How I learned to stop modelling and love the hustle
Think you can analyse your way to a better world? Think again. David Puttergill, October 2014 Associate, shares the lessons he learnt at StudentFunder, a company offering loans to postgraduates.
Hi, my name is David and I’m addicted to modelling.
Not the catwalk kind unfortunately, the kind with Excel formulas and charts. I picked up this addiction in a past life as an accountant. I used to think that whatever your problem, I could work it out with enough time and calculations. Cashflow issues? Want to buy a business? HR problems? Too many NEETS? There’s a model for that.
My first placement at StudentFunder showed me just how wrong I’d been. Models make you think you’ve already solved the problem. You haven’t. As Mike Tyson said: “Everyone has a plan ‘till they get punched in the mouth”. In our case the punch came from George Osborne’s new loan scheme for postgraduates (our target market). This gave me my first lesson, distilled by my On Purpose mentor into the phrase “it is what it is”: embrace uncertainty and don’t think you’ve got it all thought through.
Osborne’s announcement rocked the boat but we still had a compelling business and social impact case. On paper, that is. We still needed to convince investors, universities, the FCA, our shareholders — and crucially, students to believe in us. Here our CEO and founder, Juan Guerra, taught me the second lesson: “never give yourself the no”. You may have a great plan, but a business is a bit like a Fairy, it needs a lot of people to believe in it to work. If you start assuming that people don’t believe in it then you may as well give up. You’ve got to get out there and tell them why you’re backing it heart and soul. You’ve got to hustle.
On reflection it’s obvious that models aren’t always the answer. History is rich with stories of last minute successes, long years spent hustling and left field solutions that were definitely not in the model. Venture capital and social investment pioneer Sir Ronald Cohen is a good example. His book “The Second Bounce of the Ball” recounts how he left a comfortable consulting career to found APAX partners, one of the earliest venture capital funds in the UK. It failed flat out for five years and took almost a decade to get going, but it came off in the end (he’s now worth over £200m).
So two great lessons later, though I’ve not quite gone cold turkey on modelling, I’m definitely easing up. I now know that what really makes the difference can be an awful lot of hustle.
