Inside A One Person Business - An Interview With Alex Smith, Founder of Basic Arts
Join Ellen as she sits down with Alex Smith, a successful one-person business owner who leveraged his Unique Contribution for high-level thinking and built a profitable strategy consultancy.
Have you always wondered what goes on inside a one-person business? How they start, what they do and where they get clients? Inside our brand new series Ellen Donnelly, founder of The Ask, sits down with successful one person business owners and teases out their strategies and stories, so that you can apply them to your own entrepreneurial journey.
Inside this episode Alex Smith and Ellen Donnelly discuss:
Why many Founders don't buy 'strategy' and how Alex overcomes this
How Alex used his 'monetisable quirk' aka his Unique Contribution to define his entire business
How Alex is making Basic Arts itself a company without competitors
Why labels that simplify things can box us in
The mechanics of Basic Arts business model and the difference between doing strategy v execution for brands
How LinkedIn and email act as a marketing funnel to his business
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Ellen Donnelly
“Hey Alex, thank you for joining our one person business interview series at The Ask. How are you doing?
Alex Smith
“Yeah, good, good. How are you?”
ED - “Amazing. Yeah, excited to dig into your business basic arts. So why don't you tell us what it is that you do and why is it that you chose this one person business?”
AS - “Sure, sure. Well, basically, I'm a solo strategy consultant.
And for the most part, what I do is I help consumer brands make big moves, escape the competition and try and open up their own kind of white space in the market. I operate from the principle that I think that every business should be - as much as it can be - a monopoly and that sort of competitive way of doing business, so that's the idea. And I came from a background in marketing agencies. But what you find quickly, as I'm sure you're aware, that is that all that sort of agency work is essentially about putting a shiny wrapper on a business proposition,which may or may not be strategically effective in the first place. And that's fine for the agencies. But often you're putting lipstick on a pig. So I just wanted to take one click up and say, well, actually, it'd be better rather than trying to make crap businesses look good. It would be more interesting to try and make crap businesses be good businesses. But that's why I took this move.
EB - Okay, I was going to ask you, what's the problem that you're solving? And it's crap businesses pretending to be good. And you're solving that by really getting to the heart of the business itself, the proposition, the strategy and saying, how can we make this in and of itself unique, a monopoly in its space? Is that right?
At its root level, strategy is a method by which you can grow more, make more money. But simultaneously, it's also a way of creating businesses people give a shit about and are exciting
AS - Yeah, that's right. I mean, in terms of what basic arts, the problem that it solves, obviously, on a client to client level is that very thing. There are kind of slightly more macro goals that I have for the businesses or ways of thinking about it.
I mean, one of them is essentially just strategy education, improving kind of strategy, understanding and capability, because I mean, obviously, it's a cliché that people don't understand strategy, but they really don't. And, what you see with most businesses is not only that they have bad strategies, that would actually be an improvement, it is that they actually don't even engage with the subject.
I'm trying to get a new generation of founders to understand, okay, what is strategy? What are the questions that I should be answering? And then latterly, the result of that is that I would hope that you're going to create in a more grandiose vision, a generation of businesses that provide real value to the market and which are doing very interesting things, very unique things, things that get people excited, things that people are passionate about. Because, yes, of course, at its root level, strategy is a method by which you can grow more, make more money. But simultaneously, it's also a way of creating businesses, which, fundamentally, people give a shit about and which are exciting, those two things, they obviously go hand in hand.
EB - Yeah, I really like there's so much of your content that I resonate with. One of them was, to make an interesting business, you'd be an interesting person and creating something that's worthwhile in this world won't happen overnight, you have to really intentionally go, what do I care about? And for you, it's not just what do I do with my clients? And how do I make a buck at the end of the day. It’s what's the stamp I want to put on the world and that stamp is businesses need to have a strategy in order to be xyz, like you just said, and that's the thought leadership piece that you do so well.
I'm sure draws people to you by creating a narrative around this problem and letting them know what you stand for, and therefore creating leads at the end of the day. That's the game.
So I want to ask you about your unique contribution. This is the expression I use to help founders identify what it is that they bring to the table that's unique, their strengths, their background, their experiences, skills, personality, and helping them map that to the business. You know, we don't work together, but I'm sure that there are ways that you've mapped your unique contribution to your business. Could you share any of the ways that you've done that?
