Generating $77B in Revenue: Bennet Bayer’s Secrets to Scaling Products and Platforms

Welcome back to the Scale2Day Podcast! In this episode, Scott dives deep with an extraordinary guest, Bennet Bayer—a five-time CMO and four-time CEO with a wealth of experience from some of the world’s largest corporations, including Huawei, British Telecom, and Unisys. Bennet opens up about his demanding career, the importance of work-life balance, and how a supportive partner has been crucial to his success. He shares invaluable advice for entrepreneurs on understanding the "levers" of business and staying adaptable in a fast-changing market.

Tune in to hear Bennet's remarkable journey from launching the world’s first digital camera at Casio to leading as the Global CMO at Huawei. With over 1,500 product and service launches under his belt and $77 billion in new revenue generated, Bennet shares his strategic approach to business, marketing, and leadership—what he humorously calls a mix of hard work and "pure dumb luck." Don’t miss his insights on developing a mobile app store at Unisys and his secrets to scaling businesses. Whether you're an entrepreneur, marketer, or leader, this episode is packed with wisdom and actionable tips to help you scale your business. Let’s get started!

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Scott Bewley [00:00:01]:
Hi. I'm Scott Bewley, the founder of scaledoday.com, where we help you scale your business to new heights. This podcast is a 30 minute master class on how to scale your business across borders. It's where I interview seasoned executives and entrepreneurs who have built, scaled, and turned around businesses. Listen in to get great nuggets of knowledge from experts in 30 minutes by joining the podcast. Bennett, it's fantastic that you're able to join us on the podcast today, and, I appreciate your your long journey back from, Australia back to the US. And, not as much as the hardship as it used to be on the on the convictship days, but still it's great to have you join us. You've got an incredible career over many years, so we're really excited about hearing about it and especially, you know, the time with Huawei and your other experiences across different corporations and entrepreneurship that you've been involved with.

Scott Bewley [00:01:05]:
So I guess great way to start off would be just to if you tell us a little bit about your background for the listeners.

Bennett [00:01:12]:
The fancy schmancy is I I've, at the end of the day, I'm an emerging technology product marketer. I only got hired by most commonly large companies who were in dire trouble or like Huawei. They wanted to go faster. During my career, I've got 27 uniques. I came up with the first the world's 1st mobile app store, MOSO, the first, digital camera, the first global voice over IP replacement for the PSTN network. You know? And and for my various employers, I I launched something like 1500 new products, services, driving over 77,000,000,000 in new revenue just for those. And that's not including the legacy stuff that I inherited as well. So I I I'm an entrepreneur, I guess, more than anything.

Bennett [00:02:08]:
I you know, I mean, I've done several startups, but I've done mostly startup within large organizations, which I would argue is hard harder in a lot of ways. And and especially Huawei, which you mentioned, I was their global chief marketing officer. The the the size was staggering. I I had a staff of 48100 dotted line, over 60,000 engineers. I had 948 product lines, I think it was. And, Grant, for a marketing budget, I only had $60,000,000, which sounds like a lot, but not not over 900 some products. Amazing. So I learned time management very well.

Scott Bewley [00:02:52]:
I I bet must be must be an incredible incredible year. And, what what, in terms of those those roles that you've had in terms of as an entrepreneur, how have you kind of found, you know, working in those different environments? So you've worked for US companies, you've worked for global companies, you've worked for Chinese companies. How do you find the culture between the different companies?

Bennett [00:03:16]:
Night and day. Every one of them is different. Every one of them had their own challenges. You know, I worked at, Infonet, which was later acquired by British Telecom became BT Infinet. And it was, thou shalt stab thy neighbor in the back. It was unbelievably aggressive. Whoever got the check won. And it it compared then, I I left there and I went to Unisys, which is basically government work.

Bennett [00:03:42]:
They were unfailingly polite if they reach for the cotton pot before you. Huawei culturally was the biggest challenge because and I knew that going in. I had 2 big challenges. 1 was the size of it and the middle management did not want the Western Guaido, White Devil, to be in there at all. But senior management knew that we were necessary. And so their version of management was yelling and screaming at troops for typically, you know, twenties early 20 something kids just out of school. That doesn't work too well. And so you sit in a meeting, and and the, you know, the manager would yell and give us instructions, and you could, you know, see the wheels turning in the eyes.

