23 Business Lessons from URBNSURF Founder, Andrew Ross
Andrew Ross is the founder of URBNSURF - Australia’s and the southern hemisphere’s first surf park, which opened its doors to the public in January of 2020 to much fanfare.
Prior to opening URBNSURF, Andrew spent twenty years in various legal and investment banking roles and started his own oil and gas company at the age of 33. Later, at the age of 41, Andrew made a life-changing discovery at a research & development lab in Spain that would enable him to merge his profession with his passion to create URBNSURF — something that was seven years in the making.
As you might imagine, building a $30M, two-hectare large surf park, one that generates 1,000 ocean-like waves per hour requires a Herculean effort, fraught with both engineering and financial challenges.
I had the opportunity to sit down with Andrew for an episode of the Future Squared podcast and unpack the many business and life lessons learned along the seven year journey from idea to launch.
You can listen to the entire conversation below, or wherever you get your podcasts.
But if you’d prefer to quickly extract the key lessons, look no further as I bring you 10 business lessons from Andrew Ross.
Andrew’s quote reminds me of Jim Collins’ ‘hedgehog concept’, below.
When it comes to choosing what to work on — how you’ll spend a large percentage of your waking hours, Collins advises to do something you’re passion about, something you can be the best in the world at, and something that makes money.
Having interviewed numerous leaders across myriad domains, one thing that they all credit to their success is persistence. If we want to do great things we will inevitably face setbacks and failure, but as Rocky Balboa said, it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.
Andrew suffered many setbacks as he tried to make his way in London as a young lawyer, and later had to endure many demoralising engineering challenges in completing the surf park, but the one thing he didn’t do was quit.
While this doesn’t always guarantee success (because of unique subtleties of your country or city — eg. cultural, ecological, geographic, technological, economic, political and so on), in the case of URBNSURF and many other businesses that have followed this model (see Rocket Internet), it can be a real winner.
On this note, I’m waiting for somebody to bring the zero-sugar, high protein Magic Spoon cereal to Australia… I’ll just park this here.
Yes, most successful people got lucky somewhere along the line — a chance encounter, being at the right time at the right place, an acquaintance who just happened to know someone important — but the thing about being lucky is that you can increase your chances of a lucky outcome and serendipity through what Andrew calls “f’n grind”.
The more you do, the luckier you get.
If you’re not really feeling your job, or your life, something should probably change.
Nowadays in the entrepreneurial ecosystem, concepts such as minimum viable product, fail fast, and iterate are widely practiced. In Andrew’s case, there was no MVP as such. In fact, URBNSURF appears to be in his words “an overnight success that was seven years in the making”.
Andrew acquired the rights to the Wavegarden technology that powers the surf park back in 2012 with URBNSURF openings its doors seven years and almost $30M later.
However, in lieu of this came comprehensive and diligent market research complemented with independent third party research.
For example, the fact that Melbourne alone has 300,000+ surfers, most of whom have to drive for over an hour to get to a surf beach (providing the conditions are inviting, and the surfer is available) which means that most of them simply can’t surf all that often. This alone, for a city in Australia — the largest surfing market in the world per capita — was a strong foundational reason to do further research.
Before you meet with would-be investors or customers, pre-empt what you think the objections might be and come armed with rebuttals or answers. It could be price, social proof, industry experience and so on.
In Andrew’s case, he had to raise $30M to bring something to Australia for which there was no real precedent in the country. In order to do this he had to be ready to answer a barrage of questions from investors who are well trained to spot the holes in business models.
While it’s important to be prepared, there are simply going to be things that you can’t prepare for — known unknowns, and unknown unknowns.
Being candid about these demonstrates you’ve thought about such matters, and also spares you being written off as naive, short-sighted or seeing the world through rose-colored glasses — something that usually results in jumping to conclusions and making bad financial decisions.
At Collective Campus, we often share questionnaires via email while we’re pursuing a company (“why might you not work with us?”) or after we’ve lost an opportunity (“why did you not choose to work with us?”) with a simple multiple choice form. This gives us invaluable insights to incorporate into our sales strategy going forward.
If raising capital, you will no doubt have a number of assumptions that underpin your financial model. Have these verified by a credible and trusted, independent third party — not just for your own piece of mind, but also for your investors.
Andrew had his elaborate financial model — one he was able to create thanks to his years in investment banking — verified by Deloitte.
Sometimes however, if you’re truly doing something completely new, you might struggle to find enough data, and will need to create your own data through experimentation. This is essentially the Zuckerberg view of data versus an economists which is often based on the past.
.png)
The WorkFlow podcast is hosted by Steve Glaveski with a mission to help you unlock your potential to do more great work in far less time, whether you're working as part of a team or flying solo, and to set you up for a richer life.
To help you avoid stepping into these all too common pitfalls, we’ve reflected on our five years as an organization working on corporate innovation programs across the globe, and have prepared 100 DOs and DON’Ts.