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AS - I mean, I don't know how true this is of all one person businesses and other businesses that you speak to. But speaking for myself, all the business really is this particular business is just a monetization of my own personal quirks, right? Like, I'm not doing this because I had identified an opportunity or because I had a sort of a kind of arbitrary interest in the subject field. This is just the most effective way I've found to monetize what I happen to do well and to downplay what I happen to not do well. And in my case, I basically just have one particular character quirk,which is good for this, which is a kind of a very almost, what's the word? Yeah. Well, an almost pathological focus on the big picture and zooming out, which is essentially what you need to do for strategy. And it's something which most people, I would say in particular founders, are not very good at. So you get that good balance with what the founder or the chief executive is bringing to the table with what I can bring to the table.
All the business really is this particular business is just a monetization of my own personal quirks, right? This is just the most effective way I've found to monetize what I happen to do well and to downplay what I happen to not do well.
They're like focused on the real digging into making the stuff happen, making things work, whilst I can provide the sort of the helicopter view. And then you bring those two things together. So really, that's something that I just do for fun in, in all parts of my life, I guess. And in this case, it's just realizing, oh, well, if I just do that to businesses that in and of itself as value.
So, that's really just the it. I wouldn't even say it's a question of me, as you say, mapping my unique contribution on to the business. It's more that the business is by definition a by product, there isn't really a part of the business that isn't. Although that being said, in the past, obviously, I have tried to do things which weren't really me, but which I thought might be a sensible thing to do because oh, that seems like the sort of thing that someone in my situation would do. And of course, those types of ideas always fail.
If it's not something that's truly aligned with you and that you sort of like get get a sense of flow with then yeah, it's you're gonna botch it. So that's one thing that I've learned.
EB - Yeah, they say like the shiny object syndrome is one of the quickest killers of a business, not just in terms of focus, but I see it from a personality, a skill fit perspective. It sounds like you're the extreme on the Myers -Briggs end preference, like big picture thinking. And that's, as you say, become your monetizable quirk, which I love, I might steal that.
AS - That's funny, I was actually going to reference that then I thought, oh, no, that's too random a thing to reference. Yes, actually, on that test, I am like, I bury the needle on that one particular characteristic. So yes, that is exactly right.
EB - Personality testing, I do a lot with with clients, because I think if there are those anomalies, let's use them, let's take that tenfold, because not everybody will have that quirk, let's call it. And that's a differentiating factor. So is there anything that you feel that you do or don't do aside from perhaps what you've already shared, that differentiates you from other strategy consultants or one -on-ones out there?
AS - I'm not aware of many other sort of solo strategy consultants in the UK, at any rate, a bit more common in the United States, but clearly the field is very dry and corporate and academic. And so there's a big stylistic change that I try to bring to the table, because I tend to be working with, for want of a better term, trendy-ish consumer brands.
You want to bring a more kind of casual and accessible and fun style to it than what you would necessarily get in an MBA syllabus textbook. Ultimately, the ideas are all the same, there isn't really any new ideas out there in this space, but it's about the way you articulate them and the style that you bring them out there. So this is one thing where I do think that I'm that I'm very different.
I don't know to what extent other sort of strategy people think this too, as far as I'm aware they don't, but they might do; I think that, strategy is 50 % having a good idea, being right. Oh, if we do X, then Y will happen. But the other 50 % of it, to be honest, and maybe even more than 50%, is actually a motivational factor. Because if you have a really clear strategy, what it can do for a business, what it can do for a CEO, what it can do for a founder is it can really kind of give them a sense of conviction, something that they can go out there and attack very aggressively and sort of have fun doing it. And that energy, which they bring to the party is actually going to have a bigger implication, I think, to the success of the business than whether or not the strategy is technically clever or not clever.
So, it's very important for me that I think there's a sense of sort of like mischief and joy in the strategy, because you're trying not only to make a smart move, you're trying to make a move which galvanizes the business. And you could clearly come up with a intelligent, quote unquote, correct strategy that's a bit dry, and I don't think that would do the job. Whereas ironically, I hesitate to say this, but you'll get my point. I think a kind of crap strategy, but that at least makes people say, right, hell yes, let's do it, is one way or another, I think that will actually end up still yielding results.
ED - Yeah, I love that galvanizing the energy that's created by like excitement around the business, the proposition, the competitive element that founders can have, it makes such a difference that the energy compounding and creating action. So I love that you're creating that clarity so that they can take action, which is a lot of what coaching is about as well.
