all trades at first, learning new things and knowing how to do everything is just as important as actually doing it.
5. Get good at processes. Once you do the step above, you’ll need to be good at documenting everything down to the finest detail: not all at once, but it will need to be done. That way when it comes time to outsource that role, you’ll have a ready-built standard operating procedure that works for you in your company right away. Less time training and worse yet, repeating yourself.
6. Get to revenue, fast. It may not be the best version of your product, but get something out there as soon as possible. This will do a number of things; it will keep you and your team motivated, attract investors and of course provide incredible user data and feedback.
7. Outsource. Armed with your SOPs, now figure out which hires are next and get them, even just short term gap fillers, always find the very best people you can, and source globally, don’t restrict yourself to local talent.

What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started Leading My Company” and why?

1. There is no training for what you are about to do — no courses, MBAs or anything that can really prepare you — you just need to back yourself and do it. Day in and day out.
2. Get a mentor. This is easier than you might think and it doesn’t need to be a professional relationship, just have people better than you available and willing to take a call from you from time to time. Just airing and sharing a problem or talking to others can in many cases solve your problem.
3. Be yourself. You don’t have to act like some corporate high flier suit-wearing robot. Being yourself is more honest and in today’s world, completely acceptable. You’ll come across as more natural, more confident and get better results.
4. Stay focused. There are a lot of shiny objects out there, and you’ll be tempted to sway from your plan for something along the way, but tread very carefully with this. It has the potential to stop you in your tracks or lose face with other stakeholders. Know what is good for you and your company and its goals.
5. Take time for yourself. Sounds easy enough, and maybe I was late to the party on this one, but blocking out time away from it all is as important as being there for your team. You need this reset time, time to think and strategize the next move/s.

Let’s imagine that a reader reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to invent. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?

Learn from others; the internet is full of amazing content, start watching videos, like my video LINK. Don’t just watch and read, do it with a goal…what is your outcome at the end? What did you learn? And importantly, How can you apply it to what you want to do?

There are many invention development consultants. Would you recommend that a person with a new idea hire such a consultant, or should they try to strike out on their own?

Hiring consultants can be a minefield and a pocket burner in the early stages. Anytime you hire a consultant you need to make sure the deliverables are clearly defined for all involved. Do this up front and honestly and you should be fine. Make sure you have exit clauses so if they aren’t performing you can move on, and learn to recognise this quickly.

What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?

Venture capital at an early stage will cost you more than you will want to give up as a general rule of thumb; not only in equity, but also control so this can be risky. The flipside of course is they have the capital to potentially move things forward much faster than you could alone and may make your venture worth a multitude more than if you were without them. Choose wisely. My business partner Shannon Lee and I chose to bootstrap for a number of reasons, mainly because we knew that at the early stages we wouldn’t be a target for serious levels of investment. We did a friends and family round early on to enable us to reach the point where we were looked at seriously and at the time of writing we have various offers for project and company funding.

Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?

Already we have seen a positive impact being made in the world because of Storylines. During a tour to the Philippines it was on our advice that a terribly poor, muddy and dangerous road was sealed all the way to a mountain top, making the lives of everyone who uses it including school children a little bit better. Our plan is to make meaningful change in every port we visit.

You are an inspiration to a great many people. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

One of our founding principles is based on contribution. We consume less than we contribute. On and off the ship, philanthropy and sustainability are central to all that we do. We are planning on using the Storylines vessels to contribute positively all around the globe at all the ports, cities and regions we travel to. With 1000+ residents travelling the world continually via an environmentally sustainable ship, we believe our community will have a positive impact everywhere we go. I’d love to hear from people with practical ideas on how to facilitate this. We have the floating city and many people in our community who want to participate; let’s hear your ideas!

We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.

Elon Musk — He has what many might consider ambitious plans, that include putting humans on another planet and, interestingly, I saw a talk where he discussed ‘space citizenship’. Well before that can happen there needs to be a consciousness shift from the land based creatures we are to embrace his ideas. I think that Storylines is a logical step in this direction. We are helping our species evolve from living on land, to actually living on the sea. The next logical step will be with space and then to Mars and beyond. So although he may not know who we are and what we are doing, we like to think that we’re helping him to realize his dreams too. So Elon, Breakfast or Brunch?

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.

---

Making Something From Nothing: Alister Punton Of Storylines On How To Go From Idea To Launch was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.