In this practical episode, Hugo van den Biggelaar, CEO and Co-Founder of The Bitsing Company USA, shares why growth hacks fail and how a balanced, insight-driven method makes growth predictable again. If you’re approving budgets that don’t return and feel stuck playing permanent whack-a-mole, you won’t want to miss it.

You will discover:

- Why chasing silver-bullet growth hacks keeps you stuck fixing one fire after another

- How to use actual revenue data instead of gut feel to decide where to invest

- What a balanced growth strategy looks like so you don’t starve today’s business

This episode is ideal for for Founders, Owners, and CEOs in stage 4 of The Founder's Evolution. Not sure which stage you're in? Find out for free in less than 10 minutes at https://www.scalearchitects.com/founders/quiz

Hugo van den Biggelaar is a Dutch entrepreneur and former Director at Nike, now based in Brooklyn, New York. When his time at Nike ended, he made his biggest bet yet: moving to New York to bring BITSing to the US. BITSing is a proven growth methodology with a 30-year track record across more than 1,000 organizations, from global giants like BMW, HP Enterprise, and DHL to fast-growing startups and scaleups. BMW tripled its market share. HP grew revenue 168% across 72 countries. DHL added 22%. Hugo works with founders and leadership teams to diagnose where growth is breaking down and rebuild it in a proven way. He is currently building BITSing USA from Brooklyn, one client at a time.

Want to learn more about Hugo van den Biggelaar's work at The Bitsing Company USA? Check out his website at https://bitsing.com/

Connect with Hugo van den Biggelaar through his LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/hugovandenbiggelaar/

Hello, hello, and welcome, welcome once again

to the Start, Scale, and Succeed podcast-the only podcast that

grows with you through all seven levels of your journey as a

founder. I'm your host Scott Ritzheimer, and today we're

talking to all those founders out there who are approving

budgets that their managers just can't tie to any real return,

especially those of you who are in the disillusion leader stage,

because we all do it. We all want it to be true. The usual

fix is to go out, and we want to find that silver bullet, that

one growth hack that we heard about from this incredible

leader on this incredible podcast. That that one approach

that's going to save the day, but you know and I know it

doesn't. Growth hacks make for great content, but they

inevitably make for a lousy strategy. That's why my guest

today brings a growth method that's built to replace the

guessing. Hugo van den Biggelaar is a Dutch entrepreneur and

former director at Nike, now based in Brooklyn, New York.

When his time at Nike ended, he made his biggest bet yet, moving

to New York to bring BitSing to the U.S. BitSing is a proven

growth methodology with a 30-year track record across more

than 1000 organizations, from global giants like BMW, HP

Enterprise, and DHL to fast-growing startups and

scale-ups. Hugo works with founders and leadership teams to

diagnose where growth is breaking down and rebuild it in

a proven way. He's currently building Bitsing USA from

Brooklyn, one client at a time, and he's here with us today.

Hugo, I you know I don't know if you do. We'll find this out

here, but I love a quick fix. Like I love that one thing that

like it just everything else magically falls into line, and

all the dominoes do what they're supposed to. But I've chased

enough of them at this point in my career to know like they they

just don't pan out. But but for a lot of founders, I know this

was for me in my first organization. You you kind of

don't know another way. Like the whole reason you're looking for

the growth hack is because whatever you were doing before

isn't working like it used to, and you've got to find another

way. So how do you help founders that have had success? Right,

this isn't brand new startups that have never figured anything

out, but folks that have had some success-they've brought it

to market and it worked until it didn't. How do you help them

grow from that frustration to the next level?

Hugo van den Biggelaar: Thank you so much, and thank you for

the the fantastic intro. It's a pleasure to be here. And yes, to

answer your question, how do I help founders to understand

where their growth is stalling. Well, what we do is we use this

methodology that's called bidsing, like you were

explaining. And what is the really cool part about bidsing

is that it's all encompassing. So when I sit down with a

founder and with their teams, and we start to analyze, you

know, what the company has been doing, we look at the insights.

What we actually do is we build a a plan through that

methodology that's all encompassing. Now, what does

that mean? It means that it's not just a plan that's focused

on, let's say, optimizing top funnel. It's not a plan that's

focusing on and saying, hey, you should double down on this new

product category. Now, what we do with Bitsing is we make an

analysis of the entire organization. Then we deliver a

plan that spans across seven principles, from strategy to

finance to branding to marketing to sales. And then, not only do

we deliver the plan, we also help you to execute on the plan,

and we train your team to be able to do it themselves. So,

what I feel like often, what happens when we are looking for

that silver bullet or for that magic growth hack, is we tend to

be hyper specific on fixing a part of our organization, or you

know setting up a new team, or like I said, you know creating a

new product category or doubling down on a particular market, and

that might not be the wrong thing to do, but what we do say

is that performance happens only when everything works together.