Bennett [00:04:24]:
And you take that 1 or 2, and you pull them aside and say, well, what do you think of what the big boss said? Oh, yes. Yes. I agree. Uh-huh. Well, let's go to lunch. And, you know, and and and then you say, you know, look. In 10 years, you're gonna be the boss. Do something different.

Bennett [00:04:42]:
And I kinda set the stage. My first day in Huawei, we had an all hands meeting, and, you know, they had a big auditorium. There's, like, 4,000 people in there. And here's Bennett. He's invented this and Bennett that, and he's, you know, the grand poo ba. And I got up there. I'm wrong half the time. You have to figure out which half.

Bennett [00:05:02]:
And so so, you know, by falling on the surface, and look, kid, I'm gonna question everything you do. But you have to question me too. Together, we'll figure it out. Because I I had to reset the culture and and the culture at Huawei was from a business perspective. It was thou shalt sell Huawei and only Huawei. And I had the advantage of having having, you know, been the CEO of a couple of mobile operators, having been a customer of Huawei, a competitor of Huawei. Now I'm working for them. And so I said, look.

Bennett [00:05:34]:
You know, I I started at the board. And, again, 1st week on the job, and the board are all business people. They're not telecom. They're not technology people. They're business. Huawei owns vineyards, travel businesses, shipping. They own the whole thing. Always into making money.

Bennett [00:05:54]:
And so I said, look, are are you a tech company or, you know, think about it like a little math formula. Hardware plus software plus smart people equal something. So if you look at our ecosystem, you know, it's just us selling you know, if we had if we're selling servers in enterprise, we you know, we've got a 150,000 enterprise sales people. Great. How do you think IBM has? 4,000,000 with all of its, you know, partners. How much do you HP has? 6,000,000. They have more guys knocking on doors than we do. So, again, going back to this formula, let's sell our hardware, partner with somebody.

Bennett [00:06:33]:
And one of the first deals I made, I found out we had this super server, multi blade server that could run SAP HANA 5 times faster than the Cisco VCD. So I, you know, I know SAP when I was at Infinet, I ran their network. So I know their board members and I followed them and went to see them and say, hey, how about you sell our, you know, box? I'll put your brand on it. And that, you know, convincing the Huawei boarder, let's make money. Let's forget forget about the brand. Let's make, you know, what do you want, money or the brand? And that that things started to turn around and click, and we were able to replicate, you know, washrooms for peak. And and I would say that's, you know, to a an entrepreneur, that's one of the highlights I would suggest is, you know, really look at the flexibility of your business model. Yeah.

Scott Bewley [00:07:25]:
Fantastic. Yeah. Great great insight. Absolutely. Yeah. It's amazing. Yeah. When you turn it on, it seems a lot of lot of companies now and you think it's that that's the brand, but they're producing a brand with a white label and then they're producing something else and something else.

Bennett [00:07:41]:
Yeah. And I learned that lesson early on in my career, a lot of my early trainings with Casio. And I I I, you know, after I I launched the video phone, I I said, well, you know, we can use this chipset for other things. And so I launched the world's first digital camera, the qb 10, in the modern form factor. And so okay. Yeah. For, you know, cool. However, I could see the Sony monster 6 months down the road behind me, and they're gonna run us over.

Bennett [00:08:09]:
So we had invested in a factory to making the TFT, the little display on the back of the camera. So I quickly got on a plane, went to go see Sony and say, hey, how about we make the TFTs for it? Because Casio actually makes more money making stuff for other people than they do, you know, watches and calculators and cellular phones and other stuff. So it was the the job was actually keep the factory churning. And what can you make that makes the most money on the line? So that that was a bit of a revelation as well.

Scott Bewley [00:08:42]:
Yeah. Amazing. Amazing. Brilliant. So just just on another sort of a note, Bennett. So for people who don't know, what what would be kind of like a surprising fact, about yourself, that would surprise listeners about you?

Bennett [00:08:55]:
I didn't do terribly well in school. You don't have to. I'm a 5th I was a film I graduated in film, radio, TV, film. Yeah. I had a business and, you know, computer science and an engineering background. I came I grew up in a machine tool family. And later on, I read law at Oxford, from my master's, so I'm not completely ignorant.

Scott Bewley [00:09:21]:
That's amazing. But

Bennett [00:09:22]:
you don't have to do well You don't have to do well at university to succeed and what?