So what is it that you do? What's the doing of strategy? Could you share a little bit about the services, the products that you offer, and maybe even how have those evolved over the years as you've learned what does and doesn't work with your clients?
AS - Yeah, the for the most part, most of the work is not complicated. It's ‘what is the strategy’, and then go and execute it. And the job is finished, at least in terms of my involvement, generally, when you've turned the ship, and the business has become the kind of very obviously strategically aligned version of itself, that process probably takes maybe a year or something like that, or on average. Now I used to focus more on the strategy development stuff, and then was like, okay, yeah, off you go, you now know what you need to do, go and do it. But I found that the success rate of that was quite low, I underestimated how difficult execution is for most businesses. I would say, obviously, there's a difference between what how I judge a successful project, and how the client judges a successful project.
But from my point of view, I would say that probably only about 30% of projects where I left them to execute by themselves were what I would look back on as being successes, by which I mean, they really went full bore after the strategy and saw the results coming from that. So because of that, I've now shifted the emphasis to be much more even between the strategy development and the implementation, because really that hand holding is required for I think for two reasons.
One of which is that when you think about it, it's nobody in the business's job to do strategy, it's a kind of extracurricular activity in a sense. So, it doesn't really fall into any particular sort of competency, it sort of falls into the CEO's competency, but a lot of the time, rightly or wrongly, that's not what they're spending their time doing. And then the other thing is that it sort of, it takes quite a long time for it to seep into the fabric of the business, you know, like when you put, I don't know, a treatment onto a piece of wood or something, it's only really going to work once it's sort of soaked in, otherwise, it will just be a waste of time. And then the other thing is that it's not just like quickly wash off the surface. So for those reasons, yeah, I've come to see that it's a much bigger challenge than I thought when I first started doing this.
ED - I can imagine it's so hard to say what is contributing to a result and what isn't, but I'm sure when you stay with your client throughout the implementation, at least you have like the steering wheel in your hands a bit more than, all right, good luck with with this one pager, like, let's actually see it. Do you have any client wins case studies that you're able to share just to bring this to life a bit more?
AS - Yeah, I mean, one of the cleanest examples, which I like, because most people know the brand, it was just a very pure piece of strategy, not without any muddying of the waters was Moju, the juice shots business. I started working with them when they maybe they had one retailer listing and I don't know how big they were, they were pretty small, one or two million tonnes. And now they're exponentially bigger than that in every store in the country and they've done fantastically well. And incidentally, that's not one where I helped them with the execution. They were one of the 30 % exceptions who just like nailed the execution all by themselves. And, you know, in their case, it's to give you a basic idea of what happened with that and it's, you can then map this over onto other businesses.
They had this product, which was the juice shot, but that was all they had, just the product and this product was doing quite well. But what a lot of businesses don't understand is that your product is not your business, right? You can put a product out there, but the reason that that product is succeeding, the reason it's getting traction in the market could be a million different things, right? So they knew that there was a bit of heat between the juice shots, but they didn't know particularly why there was and therefore it's unclear how you're going to grow that and how you're going to expand it to a wider market. At the time, there was a very small number of people who just intuitively understood it. So from that one base point, you could take the business in a million directions. Is it all about getting more healthy or is it all about, I don't know, having things on the go? You can see how completely different businesses could be born out of that same starting point.
And in their case, what we realized was that at the time they were very much conceptualizing themselves as a juice brand like Innocent and so on, because for the obvious reason the product's made of juice. But we realized that that was a bit of a red herring, because although the product was made of juice, it actually didn't really have anything in common with juice and the way that people bought juice and the way that people thought about juice. The juice shots are actually much more similar to something like a Barocca or maybe even you might go so far as to say an energy drink.
So when you frame the juice shot, not against juice, where it doesn't have much leverage, but against kind of chemical performance products, which is how we bracketed those other products, you see that it has a lot more leverage in that direction.
Because it's a all natural product and those products are full of crap. So it was essentially we pulled the business out of the juice category and into that other category where it made a lot more sense to people where it had a lot more leverage and then where off it could kind of go. And obviously there was lots and lots of executional implications of that. But I think it's quite a good example of of the process, shifting from this sort of being product focused, product centric, thinking of your business as the product. So then thinking of the business as the value that the product delivers. And then once you've moved your thinking to that higher level, you can then start to think, okay, well, what other things would deliver this value and then boom, boom, boom. Outcomes a range of products, outcomes, your brand outcomes, your advertising outcomes, your approach to distribution, whatever it might be. So everything just everything just opens up.
