How Working For Free Substantially Increased Our Profits

And how your company can do the same.

If you build it, they will come. It’s a wonderful, old adage.

It’s also a lie.

Unless you’re hosting the next Olympic Games, it’s unlikely that any startup business—no matter how great it is—will generate its’ own gravitational field.

The simple truth is: building your business does not guarantee that anyone will come.

What building does guarantee is a beginning, a starting line, a place to devote all of your waking time and energy towards making your customers happy and growing— but what if you don’t have any customers? Or, what if you have the wrong customers?

In that case, the answer is not building. It’s giving. And giving is hard.

Giving is a risk. It’s a risk that young businesses are often very afraid to take, because—let’s face it—young businesses are often struggling to keep the lights on and make payroll. They certainly don’t have money to just throw out the door.

Yet, that’s exactly what many of them need to do. Here’s why:

When we began to redefine how Metal Potato operated, we thought long and hard about some of the things we needed to change in order to grow. We knew we had some of the best customer service in our industry, and we also knew we had a truly exceptional product, but our growth-rate wasn’t reflecting that.

Marketing was a real mystery.

We knew that in order to grow, we needed to get exposure. But how were we going to get it? A massive marketing budget simply wasn’t on the table; but being the tech-savvy optimists that we are, we put our heads together.

The usual slew of millennial marketing ideas flew around our conference table: social media marketing, guerilla marketing campaigns, door-to-door candy bar sales.

None of them quite fit.

That’s when our team had a truly frightening idea—giveaways. No, not giveaways of an iPod shuffle or concert tickets to the Metal Potato garage band: we’re talking about giveaways of our product, our customer service and everything that gives our startup the ability to survive and thrive.

We were talking about working for free—a thought scary enough to make Rob Zombie cry. But you know what they say about potatoes, they’re fearless (at least, we say that).

So, we embarked on a giveaway spree. We called up some of the most prominent businesses in the UK and offered to do our work for free, focusing primarily on those in contact with a broad spectrum of customers and suppliers. Of course, some of them turned us down—but others were more than happy to open their doors to us.

What happened? Well, we ate a lot of fast food for a while. Some people called us crazy. We lost a little sleep.

Then, the companies who opened their doors began to see the same level of customer service that we were giving our paying clients; and they began to understand the Metal Potato customer experience.

One of our first giveaways went to our friends and customers at Emerge Ltd owned by Emily Austen; a PR and management firm that handles some big name UK brands and celebrities. We hooked them up with a website and almost immediately began receiving dozens of referrals to their contacts.

Why?

Emerge Ltd saw us taking care of them day and night, and they saw us delivering products that met their needs and exceeded their expectations.

Soon, word began to spread. These potatoes tasted good; and other companies began to follow suit.

We started a carbohydrate­‐cooking spree and got connected to paying customers who’ve placed a substantial quantity of orders.

Because our product was great—and because we took the risk of giving it away— our name spread like wildfire. We quadrupled our return on investment. In the process, we established relationships with tons of excited new clients.

Our gamble paid off.

Which leads us to a revision of that old adage: if you give it, they will come. And that is the truth.

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