I sat down with Martin Bjergegaard at the Rainmaking office in downtown Copenhagen.  Martin is charismatic in a low key way and Rainmaking, a ‘company factory’, promises to be big in a few short years.

“Values are extremely important for us. We want to be a warm-hearted company, we don’t want to be cynical like many consulting companies, law firms and VCs can be.”

-Martin Bjergegaard

Transcript

Q: Why go from Mckinsey to entrepreneurship?

A: The real question is, how do I go from being an entrepreneur to Mckinsey, because that is what preceded it and I was working as an entrepreneur when I just left college for 5 years. And with 3-4 different companies, I was particular successful but I worked a lot, and I really fight different project different ideas different concepts but I kind of frustrated because it didn’t really go in the direction I want to, I got up to ten employees a couple of times, but I had really problems getting it sustainable and when my role turned from entrepreneur to leader, it started go to chaos and so I knew I didn’t have the right skills, so I took a couple of years to get some more education, and then I went for a job to Mckinsey to learn some more. So it was kind of natural for me to go back actually to some kind of entrepreneurship and instead of going on my own again as a real entrepreneur I saw it could be a good idea to have one more step in my learning experience and that could be to work together with an experienced entrepreneur who had actually done it.

Q: Working with Claus Meyer.

A: It was great! When I started, I was working at his private home, and it was a small company, he was there, and the personal assistant was there and I was there, we were looking at a small portfolio of the six different companies he had been starting to in the last 20 years but has grown very rapidly from 2000 he had 25 million Danish kroner revenues and in 2004 when I joined him he had a hundred million Danish kroner revenue so times four and then of course it hadn’t happened without some kind of chaos in the corners and so I was there to help him optimize a real stronger organization and improving communications to the customers and then it was very interesting.

Q: Rainmaking.

A: The story was that after my experience, I actually started the company together with Claus Meyer called frokost.dk, that’s a large company, what we were doing is, we were selling lunches to companies on a subscription base and we have 5,000 Danish customers and 300 different workplaces. So I started a company together with him, I was of course doing all the work and and he was like kind of the brand and the investor in it, that was a good partnership because he let me pursue my ideas and I manage to get the 20 million Danish kroner revenue for the first year and we were on a good track, and also we didn’t spend too much. So that could have been a nice, easy job for me to have had for 10 or 20 years that I could probably also get wealthy from it. But what happened then was, I was beginning to think that this might not be the thing for me. I miss having more colleagues and equal partners, I missed the challenges of looking into new business opportunities and styling of more companies with more projects than just one, having doing that together with Claus Meyer, and I’ll be doing that in Mckinsey and start up, but different projects together with great colleagues, so I was looking to get that back again but I didn’t wanna go back to Mckinsey or to another consultant job and not even to Claus, because I want to have my own company. So I found three other guys who felt the same way as I, and had somewhat similar profiles and would just quit on founding Rainmaking. We got a hit start by just putting in the lunch company and one of the other guys had a company as well and another company. So we had like a small base of free company when we started, but we also knew that we had to raise some money because we want to be a bit more ambitious on that, get some more rapid growth, and also we are very willing to see other cake with investors and partners, and we would rather be a part of something big than just having our own small set up. So we went out and look for investors and we found 9 Business Angels, it was supposed to be 10 but at the end, it ended up being 9 and we raise to 25 million Danish kroner and to build the existing portfolio but even also to build a company in Germany called CityLasik, while invested 15 million in that company, chain of eye clinics, doing laser surgery. So we started that company and also couple of other companies that are not alive anymore today, we made some kind of test and then we see if it flies and if it doesn’t, and if it doesn’t, then we just close it again and we have done it 3 times actually and invested million each time Danish kroner and we rather fail quick than fail slow, because time is precious. Of course the advantage of being a company factory is that we have more people and we have more competencies. To begin with, before we were four partners, and one is lawyer, and that’s just great to have a lawyer in board, because he’s a commercial lawyer. And we have a finance guy, but he’s also an entrepreneur, he started up one these companies that we have and just exceeded. So he’s also very pragmatic finance guy but he knows about accounting and he knows about numbers, he knows about budgeting and all these things. And then another colleague he came from Accenture, so he’s kind of a generous profile like myself but we also have different interest areas so one of us very interested in google optimization and one of us is very interested in negotiating the right deals you can method with the lawyer, and I’m very interested in getting ideas and find the right concept and stuff like that so we also have a common base that we are interested in our entrepreneurship and we are actually kind of generous to all of us but we have some different interest and some different competencies. And we just built from that because today we have five partners and we also have five business developers to help us and we hire people with different competencies. But of course there is a lead man for each project because someone has to have the responsibility and be the person who fix about this all day long and then he can pull in the other resources when needed.