ED - Yeah, that's amazing. Great case study. And I love the sort of reframing of the thing like what other things would solve the same problem for my consumer. So, in the case of like businesses like ours, which are somewhat similar, you might say, going and doing further education or buying a book. You know, you wouldn't see a book as your competitor for your business. But in a way it is, it's a competition for time and energy and money in the same way that Moju's competition is like hydration shots or yeah, living clean lifestyle. I don't know, but that's cool.
AS - Yeah, that's a really fundamental principle for sure that stuff. And I'm sorry. And just to just to close out that point, I think that a lot of businesses, they get kind of screwed because they get their financial reporting in category terms and they start to think that the category equates to the real world, but actually the category that you are part of is completely made up and arbitrary and it doesn't actually exist in the real world and it doesn't reflect the way that people are navigating the world..
So one of the first things you have to do on almost all projects is to kind of sweep away whatever category they think they're in because normally that is acting as a sort of intellectual anchor dragging you down.
EB - Now I can see that we put labels to simplify things that they can box us in at the same time. So yeah, I can see how what you do is really impactful. How do you articulate it to new potential buyers in terms of your sales and your marketing? I know that you have a newsletter. What other activities do you take on as a one person business?
AS - Going back to what I was saying before about how low the knowledge and understanding is that has an unfortunate byproduct, which is that because people don't really engage with strategy, they also aren't really shopping for it, which means that everything that all of my own marketing has to be completely educational. It's about generating demand. It's not about answering demand. The direct demand out there is very, very small.
The number of businesses who are thinking, oh, I need to work on my strategy, like that's a very, very unusual scenario. So you have to introduce people to the concept and then let them see, oh, God, this is something that I don't do at all. And then hopefully it falls into place. So the newsletter is the main way that I do that.
And that's all about essentially instilling kind of deep strategic knowledge in readers over time. And that used to be all I did, plus the odd event and stuff like that. And, the odd podcast. But recently I realized that I had the fairly obvious issue that I didn't really have a top of funnel. So I didn't have an easy access point to the newsletter and to the kind of like the deeper thinking. So only in the last three months or so I've started tragically playing the LinkedIn game, which and although you sort of have to swallow your pride a bit with it, I do now think how stupid I was to have not been doing that for the past like five years because then the capital that you build up over that time would have been fantastic. But, you know, you live and learn. So, yeah, that's something that I've now added. So the idea is that the funnel doesn't really work this way in reality, but in crude terms, you go from LinkedIn through to the newsletter through to potentially working together.
EB - Very similar funnel to my own or at least the evolution of it. They change, right. You do things that didn't really work, didn't really enjoy that, drop the YouTube. That was a ball ache or whatever it is. Okay, I can just about get over myself on LinkedIn. So watch out for Alex over the next five years, you're going to be the next LinkedIn influencer by the sounds of it.
AB - Oh God, that sounds like a slap in the face, but I would take it. I would take it.
EB - It works. Yeah. So, coming to land then, thank you for sharing this. It's been really insightful and some really cool kind of ideas about how people can think about what to do, what to not do, how to make their business an expression of who they are. You clearly do that. I love your work and everyone should read your newsletter, whether they're a founder or, in a sort of service providing category. I think they can learn a lot. Where can people find you? Where would you like them to come and find you after this?
AS - By all means, connect on LinkedIn. I'm pumping a new thing out every single day on there. Which, like I say, although it's pride swallowing, is actually quite fun. But the main sort of body of thought, I would say, is with the newsletter, which is called The Hidden Path. And you can find that on my website, which is basicarts.org. And you can find all of the old issues on there and all that type of stuff. I've got a book coming out in August. So obviously I'll be pushing that, it does what it says on the tin. It's called No Bullshit Strategy, which tells you everything that you need to know, particularly in a sort of founder context about letting it all out. And then I actually have another, well, that's a whole bigger, bigger subject. So we won't get onto that. But then I've got another product coming later in the year. So suffice it to say, obviously, I'll be promoting the hell out of it when the time comes. Keep your eyes peeled.
EB - Okay, well, I'll be first in line to buy the book, if your newsletters are anything to go by. So thank you for your time. We'll link everything that you've shared so people can find you. And yeah, thanks so much for your time.
AS - Thanks a lot. Cheers.