Scott Bewley [00:09:28]:
Yeah. Absolutely. That's it. Yeah. There's many, many different pathways and it's amazing because a lot of, you know, as you know, a lot of tech entrepreneurs have kind of dropped out of university and, yes. Some some few famous names and, have gone on to do great things as well. So yeah. Absolutely.

Bennett [00:09:44]:
I I yeah. And I would sit at not undercount the value of pure dumb luck of which I've been the beneficiary many times. So a typical Bennett assignment, I got hired into Unisys. Now Unisys was scary and Burroughs, 2 $7,000,000,000 companies. They get slammed together, $14,000,000,000 They they quickly lost 7,000,000,000. I said, big company in dire trouble. So they hired me. They knew they wanna do something in communications and mobile in mobility.

Bennett [00:10:20]:
We don't know what to do better. We'll give you 2 guys. You don't have the budget. Go figure it out. So I, you know, I sat around and said, you know, shit. Alright. What are my strengths? Unisys is every bank in the world, every government in the world, every airline in the world. Okay.

Bennett [00:10:35]:
If you don't have money, you can't make anything. I don't have a team of engineers, so you sell other people's stuff. And in 2000, you did the thing you know, you could see it was 2 g wap. But you could see things coming along and sell other people's stuff. But there's a lot of these mobile apps, but there was no centralizing platform, which is, you know, the core of telecom. So it's like, okay, let's build a platform and quality of the guys' apps on, hence, most of them, the the first mobile app store. And I was in Redmond because Unisys built the only, Microsoft mainframe. And very so we're very close to the hip with with, Redmond.

Bennett [00:11:17]:
And I'm meeting with the mobile guys, and they were late. And into the conference room walked Bill Gates. Hi, Bennett. Like, I held up. I thought I'd come down and, you know, we could talk and maybe I'd share where I thought the world was going in mobile if that'd be alright. It's like, yes, mister Gates. And so 3 meetings later, I got a pen, a coffee mug, and a check for 40,000,000, and that's how I got to fund and build most of them. So amazing.

Bennett [00:11:44]:
Yeah. So, again, pure dumb luck helps an awful lot, and I've been blessed many times over in that kind of way.

Scott Bewley [00:11:50]:
Oh, that's that's that's fantastic. Great story. And, I guess sort of, you know, you've had some amazing successes, and, I'm sure that there's probably been, you know, 1 or 2 failures. Do you think you could share us, 1 or 2 of those failures and kind of what you actually learned from?

Bennett [00:12:07]:
2 of the most significant sound small, but they're cultural and they're very impactful. When I was starting at university, again, I grew up in a machine tool family. I was Gilda's grandchild. I was gonna inherit everything. So I started out as an engineer, and I had a very difficult, how do you go to machine this part on a a Warner Swayze turret? Christ. I didn't know. So I called my grandfather. What's your spindle speed? He he was a very well he was president of National Association Manufacturers within his industry.

Bennett [00:12:39]:
He's very well known. He told me that the answer is a solution. And I said, you got it? I was like, okay. Bang. Hangs up. Holy shit. He's he's that busy. And he just hung up abruptly on his grandkid.

Bennett [00:12:54]:
10 years later or so, I'm managing. I got things flying at me. I, you know, I've got, like, a staff of 700 or something, and things are going on left and right. And I ended up just answering and hanging up the phone, and I'm like, shit. I've turned into my grandfather. Time to have readjust. So that that's what the second one, I was in Afghanistan and, you know, taken over CEO just after the Taliban. And we had an all hands meeting, and we had, like, 700, 800 people.

Bennett [00:13:29]:
And so we had milk and cookies, and let's, you know, start out about what we're gonna do. And okay. Let's say everybody had a birthday in June. No hands go up. Mister Baer, nobody knows when they were born. I hear you. Full Throat. To answer your question properly, though, at, Infonet, I did the I helped lead them through their I the 4th largest IPO of the year in 99.

Bennett [00:14:02]:
I bought AT and T, Unisource. You know, I built an $800,000,000 business from scratch. And now BT is gonna buy us. And I in inheriting or or buying Volus, I was running it. I had P and L. We're now a public company. And they had 2,100,000,000 in revenue. Or I'm sorry.

