All entrepreneurial journeys start with a dream, and while the journey is almost always an all-encompassing roller-coaster ride that reshapes your identity, the dream itself can look and feel different for every founder. 

For every entrepreneur looking for funding, there’s an entrepreneur who wants to answer to no one. For every founder looking for a business partner, there’s one who prefers to run their marathon solo. Starting with the goal of a multi-million dollar exit may be the driving force for some, while for others, with far more nuanced aspirations, the journey of entrepreneurship is all that they’re looking for. These differences do not even consider founders of passion projects, ‘purpose led business’ and NGOs, whose motivations will differ wildly from those of more traditional commercial businesses.  

An objective view of what success looks like is meaningless when we understand that success is very much down to how the individual founder defines it for themselves. One thing that seems to be fairly constant, though, is the importance of scaling your initial business idea into something that is financially and operationally sustainable, and this requires moving from start-up to scale-up mode and beyond.

We discussed the practical realities of this, and so much more, in the first recorded episode of Entrepreneur Stories at Banyan Workspace, with our special guests, Trilby White, Co-founder of Creature Comforts and Vetopia, and Diego Dultzin Lacoste, Co-founder of OnTheList. These two seasoned entrepreneurs shared how they started, scaled for growth, and, in Trilby’s case, successfully exited their businesses.

You don’t need an original idea –

Every successful business starts with an idea, some meticulously planned and others, as Trilby shared, come to life over a few glasses of wine.

As with all entrepreneurial journeys, Trilby and Diego had ideas that they considered ‘no-brainers’. Neither idea was completely original but, importantly, both ideas were new to Hong Kong. 

Trilby and her veterinarian husband, Dr. David Gething, saw a veterinary house call business as a no-brainer. People in Hong Kong are busy, they have pets, pets get sick and need a vet, so let’s take the pain out of the equation and bring the vet to the pet. Such a simple idea, yet genius, as no one else was doing this in Hong Kong. As Trilby shared, “we could not understand why no one had done a veterinary house call practice… all we needed was a car and a laptop to get started”.

Diego and his wife Delphine were inspired by a business in Europe that helped luxury consumer brands sell their excess inventory through private flash sales to bargain hungry consumers. With the brands providing inventory on consignment, and thus relatively low barriers to entry, the model looked attractive, and no one was doing this in here. 

Diego and Delphine approached the European business owners to inquire about bringing their concept to Hong Kong and when that proved difficult, the two co-founders decided to implement the idea themselves. As Diego shared, we “copied and pasted a model from Europe that did not exist in Asia.”

While original ideas are often celebrated and romanticised, sometimes implementing a proven business idea in a market where it does not exist and solving a problem for your customer really is a ‘no-brainer’ as both Trilby and Diego have shown.

From idea to execution –

A good idea without an almost stubborn desire to execute together with the resilience and resourcefulness to do so, can remain just that, and never become a business. 

“We went all-in” was how Trilby put it, while Diego and Delphine started OnTheList as a side-hustle and Diego shared, “we started small and listened.” 

When brands saw how OnTheList successfully executed with their peers and competitors, the number of brands collaborating with them grew, and this business became their full-time focus.

Stubbornness, resilience and resourcefulness were clear traits for Diego, as he shared that getting used to ‘no’ as the answer from potential brand partners has been a constant. “No, is an opportunity to go back and refine your pitch… I like challenges… my dream is to get the brands that say no”, is how he described the persistence that building OnTheList required.

Starting off is never easy, and, according to Trilby “before you launch you don’t know how the market will react” and the takeaway here is that when you have the ‘no-brainer’ idea you should just get out there and do it. After all, you won’t know until you try. 

But how you do it matters, and perhaps what is vitally important is to decide, based on your personal circumstances and risk tolerance, whether you are going “all in” as Trilby and David did or launching as a side hustle and ‘starting small’ as with Diego and Delphine. Both can work, but going all in certainly requires a higher risk tolerance.

The customer acquisition journey –

This never ends! Both Trilby and Diego were clear that, while sometimes strategic, the acquisition of new customers is essential for any business and, according to Trilby, it’s ‘still scrappy’ today. 

For Diego, it started by hosting a barbecue to which friends were enticed with free hotdogs and beers, but went home with promotional flyers to put into their neighbour’s mailboxes. Other tools the entrepreneurs used to drive new customer acquisition included LinkedIn connection requests and direct messaging, joining and leveraging the databases of various Chamber of Commerce’s, word of mouth, and even strategic local advertising on the side of neighbourhood minibuses.

