Making Something From Nothing: Richard Potter Of Peak Marketing Firm On How To Go From Idea To Launch
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
You can never raise too much funding. The funding process can be lengthy but not having enough funding can slow you down. Try to raise as much money as you can upfront.
As a part of our series called “Making Something From Nothing”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Richard Potter.
Richard is the Co-founder and CEO of Decision Intelligence company, Peak. Founded in 2015, the Manchester-based scaleup now numbers 250 staff internationally, it is on a mission to change the way the world works, making outcome focused AI solutions available to everyone within a business and building a company its people love to be part of. In 2019, he was recognized by Data IQ among its 100 data influencers for his work in shaping the early Decision Intelligence space.
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”?
From a young age, I had a diverse set of role models exemplifying entrepreneurship and leadership to show me the way. Three generations in my dad’s family were butchers who owned their own business. However, my dad decided to take a different path by working in car factories. He worked hard for many years and traveled during the week for work, but he taught himself binary coding to move his career beyond the factory floor.
My mom taught at a local college and brought home one of the old BBC microcomputers when they were discarded, and a huge book on coding. My brother and I taught ourselves to code on that machine. We were both under 10 when we learned how to code, and we spent our free time making games and quizzes.
Beyond my parents, the men and women in my life were successful business leaders as well — all from different backgrounds. I never second-guessed that I would have my own company someday because I always had mentors and family to look up to that showed me it was possible. I am acutely aware of this privilege and want to provide more opportunities for those who didn’t grow up with the same access to mentorship as I did.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
I don’t have a favorite life lesson quote per se but I do hold myself accountable to two key questions, which are also key values at Peak. With everything I do, can I truly say I am proud of it? Am I proud of how I carried myself in the situation at hand? Life throws a lot of different obstacles at us, and we are surrounded by people that may not have the same mindset. As long as you are true to yourself and try your best in every situation, that’s all you can do.
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?
A: In the early days of my career, I spent a lot of time traveling as a consultant and was an avid listener of the This Week in Startups podcast hosted by Jason Calacanis. It was exciting and inspiring to hear about what those startups were doing and how I could relate to these businesses. Masters of Scale podcast is also a great one that digs under that superficial layer of startup advice, which I still enjoy.
In terms of books, my favorite author is George Orwell, and I have read all his books — 1984, Animal Farm, you name it. Zero to One by Blake Masters and Peter Thiel is also a good read. But I have to say, On the Road by Jack Kerouac is probably my favorite book of all time.
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?
To turn a good idea into an actual business requires both vision and critical thinking, in other words both your creative and practical sides of the brain. With Peak, we were pioneers in the way that we thought about data and what it could do for businesses. At the time, no one thought to put a centralized platform in the cloud.
From there, it’s all about the people and building a culture of empowerment to maintain the innovation and entrepreneurial spirit from Day 1. After we received our seed funding, our first hire was an HR employee, despite not having any team at the time! We wanted to build an amazing company and culture that everyone loves being a part of. One of our foundational values is curiosity, and we test for this during interviews. We’re first principle thinkers, we ask questions, provide solutions and are open to new ideas and promoting change — all key to fostering innovation.
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?
You have to remember that every idea is a derivative of another, and most people will struggle to do something completely new and out of the box. Think critically and be honest with yourself about whether or not the product you’re imagining is truly innovative and disruptive. Ask yourself — is what I thought of an incremental improvement on something that already exists? If yes, then take it a step further and determine if there is already a big player doing something similar.
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.
This process is different for everyone. We started out as a consultancy, then we developed a SaaS platform and secured seed funding from investors. During the investing stage, we had to do quite a bit of critical thinking about our product that ultimately led us to change our business model.
We intentionally went out looking for four or five very different customers to test our platform and test it in different situations and use cases. That ultimately turned out to be the right thing to do, we started broad, learned, then narrowed our focus and now we’re in a position to go broad again.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started Leading My Company” and why? (Please share a story or example for each.)