Bennett [00:14:23]:
They had 900,000,000 in revenue. They had 2,100,000,000 in costs. However, by dumping the old, PSTN network and putting it on my new next gen IP network, I could be profitable in 6 months. That's what you're that's what you're supposed to do for the company. However, I get a call from LA, come to home. And Collazo, the CEO says, look, I got trouble with the board. And, you know, he said, look, if I put this French guy in charge of your business and just leave things alone, I think I can raise the stock 2 points on the Frankfurt exchange, which is like $7,000,000,000 And forgive me, Scott, if we can shoot you in this 7,000,000,000 you'd be better to start running. So you can be VP of strategic planning and never talk to anybody ever again.

Bennett [00:15:07]:
Or we'll give you 2 years or we'll give you 2 years pay and all all your options now. And I took the package and left, and then a week later went into Unisys and took my team with me. That's another long story. But, to this day, I don't know what I could have done to have changed that outcome. And and because I was in a very good in it from a business perspective. So I was in very good place. So, you know, stuff happens.

Scott Bewley [00:15:38]:
Absolutely. Absolutely. So what what it sounds like, you know, you had a really varied career and lots of different roles. And what's been your favorite job so far? And why would you say that is

Bennett [00:15:49]:
while we from the sheer size and figuring it out. But Unisys, I really learned my chops at Unisys, and I got to hire in a team. Again, it was just me and 2 guys. But once I figured it out and got money, I figured out and I was hired in a team. When I was at Infinite, I had recruited the YoungTurk adviser to every board member, and I had started this next gen IP network interaction. And so these were all really, really smart people. And so I brought them all in. So they were all smarter than me.

Bennett [00:16:32]:
And, basically, then I reorganized the business not by a product matrix, but on how I made money. There was lifestyle apps. There was enterprise apps. There was mobile payments and infrastructure. So I put a guy in charge of each, gave them a technical leader within each, and then I kept all the, you know, marketing, Marcom, the finance, engineering, and and, basically and I control the keys to the kingdom, and then I had, 1500 engineers and another 2,000 in New Zealand to go make with it. So I own the factory. If you wanted to if, Scott, if you were in charge of enterprise apps, you'd have to you know, we'd have a meeting weekly and say, okay, Scott. What what are you doing? Where at? What do you wanna go make? And so and, you know, pull off the carpet.

Bennett [00:17:27]:
You gotta make your business case, which then I would just go take to the board because my job got to be find you whatever you need to make me look good and be successful. Boy, that was a man, that was a huge learning lesson. It was a lot of fun. And and, again, Eunice says, I'll tell you this functionality. I went we I figured out and I thought a really clever idea. Some of my guys said, you know, we can track a bag for the airlines. We can stick an RFID tag on it. Hello? That's pretty cool.

Bennett [00:17:56]:
It costs $5 a bag, but okay. $5. Who cares? And so I went to the president of transportation and say, hey. Look what we can do. And he said, okay. That's nice. Well, would you go sell it? No. Okay.

Bennett [00:18:08]:
But, long would you sell it if, I gave you all the credit? Okay. Would you sell it if I gave you all the credit and it didn't cost you anything? Yeah. Okay. But let me tell you what, we're gonna keep a a shadow set of books because at the end of the day, we both work for the same mothership. And I wanna be able to show the board how much I helped you contribute. Is that okay? It's like, yeah. Okay. So it was that became the job at Unisys.

Bennett [00:18:39]:
It was, you know, canoodling, finagling, you know, bullying, getting people to get along. That's, as I say, marketing, product marketing, you know, the the the fun PR advertising, that's 10 per that's the 10% of the iceberg above the water. Yeah. Right. Most of marketing is 9 the 90% of it is, you know, how do we make something? How do we support it? When do we get rid of it? The life cycle that that's the, you know, 90% of the iceberg that people don't see. And I've for I'm one of those weird people that find that really, really fun and interesting.

Scott Bewley [00:19:16]:
Yeah. Cool. Brilliant. So so I guess one of the one of the key things is, you know, the the podcast is about scaling businesses, and you've clearly scaled a number of businesses in your time. And you've you've given a a kind of an example there. Is there is there any other ones that stick in your mind about how you've scaled a business and kind of lessons that you've learned along the way?

