The Growth Move That Looks Stupid on a Spreadsheet

There’s a fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ence between ship­ping your prod­uct glob­al­ly and actu­al­ly grow­ing glob­al­ly. Most com­pa­nies only do one.

At Bund­aberg Brewed Drinks, CEO John McLean draws a line that most growth-focused lead­ers have nev­er thought to draw.

“Export­ing,” he says, ​“is putting prod­uct into a con­tain­er, clos­ing the door, wav­ing good­bye, and hop­ing some­one at the oth­er end sells it.”

Inter­na­tion­al busi­ness, by con­trast, is ask­ing: how can I grow your busi­ness with you?

That’s a sim­ple dis­tinc­tion. But sit with it for a moment, because the gap between those two pos­tures explains why some com­pa­nies go glob­al and most don’t.

The Super­mar­ket Wake-Up Call

By 2007, when John stepped into the CEO role, Bund­aberg was doing $57 mil­lion in Aus­tralian rev­enue. It felt like momen­tum. But his first week in the job was, as he describes it, bap­tism by fire.

One of their major super­mar­ket part­ners threat­ened to delist them. The math was bru­tal: 87% of their rev­enue came from domes­tic sales. Two super­mar­ket chains con­trolled 67% of the busi­ness. Los­ing one would mean los­ing a third of the com­pa­ny overnight.

John man­aged to save the rela­tion­ship. But the near-miss changed how he thought about the com­pa­ny’s future. They weren’t just too con­cen­trat­ed in one coun­try. They were too con­cen­trat­ed in two gro­cery chains. The entire busi­ness was held hostage by a hand­ful of rela­tion­ships they did­n’t ful­ly control.

That’s when Bund­aberg made the shift, not to export­ing, but to build­ing an actu­al inter­na­tion­al business.

The Uncom­fort­able Commitment

Here’s what sep­a­rat­ed Bund­aberg’s approach from stan­dard export­ing: they made their inter­na­tion­al part­ners’ suc­cess their problem.

They absorbed freight costs all the way to the des­ti­na­tion port. More sig­nif­i­cant­ly, they took on the for­eign exchange risk them­selves, rather than pass­ing cur­ren­cy fluc­tu­a­tions along to their dis­tri­b­u­tion part­ners. As John puts it, they had entered the for­eign exchange business.

This was more expen­sive. It was riski­er. It ate into the mar­gin. By any short-term finan­cial log­ic, it was the wrong move.

But here’s what it cre­at­ed: sta­bil­i­ty. Part­ners could build a busi­ness around Bund­aberg because Bund­aberg’s terms did­n’t change every time a cur­ren­cy moved. That con­sis­ten­cy became a com­pet­i­tive advan­tage. Bund­aberg was­n’t just anoth­er brand look­ing for a con­tain­er to put prod­uct in — they were a part­ner who had skin in the game.

What This Looks Like in Your Business

You don’t have to be sell­ing gin­ger beer in 60 coun­tries for this prin­ci­ple to apply. The ques­tion it rais­es is universal:

Are you doing busi­ness with your cus­tomers, or at them?

I’ve seen this pat­tern every­where. Com­pa­nies that are tech­ni­cal­ly serv­ing clients but have struc­tured every inter­ac­tion to min­i­mize their own expo­sure. Risk flows down­stream. Com­plex­i­ty flows down­stream. Uncer­tain­ty flows downstream.

Those com­pa­nies have clients. They don’t have partners.

The com­pa­nies that grow fastest are the ones will­ing to take on prob­lems their cus­tomers would nor­mal­ly have to car­ry them­selves. Not out of char­i­ty — out of strat­e­gy. Because when you make some­one’s suc­cess your respon­si­bil­i­ty, they can’t eas­i­ly replace you.

The Dif­fer­ence in Practice

Think about your own most valu­able client rela­tion­ships. The ones that have last­ed the longest, referred the most busi­ness, and sur­vived tough stretch­es. I’d wager that in each of those rela­tion­ships, there was a moment, prob­a­bly ear­ly, when you took on some­thing you did­n’t have to.

That’s the Bund­aberg mod­el. No grand strat­e­gy. Just a delib­er­ate deci­sion to be the kind of part­ner your clients need to suc­ceed, rather than just the kind of ven­dor they can eas­i­ly swap out.

Inter­na­tion­al sales, which rep­re­sent­ed just 13% of Bund­aberg’s rev­enue when John became CEO, are now on the verge of sur­pass­ing domes­tic sales. The com­pa­ny that start­ed in a town of 50,000 peo­ple now sells across five continents.

None of it was built on con­tain­ers and crossed fingers.

It was built on ask­ing a dif­fer­ent ques­tion: not ​“How do we sell into this mar­ket?” but ​“How do we help this mar­ket grow?”

There’s a ver­sion of that ques­tion avail­able to every CEO, in every indus­try, at every stage of growth. The ones who ask it con­sis­tent­ly tend to build some­thing that lasts.

Learn more by watch­ing the full inter­view below or read more in our recent case study with Bund­aberg here.

Addi­tion­al Resources:

Arti­cles

• Growth Isn’t What You Think It Is
• The CEO’s Job: Build­ing Rela­tion­ships and Secur­ing Future Resources
• Your Com­pa­ny DNA: Hon­or­ing the Past and Embrac­ing the Future

Pod­cast

• Ep 98: Are You Unin­ten­tion­al­ly Doing Oth­er People’s Jobs?
• Ep 81: The Dan­ger­ous Thing About Focus­ing on Your Competition

Case Study

• Bund­aberg: The Local Brew­er that Became a Glob­al Sensation

Book: The 4 Forces of Growth 

• 4 minute Overview
• 45 Minute Webinar
• Buy on Amazon

Book: Scal­ing Up

• 45 Minute Webinar
• Arti­cle: 10 Years After Scal­ing Up: What I’ve Learned About Growth

Book: Your Oxy­gen Mast First

• Assess your­self
• Resilience Webi­nar