So instead of you know trying to double down on that one thing

that might give you a short sprint or a short boost in

growth, we help you to truly change your organization and be

ready to be focused on on the future by looking at everything

and making sure everything works together.

One of the things as I was getting ready

for this episode that I saw you all really stress is leaning on

things that that you can know work. And and one of the

challenges for a lot of founders at this stage is the things that

they knew worked feel like they're not working like they

used to anymore. The and there's this kind of like game of

whack-a-mole where it's like, oh, this thing's on fire over

here. Let's run over here, and while you do three more fires

start over there, and while you're fixing one of those,

there's three more somewhere else, which I think is a big

part of why this idea of a comprehensive model is so very

effective is because it it. Short circuits the whole

whack-a-mole approach, but one of the challenges is how do you

know which one works? Because there's lots of people out there

selling lots of different things. How how do you help

folks have the confidence in your method to know that it

really is going to help them?

Hugo van den Biggelaar: Yeah. So what we see often when we think

about okay, where you know what what what thing do I have to hit

right through the Whackmo analogy, what you will tend to

see is that people start to look at you know sometimes their

intuition, their their their underbelly, their gut feeling,

and and then start to double down on that. But what we do at

Bitsing is we say let's look at the insights. What is the

information we have available, and where has your money been

coming from? Right, we call this your money sources, or what are

your revenue drivers? And what you tend to see often is that

when you actually look at where your revenue is coming from and

where you're spending your marketing or sales budget, there

could be and often is a misalignment, and I will give

you an example that I love to use. So we were approached by

the Storystar chain in the Netherlands, and they told us,

"Hey, our market is declining. It's not working anymore. You

know, how do we turn the ship around? And we did a financial

analysis of where their money was coming from, their money

sources, as well as that, we interviewed a lot of people. We

asked them, "Hey, where do you think you should be spending

your time, your budget, and your effort on? And what they said

was, not surprisingly, and you know, intuitively making sense

because they said we need to focus on kids because we're

selling toys here, right? So we need to double down our

marketing efforts on kids, and what do kids love? They love

games. So we need to double down marketing kids to games. We need

to be aggressively marketing that because that's how we're

going to turn this thing around. Because that's what you know we

think will work. But when we actually looked into the

insights, what we found was that first of all, their biggest

target audience or consumer group was fathers, was 82% of

their revenue, and the biggest product category they were

selling was Legos, was 64% of their revenue. So we told them,

amongst other things, instead of doubling down on what your gut

is telling you, and you're going after games, which was around 10

to 15% of their revenue, and kids, which was in the end 0% of

their revenue, you should be going after fathers and making

sure you sell more Legos to them because clearly this has already

been working without you investing a lot of time, energy,

or effort into it. So sometimes it's about you know looking at

the insights and what's available and understanding

where you focus your efforts on. Now that doesn't mean that we

always say where your revenue is coming from today is gonna be

able to set you up for success tomorrow. But what it does mean

is that you want to spend a significant amount of your time

and investment and budget into where your money is coming from

today, so that we can go after some of the high potential

opportunities that we see for tomorrow's future. But people

tend to be biased and think, okay, well, we see potential in

certain areas, whether that is based on a gut feeling like

kids, or whether they feel the potential is there for games,

and double down on it. But you know, some potential might not

be as much or as important as some of the revenue drivers that

you have today in your business. So we help you to build a

balanced growth strategy, where you don't start today's business

by chasing tomorrow's.

One of the the kind of common growth hacks. I

don't know that we'd really call it this, but it is what what's

happening is for a visionary founder be like, "Hey, we just

need blank like this new thing, a new product line, a new

revenue channel, a new something, and and so I love

what you're saying because more often than not, making sure that

we're at least executing what's already working or or you know

close to working well is a really big part of that, and so

you kind of brought this nuance that hey, just because your

revenue is coming from there doesn't mean that it should keep

coming there, or that that's going to be the revenue of the

future. How do you help folks figure decipher that? Because

sometimes it can feel like hey, we've maxed a market. How do you

know if that's actually true?

