What did you get out of your time with RPM?
I wanted to learn as much as possible for as long as possible. I wanted to return to South Africa and start a business, but I also knew I had a lot to learn first.
I’d been my own boss, and now I was an employee, which was humbling, but I also gained a strong knowledge of all the different departments in a big business.
I interacted with each department and paid attention to everything. I also told my MD about my plans, and he started mentoring me. I still have contact with him today, and often ask him for advice.
When did you launch Stretch?
In March 2009 I moved back to South Africa ready to start my company. I’d saved money in London, and I still had most of what I’d earned in South Africa from throwing parties sitting in an investment account, so I had some seed capital.
I knew experiential marketing was where I wanted to be, but it was still a very new concept here. This meant there was very little competition, but it also meant I’d need to really educate the market about what the business could do.
My strategy was to get case studies, even if it meant not charging clients at first, or charging very little. My only focus was getting clients. In that first year, I’d sometimes invoice as late as ten months after the event and be told sorry, I’d missed the boat completely.
These were hard lessons to learn, and it was completely unsustainable as the business grew, but in the early years, I didn’t care. I knew we needed a portfolio that proved experiential marketing worked.
How did you secure your first client?
I registered a shelf company (because my brother told me that’s what I needed to do) and got busy on my laptop stalking brand managers on LinkedIn. It took a lot of research and sending out connection invites, but it also made it much easier to cold call them because I could say, “Hi, I’m Mike, you’ve just connected with me on LinkedIn.”
I was also lucky because a lot of the influencers who we’d identified years earlier when we hosted parties had actually become brand managers, so I wasn’t a complete unknown to them. But it was still a very slow process. I got my foot in the door at Elizabeth Arden and it still took two years to close a deal.
What we did was too new. We needed champions of experiential marketing, and to do that, we needed jobs where I could prove what we did. And then I stumbled across what turned out to be my best business development idea yet. I knew both the owners of the Plett Rage student festival as well as two brand managers of sponsors involved.
With students clearly a key target market for these brands (adidas, Olmeca Tequila and Malibu), I knew that if we could use experiential marketing to effectively and creatively activate their sponsorship at the festival, we would have our champions.
Next Page: The tricks Mike Silver had to learn to keep his business going
Related: The One Word That Will Help You Close More Sales