First, you can never raise too much funding. The funding process can be lengthy but not having enough funding can slow you down. Try to raise as much money as you can upfront.
Second, pitch your idea boldly. With Peak, we were very modest when pitching to investors and didn’t share our big vision. Not for any particular reason, but it’s very British to play things a bit more modestly and we only really pitched the next thing we were building, rather than the big overarching vision. I guess we will never know this now, but we might have unlocked our potential sooner if we had gone big and shouted about our idea from the very beginning.
Third, go into this process with your eyes open. We conducted a lot of research in the early days to ensure we understood the industry in and out. Even if it took us longer to start, it was worth it to understand the path forward and potential competitors.
Fourthly, connect with as many people as you can and talk about your business. People often try to keep their ideas a secret, they think it is the right thing to do because they don’t want to risk giving away their innovative product, business or idea. However, if you truly have a breakthrough idea that shifts all the industry norms, people won’t think it is possible. Take the risk of letting people copy the small or insignificant parts of your idea. When you share your ideas, you have the opportunity to find people who will agree, disagree and critique them so you can make them better
And finally, leverage free resources. We sought support from MIDAS, a regional development service, that gave us the critique and encouragement we needed to get started, and helped us to build a network.
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?
First, remember that market testing is key. Millions of great ideas go to market at the wrong time, so be realistic about whether the market is ready for this idea and if you have a customer. If so, you’ll be able to take advantage of the opportunity and own the market.
Second, pressure test your product. Take the time to write an owner’s manual for your product — this is one of the most important tasks we did for Peak. We wrote down all of our assumptions and tested every single one. Some we got wrong, and some were right. This process helped us be confident in our product and build a strong foundation at the beginning of our road.
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?
My recommendation would be to do it on your own. Time and money are two of the biggest risks when it comes to business decision-making. If you hire a consultant, their time will cost you a lot of money. Instead, give equity to someone and keep them in your business.
What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?
Not every company can be successful when it comes to bootstrapping. Mailchimp and Basecamp are great success stories, but if you are an enterprise software company, that might not be the case for you. With Peak, we tried to bootstrap for about a year. We learned so much, but we didn’t have the time and the resources we needed to grow. Bringing in external funding was the right decision for us and led us to where we are today.
Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?
I’m not sure that we have made the world a better place yet, but we’re trying and chipping away at pieces to make it better. Peak has been very fortunate thus far, and we are in a privileged position now to do a lot and give back whenever possible. One of our priorities is to create an impact on society and the environment, so we dedicate time to charities and causes that are close to our hearts.
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.
To create a more equal and fair world where everyone is born with the same opportunity. I feel very lucky that I have had so many amazing opportunities put in front of me, but it is incredibly unfair and unfortunate that this isn’t true for everyone.
I may not be able to change the entire world, but I can start by trying to make a difference at Peak. We’re striving to create an inclusive and open-minded culture. The pandemic has challenged us to have an outward-looking lens and has put us to the test. However, we made the conscious decision to put our teams and their families first, and were very transparent with our people about how we were protecting all of our jobs throughout this time. Additionally, we extended this same spirit and mindset into our relationships with customers and supported them in every way possible.
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.
This is such a hard question to answer because there are so many people I would like to meet. However, I’d love to have breakfast with Barack Obama. He seems so relatable, and because he was the president, it feels like he shouldn’t be so relatable.
I’d be interested to know how he managed to stay true to himself while connecting with so many people around the world and how he felt about his time in office. Does he regret it? Does he believe that he delivered on the hope that he promised? What would he have done differently?
Apart from his presidency, he is a family man and you can sense the loving and caring relationship he has with his wife. He was the president of the United States and brilliantly created space for his wife to shine as well. I want to know how he managed equality in his own family to bring up his family’s success while being in arguably the most important position in the world.
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.
Making Something From Nothing: Richard Potter Of Peak Marketing Firm On How To Go From Idea To… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