Bennett [00:19:35]:
And a couple of rules that I got that the thou shalt not expand until you have the revenue to support it. So a number of my gigs, it was just me. Now, Infinite, I had 12 guys. But Infinet had a very strict rule. You could not hire ahead until you've had at least 700,000 in revenue. Evnet, most people don't know who Evnet is. There are 3 big technology distributors, Ingram Micro, Tech Data, and Avnet. Avnet's bigger than that and and 10 times more profitable than the other 2.

Bennett [00:20:14]:
Ingram is now or is it Tech Data bought them. However, at the time, you know, they're doing 36,000,000,000, and they are the largest IBM, Oracle, Hewlett Packard, Disney in the world. But they're they had very very strict rules and make everybody else pay for it. Whereas Ingram Micro might have a 100,000 manufacturer SKUs. Avnet has only 34. They only take and they only take it if you give them money to go do it. And so if you wanted to add a headcount at Avnet, 1, somebody had to pay for it, and 2, you had to have at least, I think, 6,500,000 in revenue because your margins are only like 2 or 3%. But you had, you know, so very, very strict discipline on how and when you can scale.

Bennett [00:21:03]:
But and and with every one of the tenures, it was stick to those very strict kind of rules in order to justify adding headcount, adding money to your budget to do things. Don't sell futures. I've had several 1,000 launches of products in different businesses, and and I learned from my one of my mentors, have whatever your revenue is, cut it in half. Whatever your cost projection is, cut it in half. If you if you do that exercise and you still got a business, go.

Scott Bewley [00:21:44]:
Brilliant. Brilliant. Excellent. Absolutely. Some great some great insights there. And I guess, you know, during the, you know, during your career that you've you've probably learned a lot of a lot of lessons, and just kind of thinking out loud, what what would be one lesson that you think everyone should learn at some point in their life in terms of your career, what you've learned to date?

Bennett [00:22:06]:
Again, Casio provided the most profound. Casio had two rules in marketing. Go and see. Don't read it out of a stupid book. Go talk to somebody. Yeah. Always. Go build a straw man.

Bennett [00:22:20]:
Get justifications. And and that parallel everything that I learned from mentors and in practical application. You know, when I at Huawei, I, you know, come into Chicago or something for meetings. Well, the first thing I do is drop my bags. I go run to the mall, and I go to the phone store and, you know, look at what phones the kids were looking at, what what were they buying? Talk to them and say, hey, what the heck are you running on your phone? You learn a lot more than any stupid meeting or any report or what your guys may want to be telling you. So go and see, and the other query one was asked why 5 times. Oh my goodness. It's it's like an interview.

Bennett [00:23:05]:
You can you why? Why? Why? Take any topic and keep drilling down. And, man, that really it's it's still one of the most profound lessons I've I've learned.

Scott Bewley [00:23:19]:
Well, so it sounds like that was like a pivotal moment in your career that that probably shaped your outlook and your leadership style.

Bennett [00:23:28]:
Yeah. That and organizing, by the way you make money, which is really the way your your channels to market. We get hung up. So many marketers, you know, forgive me. They're they're they're so full of themselves. I I I have a dim view of ad agencies. If they're so smart, then why aren't they doing my job? They just want my budget. And, you know, the marketers that are storytellers.

Bennett [00:23:59]:
Well, you know, okay. The the the the again, the PR is just that tiny tip of the iceberg. It's not that hard, and people make a lot more to do about it. 83% of business in the world is business to business. Yeah. And, actually, if I broke it down, it's more business to business to business. It's like 17 and a half times the size of business to consumer. But all the marketing and everything on LinkedIn and every book you read is, you know, again, on that tip of the iceberg.

Bennett [00:24:32]:
And so you're looking at your business model, looking at if you have to if I have to sell to you and you sell to, you know, Bob and Fred, my brand means nothing. But I can make a lot of money. So I gotta help you. So I gotta help Bob and Fred why they wanna buy. And that's the other thing is is always constantly asking who wants to buy this? Why? Who wants to sell this? Why? And again, most businesses B2B, You have to make a digital. Who gives a crap in b to b? If I'm helping you make widgets, you know, and and you you you know, to make your box, none of that matters. It's it's still old fashioned knocking on doors and relationships. And I think a lot of people lose sight of that.

Scott Bewley [00:25:21]:
Yeah. Absolutely. And and like, I think you you you have kind of, your example, their partnerships are pretty, critical as well. And I think that that that's that's really key, like, that b to b to b model or even b to b to c. There's there's it's never a a direct kinda one way to another. It's, how can someone sell what you're selling to them?

