MAP Accelerator Program — Week 13
- Last Week: Week 12 | Next Week: Final Week
Once you have an idea for a business, the first question you should always ask yourself is: who’s gonna pay for this? I have to admit, I was quite surprised this week, when I found out that one in four Australian Dollars spent are coming from the government. Even crazier, Australia has a very low rate of government spending compared to some other countries: The OECD average is about one in three! That is a lot of cash that come from the government. So this week’s session was focusing on how to work with governments to tap into this money stream and get funding and support for your business.
Governments
In Australia (and many other countries), there are fundamentally five different government stakeholder groups: (1) ministers (or shadow ministers), (2) local MPs, (3) policy departments, (4) central agencies and (5) political parties. Each of them can help your business, whether it is through funding, policy change or legislative change that can enable or support your business.
Another property of government is that for every decision, there’s multiple stakeholders involved. And usually it just requires one of them to say “No” and suddenly the entire process comes to a halt. So one of the main goals of interacting with government is to convert the “No”s into “Whatever”s — that means at least they won’t fight/stop whatever you want.
For engaging with most politicians, there’s a couple of pretty simple rules that will get you pretty far: (1) Find out what’s in it for them and convince them that what you want is the same as what they want. (2) Keep it super simple. Especially with business ideas that might not be easy to understand for someone outside the industry, this is important. On top of that, by keeping it simple, you inherently keep it brief and the politician will not feel like they’re wasting their time. Also, if you can explain your business in simple terms, it allows the politician to explain it to their voter base in simple terms too. (3) Connect what you want from them geographically to the politician’s electorate. In a lot of cases (local MPs), this comes down to postcode mapping. You have an idea — try to identify postcodes that would benefit the most from your idea and then find out which MP is responsible for that postcode. For example, if you do your homework, you can then point out to the MP that it benefits 68% of their voter base, which is what they ultimately care about and makes them much more likely to side with you.
Politics can also be a marketing channel. Lots of MPs will “brag” to their electorate and the wider public all about how they made X possible and helped facilitate Y. Providing marketing material to the politician can be a cheap way to reach a larger community. But this is not without danger: One of the things to watch out here is not to antagonise or embarrass another political party, faction or agency in the process, because as mentioned before it only requires one party in the decision to say “No” to bring the whole thing to a halt.
This leads to another insight: you should work with the entire political spectrum. Playing both sides is quite useful. If you don’t, and only focus on one side, it’s (1) easy to antagonise the other side and (2) the other side will start actively fighting you. On top of that, identifying companies that are opposed to your ideas is also important, as they will employ lobbyists to work the other side and fight your idea. This is especially true for large market incumbents.
Relationships with government need to be nurtured over time. In general you want to start by raising awareness of the problem you’re trying to solve. Then you can establish a relationship with the stakeholders (MPs, agencies, political parties) and grow this relationship. After a while, you can position yourself as an innovator or leader in a sector, which will give you a seat at the table for any decision related to your business or domain.
Policy departments and government agencies tend to be slightly different than MPs, ministers and political parties. They are not focused on getting re-elected, but instead are much more focused on due-diligence and data/analytics. So, if you work with them, you can stop keeping it super simple and provide them with the insights that they need to make a rational decision for or against supporting your business.
- Last Week: Week 12 | Next Week: Final Week