Hugo van den Biggelaar: So what we do when I work together with

my my clients is we sit down together, and like I said, we

stop thinking and we look at the insights that's available to us,

and then together we look at you know we have a special

methodology called the pencil method. So we call this the way

we call this the pencil method because we say you have your

sharpest pencils in your toolkit, and that's what's

drawing or that's what you use to draw your revenue today, and

then we have your blunt pencils, and we want to sharpen some of

those because they might be your most important pencils in the

future. And having that analogy makes it very easy for people to

understand around. Okay, you know what does my toolkit look

like today, and how do I want my toolkit to look like tomorrow?

And then we basically sit down and we just have. Deep

conversation around you know growth ease is the potential

that we see in a certain blunt pencil making up for you know

potentially under indexing our effort and and time and budget

into your sharpest pencil. We talk about margin, right?

Because margin is also very important if we think about

product categories, for example. Is it what what is coming top

top line and what's coming bottom on on the bottom of our

P&L, so we sit down together, we look at the insights available,

and then together we create a balance growth strategy. And I

think balance is the the key word here, because what you see

often is like you explained, people see potential, they see

something new, and they double down on it, and if you do that,

you know you might be able actually to live up to the

potential. But if you're losing on the markets or the product

categories or the consumer groups that are working right

now, that that you know that 100% growth you you manage to

create in in this new product category might not be able to

make up for the 5% market share you lost in your biggest product

category.

Yeah, yeah, it's so true, so true. Hugo,

there's a question that I ask all my guests. I'm very

interested to see what you'd have to say. But the question is

What is the biggest secret you wish wasn't a secret at all?

What's that one thing you wish every founder or leader watching

or listening today knew?

Hugo van den Biggelaar: Okay, so I would say that that secret

that we want everyone to you know know, so it's not a secret

anymore, is that growth actually is predictable. So we we've been

talking about hacks, we've been talking about you know for

example luck, and we feel like oh we're doing such a great

thing by just doing this one thing, or it suddenly just

happen to us, but I think growth is predictable as long as you

you know think about the sequencing of setting yourself

up for success. Like I was explaining, if you focus just on

one part, let's say optimizing your top funnel, you might be

doing it very successfully and you might grow, but it might

also be the right thing to do still. But still, it might not

be successful because other areas in your business are

lacking and are dragging it down. So, if you want to make

growth predictable, think about your entire organization and

sequence and plan for growth. Use the methodology. You know,

think about okay, what are my financial goals? What is my

strategy that I have to get there? What are what is my brand

positioning? What is my funnel looking like? And make sure that

all those those questions are answered in the right order and

at the right time, so that your entire organizations is is you

know is is set up for success and is making sure that that

growth is going to happen, versus you you know making sure

that one part is working, but then the others are not. It is

predictable. We can work on it together. It's not something

that you should be guessing for or hoping for.

Yeah, it's so good. It's so good, and and

that's such good news for folks because it it feels like the

opposite of that when you're playing that whack-a-mole game,

and you fix this, but this breaks, and this, and then this

breaks. It feels like that, like that's just it. Like that's the

game we have to play forever. But I couldn't agree more that

when you get the right things in the right place and at the right

time, those it does it creates a predictable pathway to growth

that is-it's not just great because you're growing, but it's

great because you're not playing whack-a-mole anymore. Like,

let's be real, like that-that only is fun for so long. So I-I

love that point, Hugo. There are some folks that are are you know

are hopefully really encouraged by this, and and they they want

to believe that there's a predictable path to growth for

their organization. Where can they reach out to you to find

more out about the work that you all do there?

Hugo van den Biggelaar: Yeah, so we have our website, which is

bitsing.com. The methodology is called Bitsing, so that is

b-i-t-s-i-n-g.com, which they can visit. There's obviously

some contact details on the website, they can hit me on

LinkedIn. So Hugo van den Biggelaar, I will leave the

spelling for this beautiful long Dutch name, but you can see it

probably in your post. And then also they can hit me up via

email, which is [email protected]. And I gladly,

you know, discuss any questions they have, any thoughts they

have. I'm here as a resource.

Fantastic! We'll get all that, including

Hugo's brilliant Dutch name, in the in the show notes. It it the

name itself is worth it, so check that out. But also reach

out to Hugo and his team. It'll be fantastic. You will not

regret it. Well, Hugo, thanks so much for being on the show. It

really was a pleasure having you. Welcome to the U.S. of A.

or here at least on the East Coast, and so thankful for the

work that you do. And for those of you watching and listening,

you know your time at Attention mean the world to us. I hope you

got as much out of this conversation as I know I did,

and I cannot wait to see you. Next time, take care. Hey

everyone, Scott Retzimer here. Thank you so much for listening

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