Q: Why are values important?

A: The values are extremely important for us because we have a manifesto up in the world and we have written down what’s like with the non-negotiable about “rainmaking,” the things we we would never compromise. To just give you some sense of what it’s all about, it’s something about that we want to be a warmhearted company, we don’t want to be cynical, like of course a lot of consultant companies, law firms, VCs can be, we are grown up professional entrepreneurs but it’s very important for us that we are group, we’re not like prima donnas who are going out on our own adventures and not really paying attention to what we are doing or are fighting for the resources or having conflicts all the time or backstabbing each other, in the moment that would happen, it’s the moment that Rainmaking has failed no matter how rich we are at that time. And another thing that we have a whole person approach.  It doesn’t matter for us how much money we make in the process we become, that we just abuse our bodies or our spirit, or our relationships, so it’s really important for us to create an environment where you can be a whole person and it’s extremely excited what we are doing and of course you could just work all the time but we believe that there are four dimensions of the human being, the mind, the body, the heart and the spirit. And if you don’t calculate all four, you will eventually burn out or you will at least make some bad decisions on the road.

Part 2

Q: Generating new business ideas.

A: There’s a split between internal and external ideas. The internal ideas they just come from the head pretty much because we are grown entrepreneurs, and first and foremost our education and consultant background hasn’t been able to kill that so we still got ideas and we kind of force in the environment where its cool to get ideas. So each time I get an idea just talk to the other guys about it or call them in the evening or something and we just talk it through and we try to be very positive in the beginning because there’s always a lot of time to kill it afterwards so it’s about seeing the opportunities to begin with, not the the limitations and the problems because of course there’s a lot of problems, a lot of good reasons to kill good ideas instantly. And then we also take sometimes a whole day and go to the beach and go to the summer house and sit down in a circle and or whatever we do, we do running, we run together also, in the process like that or some other kind of sports and to make sure that it’s not like just sitting on your ass the whole day and hoping to be creative but exposing ourselves to different situations and getting our pulls up and beginning to movement and loosing up a bit and we just braised on a lot of our ideas and different trends that we are seeing in the society and all the success stories we have read about in magazines and stuff like that. And we think a lot about what are the needs and pains we see anything around us and in our own lives and that is one way of getting ideas and the other way of getting ideas is just that, as we are building our reputations, we see that more and more entrepreneurs are calling us and sending us business plan of just one page that were some crazy idea. And we also are always curious about that and of course we say no to a lot of stuff because we can’t do everything but we always in the beginning are curious about is that could be a good match of doing something together here.

Q: Selecting ideas.

A: We do have this consultancy background so we have made a huge model for evaluating ideas, it’s not always that we use it but we tried to use it. It’s quite simple actually, it’s eight dimensions and we rated each a business idea on eight different dimensions in a big excel spreadsheet and just to create some kind of structure around it but at the end of the day it’s about what gives us energy, what do we really believe in and what do we want to go out and implement. I know that we have to probably look at ten ideas to end up executing one. And it’s not like we just killing the other nine at the desk, half of them, we actually go out and talk to some customers and try to sell this imaginary product, all these real product if it is finished, but we go out and get a lot of reaction and maybe after some sales, we call as sales meeting so I dial up some potential customers, we can say, there is some kind of marginal benefit here but it’s not strong enough to really incentivize customers to switch to us, and in other situations it takes 10 or 20 or even a hundred sales meeting, we had a hundred sales meeting in Norway before we found out that we couldn’t implement the lunch company out there because to begin, we were quite positive and we found out that they were actually just polite and at this third sales meeting that they were suppose to sign up, but they didn’t and we just had to pull back but we tried not to be too worried about it. We like much more to go out and just try to do it together with these entrepreneurs, if we think that could be a good lessons could be a good idea, but let’s go out and test it.

