The Matt Smith Effect

By Fiona Boyd |

David and I have worked in online businesses and projects for the best part of 15 years now and coming from arts and media backgrounds we’ve both had somewhat of a bias towards running projects in an egalitarian, collaborative way. For us, this approach hasn’t always been successful and it is indeed cumbersome, takes time and you need to be supremely patient. In the meantime the competition can have the jump on you while you’re still fiddling around trying to get group consensus.

We’ve often mused about other ways of getting a business out of the blocks and have been fortunate enough to have received really great guidance from our mentor, Dr Terry Cutler and also witnessed a real guru in action. This other way I’m talking about may be the greatest shortcut you’ll ever use in business – though it requires total belief in yourself and your product. It’s called starting at the top and working your way down. And in honour of our business colleague who often astounds David and I with his feats in signing up the world’s largest and most gate-kept companies to his online product, I’m going to call this the Matt Smith Effect.

What is the Matt Smith effect? Firstly, introducing Matt Smith. Matt is the founder and President of a very interesting online business that deals with the quality certification of the really big companies around the world. It’s not really a sexy business and you won’t have heard their name and probably won’t care about them even if I told you their name. The company started in Berwick, which is an outer suburb of Melbourne in Australia and is now US-based and has its head office in San Mateo, on the fringes of Silicon Valley.

The Matt Smith Effect. Start at the top and work your way down, not the other way around.

At the very outset Matt Smith had a vision of global domination. That his product (which by the way, David built) would come to be used by every company in the world that needed to comply with safety and quality standards, and who would need a way of showing this compliance. Now that’s certainly every product manufacturer in the first world to begin with and then all those in developing nations who want to ship their product.

Whilst the business has grown and the types of document handling this company manages has expanded to include compliance with US bio-terrorism legislation and lab testing standards, Matt Smith has continued to do what he does best and sell his vision to the decisionmakers at the very top of the biggest companies in the world.

The Matt Smith Effect is all about asking yourself the question – which customer, by getting them on board with the vision, can bring you the largest amount of new customers simply by having them in your loop? And Matt goes and finds out who is the guy/girl who makes the decision on new systems and alliances and works on them and gets the company into the fold. Sometimes they pay for services provided, and other times their role is to receive the services at low or no cost but to influence their suppliers to join the system for the mutual benefit of their compliance documentation being able to be made available to the commissioning company at the speed of a login.

David and I are in the middle of building two new businesses that we hope will turn into fine businesses that will meet the needs of the customer base effectively. However it’s too easy to get bogged down in trying to win over lots of little leads. We’re getting old, we tire easily, we have got to employ faster and better methods to build our customer base.

And so this time round we’re employing the Matt Smith Effect. And yes, on a personal level this is way more risky than going after lots of little sales – you can get serious egg on your face if you get things wrong. It means that we will have to research and come to understand the specific needs of the biggest companies that would be benefited by our products and to find out who is the linchpin/key influencer or actual decisionmaker in that firm and find the way to talk them into getting on board with us. And if we’re successful, we’ll need to deliver day in/day out.

It does mean being firm in our purpose. It does also mean being clear on ourselves, but with a bit of steely effort and good fortune I hope using the Matt Smith Effect also brings us more sales at a faster pace and helps us grow these new businesses quickly. Fast growth breeds excitement, new issues to resolve and validation of your product and often expansion of your product into areas not originally thought of.

Is it time you employed the Matt Smith Effect in your business?

Photo: flickr g-hat

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