Bennett [00:25:42]:
Yeah. Business to business, business to government. That's a, you know, that's a whole another you know, where you have to rely on RFIs, RFPs, bids being the lowest most qualified. Well, you know, that's a whole another but how do you influence the contracting officer so that he writes the specs? So the box is, you know, blue, and it's, you know, got this, and it has to have those, you know, a name tag over here and with a red logo in the corner. You you wanna try and skew it as close as you can to your thing.

Scott Bewley [00:26:15]:
So, look, you you have, you know, throughout your career you've had a pretty hectic lifestyle. You had like these massive kind of armies of people, they're working for you and with you and, all that type of thing. And I imagine, I don't mean to keep coming back to Huawei but and also, you know some of the large US corporations that you've worked for, you must have kind of had pretty demanding kind of hours that you've put in. So how did you achieve that work kind of life balance, in in those situations?

Bennett [00:26:46]:
Huawei and Infonet. Because Infonet, again, most people don't understand it. Global reach of every big telephone company in the world. If you left the United States with AT and T, it was on the Infonet network. Right. You know, if you were in Switzerland and you made a call and you went for or a data connection and you went outside of Switzerland, it was on the Infinet network. So every big guy in the world used Infinet. Mhmm.

Bennett [00:27:16]:
The other big company was CETA Equant, which was every airline. Yep. But they were, you know, a a little fish in comparison. So that was a 247 job, and Huawei was 247. Early in my career, Casio, I remember a memo going out from a senior VP and said, Look, we expect you to work a 100%. But at 5 o'clock, it's time to go home to your family. And I've always been very good. And even when it, you know, 247, I'm gonna get an emergency call from somebody, wherever they are in the world.

Bennett [00:27:54]:
I'm off. Yeah. Okay. The call comes in. You gotta handle it. We'll handle it. But I'm gonna go back to sleep. It's, I think you develop an almost, I think people look at a medical professional doctor, they have a certain degree of detachment.

Bennett [00:28:14]:
And I think that's very important. Having a sense of humor is essential. So I'm at, you know, BT Infinite, and I'm getting, you know, I've got data centers across the United Kingdom, and I'm getting IRA bomb threats once a month. Yeah. I'm in I'm in Afghanistan and, you know, you know, there there's, you know, customer care, literally, people come in with classroom calls, literally. Yeah. I don't want how many are listening to us and they're, you know, have ever seen Monty Python Life of Brian where the end of the movie, they're all, you know, crucified to the cross and they're, look on the bright side of life. You kinda have to have that sense of humor.

Bennett [00:28:56]:
I think that that helps a great deal. And then treasure your family. For me, I was I've been fortunate. I married, 40 years. It was funny. We had a dinner with all at Unisys. You know, this is 25 years ago, 20 almost. And we sat around and we looked at ourselves and realized each one of us was married to a woman that was worth any 6 of us.

Bennett [00:29:23]:
You know? And so having someone and, again, the the line where I I'm I'm wrong half the time. You have to figure it out. That was actually came from my wife. Listen to me the phone one day. Who the hell do you think you are? You're in marketing. I don't care if you're the VP of this. You're you're you're a marketing. You need to you know? You're the bridge between the different groups of the company.

Bennett [00:29:55]:
Yada yada yada. It's like, yes.

Scott Bewley [00:29:57]:
Yes. You're right. They're actually the CEO.

Bennett [00:30:02]:
Yeah. I mean, she was a real marketer. She did food.

Scott Bewley [00:30:05]:
Yeah.

Bennett [00:30:05]:
I mean, it's it's easy for me to talk of the differences She, you know, she did, you know, the salads in the bag or the, you know, bakery goods or, you know, where the color really means something in shelf placement. And that that's much more difficult kind of stuff than anything I ever had to do.

Scott Bewley [00:30:26]:
Absolutely. So do you have any advice for either entrepreneurs or entrepreneurs that are starting out? Like, if, from from your, you know, your your huge amount of experience and and, you know, learnings that you have, what would you advise people who are just starting out, maybe picking their career, starting their career, or like, my my daughter who's interested in product management, what what advice would you have to to, people starting up?