No matter whether you’re just starting out or a more established business in scale up mode, the acquisition of new customers is and always will be critical for survival and growth, and it needs to be scrappy and stay scrappy even after word of mouth and reputation kick in and help drive it. 

Scaling the business for growth –

For any commercial business, scaling for growth is essential for survival. This can be achieved in different ways; finding new products to sell existing customers, acquiring new customers, developing new channels of distribution or expanding into new markets… and many more.

While the list of luxury brands collaborating with OnTheList is impressive, there are still brands that Diego aspires to partner with. Persistence, listening to what they say, building relationships and waiting for the opportunity to collaborate has worked wonders and remains his strategy for acquiring and scaling their business with new brand partners today. 

Listening and going where their existing partners have excess inventory has also been the driving force behind their international growth. At least seven new markets have been opened by listening to their partner’s needs, including Shanghai, Taipei, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Seoul, Bangkok and Dubai. These are all cities where OnTheList has scaled to help brands with excess inventory, and by doing so, they have grown their own revenues.

It was clear to Trilby that the “biggest sign that you’re on to something good is when people are willing to pay for it again and again” and as with OnTheList, Trilby and David listened – “you go where the market tells you to go,” and what they heard was that their customers needed an Animal Clinic and a 24-Hour Hospital for their pets. Both became avenues to scale their business. 

Their customers also needed prescription pet foods and so Vetopia, an online pet products marketplace, was born as an independent business and one that scaled sufficiently to allow for another huge exit for the two co-founders.

Listening and, as Trilby shared, ‘intuition’, played a huge role in deciding how to scale, and before opening their Animal Clinic, Trilby got a map and charted every Pet Shop and Animal Clinic in Hong Kong. She was looking for ‘white space’ where there was a sufficient local population, a number of pet shops but no nearby Animal Clinic and Shau Kei Wan became the obvious choice for their first clinic.

By listening and following the market, both entrepreneurs identified avenues to scale for growth. Their entrepreneurial spirit, desire to build bigger and better businesses and a willingness to take calculated risks by balancing their intuition with some data, became the driving force behind their expansion – geographically and with new brand partners for OnTheList and into new but related business for Creature Comforts and Vetopia.

Building relationships and trust –

“Relationships matter!” is what Diego shared, and he also explained the importance of building them on a personal level and how important this was to growing OnTheList. In business, transactional relationships exist between companies everywhere but personal relationships make a difference when it comes to converting a discussion into a business relationship.

This is important with customers as well as suppliers and business partners and Trilby shared how “word of mouth” was a critical factor in building trust and helping their businesses scale. 

With Trilby and David having successfully exited both their businesses, Trilby shared that “values and how you do business matters for your reputation.” Both were instrumental in their business getting acquired as their buyers checked around as part of their due diligence to understand the reputation of the businesses they were looking to acquire.  “I just don’t think you can underestimate how important trust is” was how Trilby explained this.

It’s clear from what Trilby and Diego shared with us, that as a founder, part of your role is to build relationships and trust with both business partners and customers and that this has a direct and meaningful impact on your ability to scale for growth.

Hong Kong as a home for your business –

One thing that continues to come across in our discussions with entrepreneurs is what a great place Hong Kong is to do business. 

Beyond our low taxes, ease of set up, easy access to professional services and our advantageous geographical position, Trilby shared that “Hong Kong has such an energy, people have ambition, people take a risk and take a risk on you”. 

Both entrepreneurs talked about the talent pool, people and their mindset, with Trilby saying that “staff are willing to work hard and are ambitious.”  They also do not resent their employers being successful” thereby allowing for a culture of positivity and growth. 

Diego additionally shared that “the entrepreneur community wants to support other entrepreneurs” and that is what we found with both of our guests on our Entrepreneur Stories Podcast. Two established business owners and founders of some of Hong Kong’s most loved businesses, happy to authentically and transparently share their time, stories, experience and advice with us!

For anyone thinking of starting a business or looking to scale for growth, this was a fantastic discussion full of actionable takeaways and I certainly learned a lot. 

To listen to the full discussion, you can click on the links below.

You can click here to listen on SpotifyYou can click here to listen on Apple Podcasts