Q: Following energy streams.

A: We like to follow energy streams and also when we allocate tasks between us, we also ask each other question, does it give you energy, because we know if it gives you energy you will be ten times more efficient that if it doesn’t. So that might seem a bit like a flower power or non VC like, but we were never talking about that when I was in Mckinsey, what gives you energy, you just have to do it, I don’t remember the partners were, but I doubted actually, but i think that’s more true that people are not just machines that you can just give them a task and just go for it. You can do that of course with your discipline but you’re just like ten times more efficient when it’s really where everything falls into the right place for you and you really sense the energy that you can’t stop doing it, that’s the right place to be.

Q: Why so active on social networks?

A: We believe that in the social media so we’re kind of a bit too old already to be like really into it and we see that people that are just coming out of school now or even younger than that, they’re just using it so naturally and so great at it and is efficient also because you can have like 500 friends at facebook and keep in touch with them in some kind of way and you can do that in real life and the other thing is it’s also very good business in frokost.dk, 20% of our new leads coming for facebook, and in just like six months ago it was the half and 12 months it didn’t exist.

Q: On being Danes and and going international.

A: This is part of who we are and we see that we are actually doing much more business in Denmark and Scandinavia that we would like to for the business prospective at least, but we are trying very much to have an SNS, a whole mindset and to think about Rainmaking as something that can be the next Mckinsey, Mckinsey is in 82 countries or something like that all over the world and they have offices in the local places and local partners because that’s what makes the big difference. Our goal is to be represented in much more countries than we are today. And we actually have just, I’m just in the process of finding a business developer in London, because that could be the next place for us to make a Rainmaking office and our goal is within 3 to 5 years or something to have a similar office like we have here in Copenhagen in London with 3 to 5 local partners and staff of 20 people or so and the portfolio start ups but we need to get beyond Denmark in some kind of way. We have already made a company in Germany and exceeded that and that’s of course very nice and we are clever enough to hire a German CEO for that company to very closely work with us, otherwise we had really been in trouble because we still had kind of a lot of difficulties adopting to German culture even though he was on board so that was really good we had him. And we are having customers from Denmark, Norway, Sweden in our eye clinic company, so we are doing business in Germany and Scandinavia at that time and now we are looking towards UK and we are very interested in general to get in touch with international people who can help us think more internationally and get ideas from the whole world not just ideas produced here in the Copenhagen.

Q: What’s next?

A: We have just ended a new company in UK actually. Talking about UK and London, so we are actually present a little bit now because we have ended a company called CyclePods.co.uk and we just started this work together with them 1st of August so that’s just 2 weeks ago and we’ve prepared for this deal for 4 to 5 months but that’s a company selling bike storage, that’s also very space saving because it stands like upright (instead of like this..) and it’s very safe because you can lock both wheels and the frame and it just looks so cool, they won a lot of design prices in UK and this is been shown in the television programs and a lot of countries and they got so many request from different potential partners who wants to be the distributor all over the world. They are not really, it’s all about management resource, and they’re really they can develop the stuff and get it produced sell it in UK and in the island but to like conquer the world, that’s a big challenge and you know some help to do that, that’s a very international project and we have hired a senior manager from Accenture to be our product leader in the team. And then we are going to go out to begin within 5 to 10 countries to get some real good distributor agreement and to really help the distributor sell the product. It’s about the product, that’s good for the environment and that is part also of what we like to be because you know manifesto, we want to be a part of solution in this world not the part of the problem.