Bennett [00:30:54]:
Well, the Casio, go and see and ask why 5 times, live by that. Understand the levers of your business. This is critical. Again, Cascio, flexibility in your business. What impacts not revenue, profit. Revenues are all for sale. Marketing is about profit. So what impacts that? Is it cost? Cost of production, cost of acquisition, cost of supply? Marketing, you gotta look at the entire food chain from where we source materials through how we get it there, how we make it, how we get it out door, how we service it, how we sell it, all of those different things.

Bennett [00:31:39]:
If you can shift that around, you can impact the bottom line. And I gotta tell you, most of it is internal, not external. Again, the fluffy marketers don't understand this. So understanding those levers and how you can make a deal. And again, somebody like Avnet really drawn that home because Avnet again, you're working on profit margins on 2 or 3 things. And my mentor at Avnet explained the first day, there was a picture of John Avnet handing guitars to the Beatles. He said, yeah, we used to distribute, musical instruments. We can only do computers because it's more profitable.

Scott Bewley [00:32:18]:
Amazing.

Bennett [00:32:19]:
Oh, and so, you know, these leavers of business and say, look. We do as much as we can. You know, we're the middle guy. We distribute. Everybody hates our guts. We say solutions. And the, you know, the owner of the bar said, you know, get your hand out of my pocket. You're trying to take margin.

Bennett [00:32:37]:
We're a necessary evil for the manufacturer. So but you can play both sides. Hey, mister Farr. Can I do the marketing programs for you? I've got this program that you can get into. Oh, I came up with a program for IBM, you know, to to sell their security software. And and so it I put it into a 7 layers of defense. So this theme, oh, they thought that was clever. Well, great.

Bennett [00:33:05]:
$20,000,000 and we'll put together the program for all your bars. Okay. That's cheaper than they can do for themselves. Well, $20,000,000 was more than the $1,000,000,000 in in software that we sold. So the levers of understanding the levers and then getting that information to one piece of paper. So you can come in every morning, look at it, and you understand where your business is going and how you can make adjustments.

Scott Bewley [00:33:35]:
Absolutely. Yeah. And and that's a lot of what we do at scale today as well. We help businesses scale up and look at their cost base and look at all of their processes and look at how we can we can tweak those levers. So that's that's fantastic advice for for everyone listening.

Bennett [00:33:48]:
Yeah. And and the other one, I I mentioned it before, but that and, again, between what I've done and had to approve, that if it if you cut your revenue projection in half, double your costs, and you still have a good viable business Yep. That's, boy, that's a real if you if you can't meet that criteria, that's a real red flag.

Scott Bewley [00:34:12]:
Awesome. Yeah. No. That's that's an amazing, stress test. And, I guess a lot of, entrepreneurs and even entrepreneurs kind of they put their budget together and they base a lot on, as you said, revenue, not on profit. And, you know that that's really key as well, making sure that you've got your your profit there. So when you do, as you say, increase your costs and reduce your sales and then what does that really look like? You all of a sudden your margin may go down from like your 30 5% to your 15%. So what is your net profit margin gonna be at the end of the day, which is, which is pretty critical?

Bennett [00:34:49]:
Yeah. And and the go and see. I for every company I ever worked at, I tried to be, the best salesperson they had. And then, actually, that's one of the reasons why I left Huawei. I I did 3 of the biggest deals in the history of the company. And mister Wren said, why don't you form a Tiger team and just go do that stuff? It's like, I I I like making I would when I started my career, I was in sales, and I was very good at it. But I hated knocking on doors or a straight commission. I hated knocking on doors to make my weekly check.

Bennett [00:35:28]:
And so, you know, you go into marketing, which is telling sales how to work smart.

Scott Bewley [00:35:33]:
It's some some fantastic insights there. And, I guess, probably probably final question, Bennett, which would be which I'd love to know is what is there a question that you'd wish I'd asked you? And, how would you answer it? Is there something that we're missing here that we've, we've probably skimmed over and haven't really got a good insight that you might want to share with us?

Bennett [00:35:54]:
The big big one I would suggest or the the the elephant is what's the secret to your success? And I think and I touched on that a lot. The the the value of asking questions, long winded story, but so my first day on the job at Infinet coming from Casio was a big fire hire for me. It was, you know, 4 times the money I was making. And I sat in a room with a man 63 years old, had one artificial hand. He's gonna explain his theory for global fixed, a global fixed price for telecom, and his 2 hour meeting, and with the company CFO. And he starts talking, And I'm like, oh, I'm like, holy hell. I'm God, my wife's gonna I'm gonna get fired. I gotta manage this guy.

