Understand Your Consumers and Their Lives: Interview with Matt Grech-Smith, Co-Founder of Swingers Crazy Golf
I recently went one on one with Matt Grech-Smith, co-founder of Swingers Crazy Golf.
Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks, or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?
Matt: Looking back, it’s funny how for my business partner - Jeremy Simmonds - and I, our experience almost seemed to lead inevitably to the point of starting Swingers. Jeremy and I both met when we were in college in the UK. I was in Manchester, and he was in Leeds, two cities that are close to each other in the north of England. We both were running businesses putting on music events in bars and clubs for college students. We decided to put our businesses together and combine our skills. We grew the business to become the largest organizer of youth music events in the UK, selling over a million tickets a year to young people. We got bought by a big agency that loved the direct access that we had to the youth market. With them, we developed a youth ad agency and handled all of their experiential activity across big brands like Coca-Cola and Microsoft. When we finished our earn-out with the agency, we knew we wanted to get back to being entrepreneurial. Through our experience, we knew the nightlife industry, we understood marketing and brand communications, and we could see the start of the experience economy. With all of that in mind, it’s no surprise that we hit on Swingers!
Adam: How did you come up with your business idea? What advice do you have for others on how to come up with great ideas?
Matt: Like I say, the idea really arose as a result of all of our experience that led to this nightlife, experience, event product. A detailed knowledge of your market is definitely key – you need to know everything about your market landscape and your customer if you’re going to come up with something that people truly want to engage with and spend their money on. And that second part is also key – work out what people want or need. Don’t come up with something that only you need, come up with something that large numbers of people will want and buy – and prove it, otherwise your business will never be viable.
Adam: How did you know your business idea was worth pursuing? What advice do you have on how to best test a business idea?
Matt: We knew that the idea for Swingers was a good one – universally, every friend and colleague that we tested the idea on loved it. That gave us the confidence to put together a temporary pop-up to test the concept. We found 7,000 sq feet in an old warehouse, just to the east of central London, and created version 1 of Swingers. It cost $750k to put together, so it was no small experiment, but it was instrumental in proving to ourselves and future investors the strength of the market and the potential for our concept.
Adam: What are the key steps you have taken to grow your business? What advice do you have for others on how to take their businesses to the next level?
Matt: We have five sites now. Expansion has been a careful combination of finding the right locations, building an incredible team, and raising the capital to support our big growth ambitions. We’ve always thought really big, but care massively about the detail of our product and what our guest experiences. That twin tracking of macro-strategy and micro-detail is essential for growth.
Adam: What are your best sales and marketing tips?
Matt: Understand your consumers and their lives. Where do you fit in? What are they coming to you for? How do you not only address that need but engage your consumers to let them know that you address that need?
At Swingers, we understand that our guests are busy people, faced with a huge variety of options for how to spend their discretionary income. We have worked hard to create a beautiful brand, that talks to people in a fun and intelligent way and makes it as compelling and as simple as possible to engage with us. Simply put, we do as much as we can to remove any obstacles to guests understanding what we do and how we work, so they can focus on having a good time in our venues.
Adam: In your experience, what are the defining qualities of an effective leader? How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?
Matt: This is an area that much better thinkers than me have dedicated whole books to, but here’s my ten cents worth!
Effective leaders not only devise great strategies, but they also take everyone on the journey. No one achieves business greatness alone.
Leaders know what they know and what they don’t know. No one expects a CEO to know everything, there are lots of times when you just need to bring in an expert.
Effective leaders set an example and define company culture. In a world where we spend so much time at work, the environment we work in and the way we work is everything.
Adam: What is your best advice on building, leading, and managing teams?
Matt:
Hire slow, fire fast – it’s a kind of glib figure of speech but there’s a lot of truth in it. Hiring incredible people that share your values will give your business huge momentum. Retaining people who disrupt the culture or who aren’t good at their job will drag everyone down.
Listen – engage with your team. Spend time with them. Give them ways to provide face-to-face and anonymous feedback on their roles and work environment. The results might surprise you.
Be consistent – clearly communicate everyone’s roles and responsibilities, explain what you expect from them and when. Celebrate success and course-correct those who aren’t meeting the standard.
Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives, and civic leaders?
Matt:
Engage meaningfully – whether it’s with your team, your customers, or your voters. In this digital age, people are consuming messages through a range of media all the time. To cut through you have to be relevant, interesting, and authentic.
Don’t spend too much time watching the competition – know what is happening in the wider landscape, but don’t get consumed by what competitors are doing, otherwise you will just start to imitate them. To create something special you will have to disrupt the market and do something new.
Know when to take a break – and encourage your team to do the same. In this ‘always on’ world there is a pressure to always be working and always be improving. To be the best version of yourself you have to rest and recharge from time to time if only to get a fresh perspective.
Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?
Matt: You can never keep everybody happy. Don’t go mad trying.
Adam Mendler is an entrepreneur, writer, speaker, educator, and nationally-recognized authority on leadership. Adam is the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal-winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities, and non-profit organizations. Adam has written extensively on leadership and related topics, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. Adam teaches graduate-level courses on leadership at UCLA and is an advisor to numerous companies and leaders. A Los Angeles native, Adam is a lifelong Angels fan and an avid backgammon player.
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