Bennett [00:36:44]:
I'm, you know, I'm just inside. I'm freaking out. And we take a break an hour into it. And the CFO is a stereotype New York Jewish finance guy. And he says, you know, this is my 3rd time to it. I'm starting to get it. They're like, oh, this guy's exceptional. Oh, yeah.

Bennett [00:37:03]:
And so when we're done, we go back to my office. And he said, what do what do you think? I said, well, it's really compelling. I said, time value of money. What is the impact if I gave a discount for term? I hadn't thought of that.

Scott Bewley [00:37:18]:
Well and

Bennett [00:37:18]:
it came back in a half an hour with, you know, 2 little charts and a bunch of numbers and said, I don't think we're gonna get hurt. My ability to buy bandwidths depreciates faster than your proposed discounts. Like, sit down. Let's talk. But the value of asking questions, you know, I've I've I I am an engineer. I've got 2,000 patents to my name, but being dumb. I'm I'm a blonde from California. I'm an American.

Bennett [00:37:48]:
You know? I'm sorry. I don't I, you know, I speak enough Chinese to say, can we speak English? You know, going in on and and you don't have to be the smartest guy in the room. Matter of fact, if you if you have a an I can code, but any engineer would slap my wrist. Yep. And and let me do that, mister Baer. But I'm I can spot spade a spaghetti code. I know BS when I see it. Yeah.

Bennett [00:38:13]:
So that makes me, you know, a good vice president or whatever. Having knowledge, you don't have to always show it off. It but it makes you much more successful in how you can get others to get along. And I think for an entrepreneur, that is, entrepreneurs are product marketers. They need to be the bridges. They got to be a father confessor. They got to be a bully. They got to be big, borrow, steal, cajole.

Bennett [00:38:40]:
They got to wear all kinds of hats. And I and that's what a product marketer does. So I think a lot of those lessons are, you know, if you're talking to an engineer, be dumb, you know, treat them like a university professor, and you're the student and ask lots of questions, and they will just tell you everything there is. That kind of thing.

Scott Bewley [00:38:59]:
Amazing. Yeah. Awesome. So, I just, I just picked up there on your on your patents. I didn't know you designed so many patents for so many things. Are you still doing that kind of engineering, kind of tinkering with different ideas and developing stuff?

Bennett [00:39:15]:
Whoop. Whoop. I, you know, I can I can make a database run faster than in, c plus than I can than you can in Java? Oh. You know, like I said, I've launched a lot of products, but a lot of them don't. I've I've only designed one mobile app, depth clock. And granted this is in, like, 2,001. Yeah. Hey.

Bennett [00:39:42]:
Yeah. There's probably still some kids somewhere. So, you know, you put in a if you go to an insurance guy and says, hey. I'm this old and this height and smoke, drink, whatever. They'll they'll tell you when you're gonna die. Well, put that in the database, make it searchable. So people will put all that info in. It's like, hey, what's the point I'm gonna die? Yes.

Bennett [00:40:01]:
Yeah, I've got a lot of things on my resume. So the only project on Huawei we did for the the only project we did with the Chinese government So for the Beijing Olympics, they built bathrooms everywhere across China. They put toilet paper in those. Well, the Chinese, you know, 1,500,000,000 Chinese are thinking, I got a free roll of toilet paper. And so the government wanted a facial recognition system and a dispenser that would spit out 2 sheets for her. It's not something I'm gonna put on my resume. But

Scott Bewley [00:40:37]:
Brilliant stuff, Bennett. Thanks very much for your time. Really appreciate it. It's been great, really informative, and I've learned a lot. So, thanks thanks very much.

Bennett [00:40:45]:
Thank you, Scott. My pleasure.

Scott Bewley [00:40:48]:
Thanks for joining me, Scott Beaulieu, and our expert guests on this episode of the Scale Today podcast. I hope you're leaving with actionable insights to help you scale your business to the next level. Found value in today's conversation? Make sure to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast, and don't forget to share it with your fellow entrepreneurs and leaders who want to grow across borders. For more information, visit us at scaletoday.com. That's scale, the number 2, day.com. Let's keep pushing your business to new heights one step at a time. See you in the next episode. Bye for now.